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

Since this is my first post here, a quick introduction. I’m a student at the University of Southern California studying Civil Engineering, Architecture, and Music Composition. I’ve been contributing to WordPress CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. for just over a year and this summer I’m pleased to be working on WordPress full-time for my Google Summer of Code project.

Overview

The goal of 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. project is to add Custom Menu management to the Customizer. Ideally, the project should be able to replace the existing Menus screen, with full feature parity, but that’s obviously a bigger discussion that would take place later. For more details, check out my initial proposal.

Current Status

I started six weeks ago and have built out most of the 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’s UIUI User interface and structure. However, I still need to build the menu-item previewing and saving components of the project. The UI closely resembles the Widgets-in-customizer UI, with sections for each menu and controls for each item. New menu items are added via a slide-out panel, where they’re currently grouped by post type/taxonomyTaxonomy 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., custom links, and a global search feature. The existing “Navigation” Customizer section has been re-branded to “Theme Locations,” and emphasizes the ability to add menus to widgets. Development is being done on the plugin repo, and you can download and play with it from there, but note that adding items creates orphaned draft menu items that are never published currently. Here’s a demo of the current plugin:

(If the embedded video doesn’t play for you, try this link: https://cloudup.com/cVJbk3u32QV)

The add-menu-item UI and implementation will be getting a lot of attention throughout the rest of my project. Items are added immediately, rather than the existing two-step checkboxes and adding several at once process, and menu items can now be deleted without having to open their settings, making deletion and addition more streamlined.

When editing menu items, changing the navigation label of an item instantly updates its drag-and-drop handle, and updating a menu name updates the corresponding Customizer section. Items can be reordered or moved into sub-menus via either drag-and-drop or a reordering mode similar to that of the WidgetWidget 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. Customizer.

To minimalize the UI, given the limited space in the customizer, the “Title Attribute” field has been turned off by default, and all of the existing menu-item-field screen options are available, syncing with the existing Menus screen. I might look into building a core APIAPI 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. for customizer screen options now that #27406 is in trunktrunk A directory in Subversion containing the latest development code in preparation for the next major release cycle. If you are running "trunk", then you are on the latest revision., time permitting.

A good amount of my time in the past couple weeks has been dedicated to #27406, which is a prerequisite for the Menu Customizer to be realistic given the need to allow users to create new menus (and in turn, new Customizer sections). Committed to trunk yesterday, it introduces a “Panels” API to the Customizer. Panels are a way to group sections, adding a new layer of hierarchy to the Customizer. In the Widget Customizer, all widget areas are added to the Widgets panel, allowing widgets to take over the entire Customizer as needed. The Menu Customizer plugin does the same thing with Menus, and requires trunk accordingly.

Upcoming Work

My next steps are to implement menu-adding and deleting, to implement reorderability/sortability, and then to spend quite a bit of time developing a saving/previewing system that scales well (see #14134  and related). This will most likely involve creating clones of changed menu items (posts) and menus (taxonomy terms). Once all of that’s finished, the plugin should be feature-complete, and ready for iteration.

Core Patches

I’ve also taken the opportunity to spend a fair amount of time working on core patches related to either Menus or the Customizer, as this project is widely expanding my knowledge of both areas. A couple of examples that have made it into core include #27406 – Customizer Panels, and #23076 – which adds live menu-item label-updating to the existing Menu screen. I’m planning on continuing to work on Menus and the Customizer via tickets/patches throughout my project as time allows.

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