This year, we’ve focused heavily on improving people’s experience using themes on WordPress.com. We’ve dug into defining the most common and tricky issues for people using themes through research, user testing, and iteration. We still have a long way to go toward substantially improving people’s WordPress theme experience. To that end, we’re introducing a new … Continue reading “A Set of Theme User Experience Requirements”
Designed by Automattic’s Caroline Moore with crafters and hobbyists in mind, Button features detailed accents, featured images, gallery slideshows, and a soft color palette. With Jetpack active, you can add a logo for extra flair. Now available in the WordPress.org directory, Button is the perfect theme for a blog showing off your sewing skills, chronicling your latest DIY endeavors, or keeping a running list of your favorite things from around the web.
With the release of Jetpack 3.9 last month, we introduced a new tool available for all theme developers: Social Menus. It allows site owners to create a new menu location which is used to display links to Social Media Profiles.
Theme developers can add support for a Social Menu by following these three simple steps.
Step 1: Declare support in a function hooked to after_setup_theme.
add_theme_support( 'jetpack-social-menu' );
Step 2: Create a new function to avoid fatal errors if Jetpack isn’t activated.
function themename_social_menu() {
if ( ! function_exists( 'jetpack_social_menu' ) ) {
return;
} else {
jetpack_social_menu();
}
}
Step 3: Use the function created in step 2 to output the menu where you would like it displayed in the theme.
themename_social_menu();
Once you’ve created a menu, Jetpack will automatically enqueue a basic stylesheet to style each one of the menu items, thanks to Genericons. You don’t have to do anything else!
Meet Components, a starter-theme generator to speed up WordPress theme development.
We love a good starter theme. Since launching Toolbox and its popular successor, Underscores, we’ve always reached for a starter theme when building our next, awesome WordPress theme to get us off on the right foot. With Underscores, we always say it gives you a 1,000-hour start. We get excited when we see someone fork Underscores and make it their own, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that we’re obsessed with evolving what we think of as a starter theme.
Continuing that journey, we’re pleased to announce Components. Think of it as a toolbox for taking your themes where you want them to go, faster. Forked from Underscores, Components gives you a solid base to work from – but it also takes the starter theme to the next level, offering a choice between five different theme types. Each one adds the code needed for starting a certain type of theme. You can select from:
So why the different approach with Components? Three main things inspired this direction: the community behind Underscores, the people who use our themes every day, and the web design and development community.
While maintaining and improving Underscores, we always see great pull requests from the community that we turn away because the contributions end up being too specific for a normal starter theme. Many of those additions would have been perfect in most themes. Now, some of them have a home in a project that zeroes in on a certain kind of user with each theme it builds. Speaking of users, we know from launching hundreds of themes on WordPress.com that themes are one of the most challenging areas of WordPress for people to understand. They need more themes that “just work,” and we hope Components will help achieve that. Lastly, the web community has embraced building systems, methodically created with the pieces that make up a site. Even some popular libraries have taken this approach. We see Components as the first step to allowing you to make a starter theme that’s just right for your project.
We’re very excited to see what the community brings to the project and are looking forward to evolving Components with your help. Right now, we’re in the early stages of our vision and execution for Components, so expect both repositories that power this project, theme-components and components.underscores.me to evolve quickly and constantly.
Fork or download Components on GitHub or generate your own custom starter theme at components.underscores.me and have fun making awesome new WordPress themes!
If you’re making themes, Jetpack allows you to easily add additional functionality to your themes in a consistent way without a lot of overhead — and without accidentally wandering into “plugin territory.” Here at Automattic, more and more of our themes take advantage of Jetpack to implement site logos, featured content sliders, testimonials, portfolios, food menus, and other special functionality.
The trouble is that users don’t always realize they need to activate Jetpack in order to turn on this functionality. With so many installing themes directly from their WordPress dashboards, most users don’t even know where to find a readme file. As a result, we saw tons of confused users posting in the WordPress.org forums, asking how to make their sites look like our demos.
What we needed was a way to easily inform our users that their theme relied on certain Jetpack modules, and help them install or activate them as needed. This would save on support time as well as make our users happy. We also needed a solution that would be easy to add to lots of different themes, without requiring a lot of manual labor.
We’ve been working on a solution to this problem over the past few months, and we’ve come up with a simple script that helps our users figure out what’s going on. Since starting to use it in our themes, we’ve seen the number of support requests drop substantially.
Since we love open source, we’ve made the code freely available on Github — so you can use it, too!
