Monthly Archives: June 2014

Tracy Levesque 7:50 pm on June 24, 2014
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Recap of June 24 2014 Meeting Status of…

Recap of June 24, 2014 Meeting

Status of Modules in progress

  • Child Themes (@liljimmi)

    Added sections for Screening Questions and Teacher Notes, but just need to fill in content.

    Highlighted the quiz answers in green, but will switch to the answer below the question and list of options.

    After these items are done it will be ready for @jenmylo to review and get tested at least one more time at a MeetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area.

  • Intro to CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. (@JerrySarcastic)

    Jerry has been busy, but will work on this during airplane time.

  • WordPress Template Hierarchy (@CoachBirgit)

    Birgit is taking this on – yay! This was started by Tracy (@liljimmi) but she’s happy to share.

  • Templates (@liljimmi & @tecdoc)

    After Child Themes gets moved to the done pile Tracy will work on this next.

  • Conditional Tags

    This is currently an orphan and needs someone to take it up

Other Items

  • Teacher Resources page (@tecdoc)

    Tom is going to work on this and get in contact with @jjtoothman on Twitter who expressed interest in wanting to help with a local installLocal Install A local install of WordPress is a way to create a staging environment by installing a LAMP or LEMP stack on your local computer. guide.

  • Copy editing (@ruthkalinka)

    Ruth is going to try to finish up copy editing the Child ThemeChild theme A Child Theme is a customized theme based upon a Parent Theme. It’s considered best practice to create a child theme if you want to modify the CSS of your theme. https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/advanced-topics/child-themes/. module, but she has been very busy lately.

  • Quiz PluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party

    @courtneydawn thought she remembered @jenmylo mentioning using a quiz plugin to do the quiz. Or maybe it was in development or something like that. We need to confirm.

  • WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Dev days

    Tracy and Courtney are planning on holding Team Training work meetings at WCNYC and WCSF dev days. It looks like most of the team will be at one or the other. Awesome!

#requests

Tracy Levesque 12:14 am on June 24, 2014  

Team Chat Agenda Check in on progress with…

Team Chat Agenda

  • Check in on progress with current modules
  • Check in on Teacher Resources Page
Tracy Levesque 2:43 am on June 10, 2014  

WordCamp Philly Dev Day Report @courtneydawn and I…

WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Philly Dev Day Report

@courtneydawn and I were both at WCPhilly and decided to use dev day to recruit folks to help with the Theme School project. It was a great day and a lot got accomplished.

@liamdempsey made new and improved graphics for the child themeChild theme A Child Theme is a customized theme based upon a Parent Theme. It’s considered best practice to create a child theme if you want to modify the CSS of your theme. https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/advanced-topics/child-themes/. module. He also made new file/folder screenshots with the Mac OS as per @jenmylo‘s request.

Reed Gustow and @tecdoc made an outline for a new Templates module.

@chrisurban worked on a new Conditional Tags module

@ruthkalinka Copy edited some of the Child Theme module and will finish up soon. She and @courtneydawn also went through the rest of the misc pages and updated them.

We added pages for the Intro to CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. module that @jerrysarcastic is going to work on and a Template Hierarchy module that I am going to work on.

I started adding the text for the new modules, I will have that done this week.

We let everyone know when the IRC chat was and helped them get on IRC so they can join the weekly meetings. We hope to repeat this at WordCamp NYC dev day.

jerrysarcastic 12:48 am on June 6, 2014
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Proposal: Intro to CSS training module

Hi, I’m Jerry, and I have been hanging out in the last few IRC chats, and recently brought up that I wanted to work a CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. module to compliment the child themeChild theme A Child Theme is a customized theme based upon a Parent Theme. It’s considered best practice to create a child theme if you want to modify the CSS of your theme. https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/advanced-topics/child-themes/. module that is nearing completion. In case you were not at those meetings, I wanted to recap here, so I can get as much feedback as possible

Who is the Intro to CSS module for?

Before WordPress users are ready to take those first steps into theme development (like creating a child theme) one of the first places their exploration begins is with a desire to tweak the “look and feel” of your site. So something like:

“I found a theme that is close to what I want, but I really wish I could change the size of my headings, or the background color of my widgets, but have no idea how.”

This module would be aimed at that person: a non-coder who have maxed out what they can do in wp-admin, and are ready to take those first step into the world of theme design by modifying their existing CSS.

This module would ideally cover the following:

  • What is CSS? What does it do?
  • Learning the lingo: Selectors, properties, and values
  • Getting set to edit: How to edit theme CSS the right way
  • How to your browser’s developer tools to find your theme’s CSS
  • Three exercises covering simple CSS modifications (TBD)
  • Intro to CSS self-quiz

Small Problem: How do you hack on CSS without a child theme?

