Theme Repository Data

Aaron Jorbin just released a script called the “WordPress Theme Directory Slurper“, a command line PHP script which downloads the latest stable version of every theme in the WordPress.org theme repository. You can find more information about it in the GitHub repository.

I had a number of questions about the themes on WordPress.org, so I ran the script this morning a slurped all the themes. It took 112 minutes to run and downloaded nearly 4GB of theme code. Here’s what I found out. Continue reading

Announcing Hexagone

2015 will be a transformative year for language support in WordPress. The majority of new WordPress installs are now in languages other than English. New APIs are in the works for wordpress.org which should make translation easier, and new features in WordPress core will add better support for those languages. But what I’m really excited for is the eco-system in those other languages to grow.

Matt Mullenweg alluded to this at WordCamp Europe, “Personally, I am far and away most excited about the internationalization improvements, because the fact that WordPress has that many users at all in these other languages where there’s not very much documentation, no plugins, very few themes, it’s kind of amazing.”

Which brings me to a new project I’ve been working on with a partner based in France… Continue reading

Customizer Library

I’ve been working on a new project called the Customizer Library. It’s a collection of classes and functions that make it a bit easier to develop for the WordPress Customizer. It also includes helper functions for Google fonts and inline styles- though I’m considering moving these off into their own repositories as they might not be needed for all projects.

I’ve created a GitHub repository for the Customizer Library that can be included in a theme/plugin as a submodule. I also created a demo theme with example code so developers can get a quick idea of how it works and what it does. I’ve tried to document as much as possible on GitHub- so view the readmes there for implementation details.

screenshot

I think the reason the Options Framework has been so successful is because it reduced a really complex task (developing an options page) to a really simple task (defining an array). It abstracted the complexity of adding an admin page, generating field markup, sanitizing the data, and saving the options.

The WordPress Customizer is simple in comparison. There’s just one spot to load the controls and WordPress handles the generation of field markup for the most part. But it still doesn’t provide a default data sanitization and the syntax is more complex than it needs to be. Continue reading

Features for Theme Developers (WordPress 3.9)

WordPress 3.9 will be released this month with some great new features. I think the enhancements for media (drop-in image uploading, audio/video playlists, and better editing options) will get a lot of attention in this release- but there’s also a ton of hidden gems.

I went through 582 tickets and picked some of my favorite enhancements, focusing on the ones I think will be most interesting for theme developers.

Media Features

WordPress now has support for audio and video playlists (and audio/video thumbnail images) thanks to work spearheaded by Scott Taylor:

playlists

Audio, video, and gallery previews are available in the editor and themes can add styling to better display them. Continue reading