Want to start using it in your themes? Download it from our Github repo, put it somewhere in your theme — I recommend the inc folder — and include it from your theme’s functions.php, like so:
/** * Load plugin enhancement file to display admin notices. */ require get_template_directory() . '/inc/plugin-enhancements.php';
You’ll want to replace all instances of textdomain in the script with your theme’s text domain, since it adds a few new strings. You’ll also want to regenerate your theme’s POT file once that’s done.
Here’s how it works in Sela, which uses a Site Logo and the Testimonials custom post type.
If the user doesn’t have Jetpack installed, they’ll see this:
If the user has installed Jetpack, but hasn’t yet activated it:
If the user has installed and activated Jetpack, but hasn’t activated the required modules:
The notifications appear on the user’s dashboard and on the Themes and Plugin pages. The notifications can be dismissed so they don’t annoy users who don’t want to use Jetpack.
Since the script is looking for theme support using current_theme_supports(), themes need to explicitly register support for the Jetpack features they support. Some Jetpack features — like testimonials and portfolios — are available across all themes, and don’t require the theme to explicitly declare support for the feature. Be sure to add theme support for all Jetpack features you intend your theme to make use of. You can declare support like so:
add_theme_support( 'jetpack-portfolio' );
The script checks for theme support first, then checks to see if the required plugins (Jetpack) and modules are activated. It then builds out notifications tailored to the user’s individual situation, so that users are effectively guided through the process of installing and activating the plugin.
Presto! In only 366 lines of code, we have happier support people and happier users. Feel free to use this script in your own themes, or remix it for your own purposes.
Good user experience in WordPress themes can make the difference between frustrated or happy users. Yet, it’s often overlooked. A solid user experience can feel just right, creating sound expectations and delight. If you’re looking to boost your theming skills and learn more about themes and user experience, we recommend these three recent talks by members of the Automattic Theme Team:
Kirk Wight, A Call for Simplicity: As WordPress blazes into its second decade, theming, plugin development, and WordPress core itself are reaching troublesome levels of complexity and confusion, challenging the very essence of what has gotten WordPress to where it is in the first place. Pulling from diverse areas of culture and tech, we’ll tie together our need for simplicity, and issue a call to arms for the next ten years of WordPress.
Tammie Lister, Theme, Don’t Be My Everything: It’s time to stop putting everything including the kitchen sink into themes. A theme shouldn’t be a bloated monster with an options panel that stretches out the horizon. This talk is a call to action to stop making themes that do everything and start making themes that focus.
David Kennedy, Themes are for Users: In this talk, we’ll explore user research, theme setup, theme options and more. By the end, you’ll know what makes up a theme’s user experience, and how to set your users up for success.
And if you’re still getting started with theming, or even WordPress, wondering how you could ever contribute to WordPress and add value – you’re not alone. Check out Kathryn Presner’s The Techie Continuum, and start contributing to WordPress today!
A minimalist theme crafted by Automattic’s Tammie Lister, Sapor is geared to showcase your passions. Designed with food blogging in mind but well suited to anything from gardening to healthy living, it features a left sidebar for menu and widgets, and offers a Site Logo option with Jetpack active. We’re pleased that Sapor is now available in the WordPress.org directory — visit the demo or take it for a spin.
Welcome to part three of our tutorial on building themes with JavaScript. In part one we considered the JavaScript web landscape and where it leaves us today. In part two we looked at the forthcoming WordPress REST API. In part three, we will consider the most pertinent question: how do we apply all this to WordPress theming? Some of you are likely already realizing that there are surely a lot of challenges in doing so. And you would be right.
Watch the video presentation or read the transcript below.
You’ll find accompanying material for this screencast available in a public GitHub repo — each screencast has a corresponding folder with a very simple theme that can be activated.
As you may have noticed in the previous tutorial’s files, we need a theme skeleton to make a project like this work. Fortunately, WordPress only requires themes to have a style.css and index.php file to be recognized. Beyond these two files, we can build the whole thing in JavaScript. If this thought is setting off alarm bells for you right now, I understand. Put those alarm bells to one side for just a little while.
If we are going to build a theme with JavaScript, we probably don’t just want one massive JavaScript file. We also don’t want to have to enqueue lots of separate JavaScript files just for the sake of keeping things tidy. Fortunately, others have already done this work for us. CommonJS — a project which, like Node.js, kicked off in 2009 — has created a myriad of specifications and conventions for JavaScript developers to follow; they’re a bit like a JavaScript version of the W3C. The CommonJS project has created specifications for JavaScript modules, which we can use to split up our code. JavaScript modules allow us to create something similar to a WordPress theme, with different JavaScript files containing different template parts and theme files.
