GSoC Menu Customizer Update: Live-previewing Menus

I’ve finished implementing menu-previewing in the Menu CustomizerCustomizer Tool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings. 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, building on the scalable approach to saving menus that I discussed in my last update. The entire Menus experience is now consolidated into a Menus panel in the Customizer, where you can preview your menus as you make changes. It’s really nice to have Menus easily accessible alongside the rest of the site-appearance-management tools in the Customizer.

I only have about a week and a half left in my GSoC project, and I’m hoping to focus on improving the add-new-menu-item panel in my remaining time, making it scale and implementing the search functionality. I’m also planning on cleaning up the codebase and implementing the ability to manage menu hierarchy (submenus).

If you’re interested in testing the Menu Customizer, and live-previewing changes to your menus, you can get the plugin here. Please note that it currently requires PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 7.4 or higher 5.3+, but it’s getting less and less alpha by the day.

Post-GSoC Plans

After the GSoC coding period is over, I’m planning on transitioning Menu Customizer development to the feature-plugin format, gathering a group of interested contributors and holding weekly meetings to coordinate our efforts. While it won’t be ready for coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. consideration by 4.1, and requires some more core Customizer infrastructure to really work well, we’ll continue working on the plugin until menus in the Customizer really shine, and are ready for core.

#customize, #gsoc, #gsoc2014, #menu-customizer, #menus