This is the weekly update post for the customize component. It includes a summary of this week’s meeting, recent commits, and next week’s meeting agenda.
Weekly Customize Meeting Summary
On Monday we held our weekly 4.7 customize component meeting in #core-customize on Slack [logs]. Participants: @paaljoachim, @celloexpressions, @westonruter, @johnregan3, @clorith, @melchoyce. This summary also contains a few notes on action since the meeting.
4.7 Projects
- Create page-based nav menus without leaving live preview – #37914, #37915, #37916 – @celloexpressions
- These follow up tickets are largely pending feedback from the Taxonomy A taxonomy is a way to group things together. In WordPress, some common taxonomies are category, link, tag, or post format. https://codex.wordpress.org/Taxonomies#Default_Taxonomies. component. We need to work with @boone to come up with master plan for previewing terms, and determine whether we can realistically add term-creating support in menus in 4.7.
- @boone has this on his list for later this week.
- We need one more follow up ticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. to provide users with a path to adding content to newly-created pages; currently there is another usability dead end here (see #38002).
- A new experience for themes in the customizer 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. – #37661 –@celloexpressions
- I added shiny updates and deletion, as well as refining the UI User interface for users that can’t install themes this weekend, and posted a new patch A special text file that describes changes to code, by identifying the files and lines which are added, removed, and altered. It may also be referred to as a diff. A patch can be applied to a codebase for testing.. Also explored reviews, and we’ll need API An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. support from .org if we want to load them inline in the future.
- Only major development task remaining is shiny theme upload.
- We discussed whether it might make sense to delete/uninstall themes if a user previews them and then moves on. Need to explore user expectations here as part of the testing and feedback processes, as this would be a change from the current core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. behavior.
- @karmatosed had some trouble getting the style changes from the patch, once that’s resolved we’ll start the user testing and design iteration process.
- @aaroncampbell is interested in helping out here. For everyone interested, please start looking at/testing the patch and reporting issues or ideas on the ticket or in #core-customize.
- Code-editing gateways, via CSS Cascading Style Sheets. – #35395 – @johnregan3
- @johnregan3 brought up in the ticket, based on input from @joyously that it might make sense to allow theme-independent styles. We reached a consensus that theme-specific styles are more important for core for now, and plugins can add additional global CSS options. We can revisit this for core in the future.
- @johnregan3 has created a code editor control leveraging the CodeMirror library that’s also used by Jetpack. The Custom CSS setting now saves to a post, and he’s working on updating the post when the customizer is saved. He shared an initial patch for review later this week.
- Customizer browser history – #28536 – @westonruter
- Customize transactions – #30937 – @westonruter
- Refactoring sliding panels UI – #34391 – @delawski
- @delawski has posted an updated patch for review. We’d like to get a first patch in soon so there’s plenty of time to test compatibility with third-party custom sections.
- #34343 is related to improving the sliding panel experience, and @delawski is working on that next for 4.7.
Not every project needs to have an update every week; the primary purpose of our meetings is to make sure that no one gets stuck and to provide group feedback/decisions as needed. With about a month and a half before the merge deadline for 4.7, all of our 4.7-targeted projects are still on track for that milestone.
Future Release Project Updates
- Customize Posts
- @westonrtuer brought up an issue with adding a post parent control that let to an implementation of the dropdown-pages control that leverages Select2. This improvement could be implemented in the core control in 4.7. There is a feature plugin A plugin that was created with the intention of eventually being proposed for inclusion in WordPress Core. See Features as Plugins. called Customize Object Selector that replaces the dropdown-pages control with this scalable multi-select control for the page on front and page for posts controls.
- @clorith pointed out that accessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) concerns had previously stalled implementations of Select2 in core. We pinged @afercia to have the accessibility team review whether there are still issues with the newest version of Select2. Unfortunately, it has significant accessibility problems and the maintainers haven’t shown interest in resolving the.
- We also discussed that work on Customize Posts has developed most of what’s needed to use JS JavaScript, a web scripting language typically executed in the browser. Often used for advanced user interfaces and behaviors. templates for the base
WP_Customize_Control UI. This will be implemented in #30738 for 4.7, along with support for setting values that are objects.
Additional Tickets Needing Attention
- Improving contrast and UI consistency in the customizer – #29158 –
needs-testing
- @clorith really likes it and @westonruter thinks it looks nice but doesn’t have strong feelings. With no objections from the customize component, we’re waiting for the design team to approve or suggest additional revisions 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..
- Discussed during the design meeting, and pending patch testing we’ll get the initial pieces in and continue iterating.