Although we can split out our code into different JavaScript files as we can with PHP, unlike with PHP, we’ll want to concatenate these files into one when we run the theme. In theory, we don’t have to do this — but if we don’t, each page would need to enqueue lots of different JavaScript files, which is bad for performance and user experience.
To concatenate the files we’ll will need to use a build tool, such as CodeKit, Grunt, or Gulp. We can even use Unix’s Make utility, which was first released in 1977(!), to run our build process. At this stage, it doesn’t really matter, as the main thing our build process will do is smoosh our JavaScript files into one file, so whichever utility you’re most comfortable with is fine. For this tutorial, I’ll use my current favourite, Webpack.
Let’s take a look at how these JavaScript modules work. In part two, I showed an example of a very basic JavaScript theme with some inline JavaScript. We were breaking quite a few WordPress conventions, with everything in one big index.php file.
I’ve now broken this up and turned it into a more conventional theme. In index.php we now just get a header and footer. We’re now enqueueing our JavaScript in our functions.php file correctly. And our JavaScript file now sits on its own.
But if you look closely, you might notice something has changed. Our changePost function has disappeared, and instead we are requiring the changePost function. If we go back to the containing directory, you can see that we also have a changepost.js file. This file now contains the changePost function. Note that at the bottom, we have a line that says module.exports = changePost. This is the CommonJS convention for defining what the module actually is. So when we require it, this ensures that what we require is the changePost function itself.
Let’s get concatenating. I’ve mentioned that we’re using Webpack, so let’s get that set up. First, you need to install Node.js. Fortunately, this is a lot easier than it used to be — simply go to nodejs.org and download the automatic installer for your system. Once node.js is installed, we can run a command to install Webpack:
npm install webpack -g
This gives us global command-line access to Webpack. With this done, we can now run the most basic Webpack command, which is to take a source file, and smoosh it into a compiled file. The command for this is:
webpack ./theme.js compiled.js
We can now view the compiled file and see that it contains the contents of both changepost.js and theme.js. An extra little bonus with Webpack is the -p flag, which simply means that you want to minify the file – remove whitespace and remove all comments etc. You can see that even this simple example our compiled file is almost a third of the size it was unminified.
We can also add the -w flag which means we want Webpack to watch the files and automatically recompile whenever we change anything.
With the file compiled, we can see everything in action working together.
With everything we’ve looked at so far, you can probably imagine stringing together a theme that allows a user to browse through different chunks of content from their website. However, a major missing piece is routing, something that you may not have heard of. Routing broadly encompasses the way that we deal with URLs changing. Let’s say a user visits our site, clicks to a different post and wants to share the link. With the examples we’ve looked at so far, this isn’t possible. Routing also ties into our user’s history. If we have no routes, the user can’t press the back button. No routing also means we have little chance of anything meaningful being indexed by search engines. I’m sure you can now appreciate that routing is very important.
In PHP, WordPress deals with this for us. There is a rather large class called WP_Rewrite (you can find it in wp-includes/rewrite.php). This handles every different type of URL and works out what should be shown to the user. In JavaScript, we don’t have this luxury, so we have to deal with it ourselves.
Let’s look at something basic we can implement.
If you look closely at changepost.js, you’ll notice that I’ve added a new line since the last tutorial. As well as editing the document on success, I’ve added a line that redefines window.location.hash. This is the most basic way of changing our user’s route. You’ve probably seen this used on other websites and it amounts to the same thing as using an anchor link to take the user to certain heading on a page.
Let’s look at this in action. Our eventListener has been added to the first link in the menu. If we click it, note that the route now changes.
So with some very basic routing, we now want to change what happens if the user clicks back.
If we go back to theme.js, the eagle-eyed among you may have noticed another line beneath my link listener:
window.onhashchange = changeRoute
We’re hooking a new function, changeRoute, onto window.onhashchange. Every time the URL changes, the browser fires a hashchange event, so this method allows us to tag our own JavaScript on to what happens when the hash changes. You can see beneath this I have a changeRoute function. Here, we say if the hash equals nothing — as in, we’re on the homepage — show the original post that we fetched in the first place. The code here is almost identical to changePost, but it just gets the original post.
A few minutes back I mentioned that you might have alarm bells ringing. We’ve now likely dealt with a couple of those alarm bells. But we’re not done. Some of you may be thinking, “But what if the user doesn’t have JavaScript enabled? Or what if something has caused JavaScript to break?” In our current scenario, our website simply wouldn’t work.
