WordPress Design Changes

There are some bold new changes in the works for the WordPress dashboard: a responsive design, a font icon set, and a new darker + flatter look. There’s also workflow changes on a number of admin screens, including the themes page and dashboard home.

New Dashboard

For folks interested in following along with the progress, check out the make.wordpress.org/ui blog. MP6 and Dashboard can also be installed on a development site to preview all the updates. Continue reading

Full Screen Background Images

Full screen background images are a nice feature for a number of WordPress themes. It’s also one of the few theme modifications that can be handled well through a plugin.

Full Screen Background

The implementations I’ve seen generally use the jQuery script backstretch.js– which handles responsive layouts and large images elegantly.

If you’re not a theme developer and just want to add a full screen background to your site, I’d suggest trying out one of these plugins:

If you are a developer and want learn how to add this feature to a theme, read on.
Continue reading

Add UTM parameters with jQuery

On a recent project we needed to add UTM query parameters (for Google Analytics tracking) to all outbound links to a specific domain.

I didn’t feel like updated all the links on the site directly in the code since these campaign query strings might change, so I created a basic jQuery plugin to do this:

jQuery.fn.utm_tracking = function() {
	$(this).find('a[href^="http://www.example.com"]').each(function() {
		var url = $(this).attr('href');
		$(this).attr( 'href', url + '?utm_source=example&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=campaign' );
	});
}

Continue reading