- Improve custom background properties UI – #22058 – needs additional feedback on the latest proposal, and a patch. Also needs design decisions.
- Appropriate means for themes to add top-level promotional links – #37335– needs input from theme review team
- They discussed in their meeting last week, and it’s now pending additional investigation of alternative approaches for theme developers. We’ll follow up with the theme review team in a few weeks.
- In the meantime, the theme review team is no longer allowing links to be added by injecting markup into the DOM with JS.
- Customizer notifications – #35210 – needs UX User experience feedback and a patch
- @westonrtuer added clarifications to the ticket, and @afercia provided accessibility feedback there as well. We should be able to implement the accessibility changes, so we’re currently waiting for design feedback again.
Ticket Scrub
We reviewed the enhancement Enhancements are simple improvements to WordPress, such as the addition of a hook, a new feature, or an improvement to an existing feature. tickets in the Future Release milestone that have a patch.
- #34747: Provide more flexibility for “You are customizing” text
- This is pending the direction of the sticky-headers discussion, but we’re not all convinced that it should be able to be customized on the top level (it can already be changed in sections and panels).
- #18584: Nav menus need more hooks In WordPress theme and development, hooks are functions that can be applied to an action or a Filter in WordPress. Actions are functions performed when a certain event occurs in WordPress. Filters allow you to modify certain functions. Arguments used to hook both filters and actions look the same. for extensibility (on admin (and super admin) page & in customizer)
- #30738 will introduce functionality that will help enable saving custom menu item fields. Once that’s in place, we can revisit how the API would work for plugin 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 developers and determine whether there’s still time to get it in for 4.7.
- #36175: Simplify the Customizer Image Control action buttons
- We need to come up with an accessible solution and make sure the experience is consistent across the various media controls.
- @melchoyce doesn’t want to continue owning the ticket for now but will take a look again later in the 4.7 cycle.
- #31334: Customizer JS API should handle container removal from document
- I had forgotten about this ticket and commented about this issue on #30741 recently.
- We discussed the potential issues with using jQuery.remove(), and could potentially use jQuery.detatch() instead. However, menus and widget A WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user. currently use remove() in core, so we should standardize the behavior and incorporate it into the API.
- #32296: Allow the customizer to be made wider
- I suggested that we likely won’t make a major change here until we make major changes to the customizer UI in general. However, there is a patch that makes the customizer proportionally wider on large desktop screens, and that could easily happen for 4.7 if others are okay with this approach in the interim.
- #33064: Customizer: form inputs need a way to have hidden labels
- I’m somewhat uncomfortable with adding a new class variable for this, and doing that means we also need to update all children of WP_Customize_Control to support it in core. However, this is an important feature to support in the API, so we’d like to get it in for 4.7.
- #21627: Filter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. for custom-background CSS selector
- This ticket seems to have been forgotten about, but adds a lot of flexibility to the custom background feature and would be nice for 4.7 alongside #22058. Moved to the 4.7 milestone.
Recent Customize Commits
Here are the customize-related commits for the past week:
- [38513]: Customize: Fix php warning due to
WP_Customize_Manager::prepare_setting_validity_for_js() incorrectly assuming that WP_Error will only ever have arrays in its $error_data.
- [38520]: Accessibility: Improve the Customizer and Theme Installer initial focus.
- [38577]: Customize: Prevent widget previewing logic from building invalid A resolution on the bug tracker (and generally common in software development, sometimes also notabug) that indicates the ticket is not a bug, is a support request, or is generally invalid. jQuery selectors when sidebars are registered without a class name in
before_widget.
Big thanks to those who contributed to patches committed this week: @westonruter, @dlh, @afercia.
We’re always looking for more contributors; check out the open customize tickets and swing by #core-customize in Slack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. to get involved.
Agenda for 2016-09-12 Meeting
Our next regularly-schedule meeting is next Monday, September 12, 2016, 17:00UTC. Agenda:
4.7 Projects
Additional Tickets Needing Attention
- Improving contrast and UI consistency in the customizer – #29158 –
needs-testing
- Improve custom background properties UI – #22058 – needs additional feedback on the latest proposal, and a patch
- Customizer notfications – #35210 – needs UX feedback and a patch
Ticket Scrub
- Identify tickets ready for commit consideration, and 4.7 milestoning from future release bugs with a patch.
- We’ll pick a different query to triage The act of evaluating and sorting bug reports, in order to decide priority, severity, and other factors. each week. For example, bugs awaiting review (need verification).
We’ll see you next week!
#4-7, #customize
