Customizer Control: Arbitrary HTML

Sometimes it’s really useful to be able to output HTML in the Customizer that’s not a label or description for a specific control. You may want to output a line break, an image, a button, or simply some additional text.

There isn’t a native Customizer control in WordPress to do this, but you can add your own custom control to output arbitrary HTML. This was a request for the Customizer Library, and the GitHub issue explains the thought process behind the code. Continue reading

Barriers to Entry

Broad Experience is a podcast I listen to regularly. It’s a thoughtful interview show about the experience of women in the workplace.

One recent episode mentioned the lack of women in tech, which hits close to home (87% of of people who follow me on Twitter are male). It’s a complex issue and there’s no quick panacea, but there is at least one easy step companies can take recruit more female engineers: remove requirements from a job description that aren’t actually requirements.

“There’s been research that shows many women will only apply for a job if they meet 100% of the qualifications,” said Erik Michaels-Ober of Soundcloud. “Whereas men will do so even if they meet some smaller percentage. They’re willing to put themselves out there even if they’re not fully qualified.”

“So we looked at a lot of things,” said Erik. “For example, having a college degree was a requirement on a lot of our jobs. But when we looked internally, we realized had hired a lot of male engineers who didn’t have a college degree because they had decided to apply anyway.” Continue reading