When it comes to changing a theme’s CSS, there is one small but important caveat that we all know: Hacking on actual theme files is bad, bad, BAD! So, what is the best way to get students up and writing their first lines of CSS as quickly as possible? We could have them set up a quick child theme, but the problem with that is:

  • It may be a little too early to introduce that concept
  • It would take valuable time away from the lesson to set up (plus FTPFTP FTP is an acronym for File Transfer Protocol which is a way of moving computer files from one computer to another via the Internet. You can use software, known as a FTP client, to upload files to a server for a WordPress website. https://codex.wordpress.org/FTP_Clients. access)
  • We already have a module that covers this better and in more detail

So with that in mind, it probably makes sense to install a CSS editor pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party instead, which is quick, easy, and gets students straight to the good stuff. But…

Which CSS editor plugin?

Here are a few that I could think of, what do you think would be the best to use?

#1 Jetpack – On the plus side it comes with a great CSS editor, with easy access to revisionsRevisions The WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision., but as a negative it requires a WordPress.comWordPress.com An online implementation of WordPress code that lets you immediately access a new WordPress environment to publish your content. WordPress.com is a private company owned by Automattic that hosts the largest multisite in the world. This is arguably the best place to start blogging if you have never touched WordPress before. https://wordpress.com/ account, which not everyone may have or want.

#2 CSS Plus – This is in the repo, so easy to access and requires no sign-in; however, I have no experience with this one, so testing would be a good idea before incorporating it into the lesson plan.

#3 Codepen.io – This gets away from the idea of tweaking the theme directly, but would it be better to not even go into the wp-admin in the first place? This would place the focus on the CSS, and may be easier than setting up test sites, downloading plugins, etc. However, like Jetpack, it would require an account creation step for some, and, well, it’s not WordPress.

Really those seemed like the best choices, but what do you think? Is one better than the others? Am I missing any other options that are worth considering?

Want to help? You can!

Is a CSS module something you would be interested in helping with? To get us started we can leverage some of the CSS materials available at en.support.wordpress.com (adapted to fit a self-hosted environment) but if you have any ideas to make this even better, or would like to help develop this module, please speak up in the comments

You can also say hi at our next IRC chat Tuesday at 18:00 UTC in #wordpress-getinvolved on IRC freenode. 🙂

#wcus

Courtney O'Callaghan 5:48 pm on June 3, 2014  

Training Project Chat Agenda 06-03-2014

Topic: Child ThemeChild theme A Child Theme is a customized theme based upon a Parent Theme. It’s considered best practice to create a child theme if you want to modify the CSS of your theme. https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/advanced-topics/child-themes/. Training Module
Module: https://make.wordpress.org/training/modules-in-progress/child-theme-module/

Agenda:
Discuss Tracy’s testing of Training Module
Discuss WC Philly

Tuesdays at 18:00 UTC | #wordpress-getinvolved

Tracy Levesque 2:24 pm on June 3, 2014
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Second Run of the Child Theme Training Module…

Second Run of the Child ThemeChild theme A Child Theme is a customized theme based upon a Parent Theme. It’s considered best practice to create a child theme if you want to modify the CSS of your theme. https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/advanced-topics/child-themes/. Training Module

Last night I did a test run of the Child Theme Training Module https://make.wordpress.org/training/modules-in-progress/child-theme-module/ at the Philly ‘burbs WordPress Meetup (http://www.meetup.com/philly-burbs-wordpress-meetup/events/184589022/).

It was a small group – around 10 folks with varying skill sets. I told them about the training project and let them know they were helping test it and that I wanted their feedback at the end.

I did make a slide deck for the training http://slides.thetracyl.com/burbs/. It contained the main points and notes I could refer to (hit the S key to see the notes while viewing the slides).

I went through each section and did a live demo of building a child theme at the same time. We skipped the group exercises for lack of time and because it was not a classroom situation, but I did just ask folks to talk through how they would do the exercises. As a group they did well on the quiz.

Overall, I think it went great, the feedback was very positive. I asked people what they thought and they said they understood the material.

I asked them how it could be better. @liamdempsey thought the graphics illustrating how the Child Theme affects the Parent could be better. I asked him to please send me any mock ups or suggestions. Another person said it would be helpful to know information about the setup on the demo computer – Browser, OS, text editor, etc. – at the outset of the class.

Most of the folks at the MeetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. are coming to WCPhilly. I let them know we were planning on working on more modules at Dev day.

#testing