There are some who don’t think this is a problem. Today, only a tiny number of people browse the web with JavaScript turned off, and for the most part they’re probably power users who fully understand why they have it turned off and know that it will limit their experience. But I am personally not convinced that we should just forget about no-js situations.
Even if we sort out our routing, what about search engines? As it happens, Google is now able to render JavaScript. I’m not sure if it’s official yet, but I’ve experimented with this. For example, the ThemeConf website has no server-side rendering, but try Googling “ThemeConf”. It also works on DuckDuckGo. Despite this, it’s not a great idea to rely on others to render your JavaScript — there are also places where this doesn’t work. Ironically, even though Facebook developed React, it doesn’t render JavaScript-rendered content when you’re embedding a link, for example. To see this in action, and if you use Facebook, try pasting a link to ThemeConf.com there. You don’t have to actually share it of course, but you should notice that the preview of the content Facebook will embed is blank.
I believe the most compelling reason to not rely on JavaScript rendering is performance. A developer at Google called Jake Archibald has given some great talks on this. In a worst-case scenario, our current theme makes our users wait for three page loads when they first arrive. First, the page loads, then the JavaScript loads, then the JavaScript loads the content from the REST API. Yuck! This may not be a problem if you’re connected with fiber-optic broadband, but if you’re on a mobile device or a spotty Wifi connection, you’ll really feel the pain.
This ties back into the search engine point, since we know that Google does take page-load times into account when ranking sites in search results. We really don’t want our load times to be three to four times longer than they need to be.
One way to tackle this problem with our simple theme example would be to add PHP to render the theme as well. In our simple example, this wouldn’t take too long and will work fine. The content would load exactly as the menu and footer loads, then the JavaScript will load and take over. However, this would very quickly get out of hand if we tried to build a whole theme. We would be forever having to repeat ourselves, and generally getting into a massive tangle.
Already, our simple JavaScript theme is starting to get pretty messy!
In the next part of this tutorial, we’ll look at how to move from our basic theme to something more advanced, building from an altogether more stable foundation.
Welcome back to our tutorial on building themes with JavaScript. In part one, we considered the JavaScript web landscape and looked at where we are today. I suggested that while JavaScript lets us render content in new and interesting ways, there are challenges when it comes to fetching the content in the first place.
Watch the video presentation or read the written transcript below.
You’ll find accompanying material for this screencast available in a public GitHub repo — each screencast has a corresponding folder with very simple theme that can be activated.
With traditional WordPress themes, we’ve been able to use all manner of loops and custom queries to get data. In shifting our approach to be less PHP-centric, where will our data come from?
The missing piece of our puzzle is a REST API, essentially an HTTP interface for getting data from a source. The REST part stands for REpresentational State Transfer. Think of it as a way of accessing WordPress queries directly through a URL. We can type a URL into our browser and include parameters just like we would with a custom loop, and in the browser we can see pure data from our website.
A REST API also allows you to post data, so the WordPress REST API allows you to add and update content directly without using the admin interface. Certain types of requests do need authentication, the REST API only publicly exposes content which is already revealed by WordPress through other avenues, like RSS feeds.
This all means that you don’t have to worry about connecting to a database, you just use a series of URLs to access different types of content on your site — these are known as endpoints.
The WordPress REST API is due to be fully incorporated in WordPress 4.5, due in the spring of next year. In fact, the infrastructure of the WordPress REST API will be included with WordPress 4.4 and has already been merged into trunk.
Next, let’s look at some of the basic things we can do with the WordPress REST API.
I have a WordPress environment set up locally where I have installed WP API. Ahead of its inclusion in core, WP API is available as a plugin on the WordPress plugin repository. With the plugin activated, I can navigate to the URL /wp-json/. At this URL I can see an overview of everything that the REST API makes available to me.
As the URL suggests, WP API uses JSON formatted data. This is not compulsory for REST APIs, but most REST APIs will use either JSON or XML formatted data. More recently JSON is the preferred format as it’s less verbose and generally easier to work with. I’m also using a Chrome extension called JSON View, which adds sane line breaks and some colours to make it easier to read the JSON. Without JSON View, the JSON data is quite hard for a human to read!
The REST API adds namespaces to its endpoints. This is to ensure that extensions and future versions of the API don’t break functionality for sites and software that use it. The primary namespace at the moment is wp/v2. This means that we can build our website against version 2 of the REST API. If, in the future, it’s decided that the REST API should be structured differently, this restructure would happen under the namespace of wp/v3. Therefore the REST API could completely change, but what we built for v2 would be safe with the inherent backwards compatibility of the v2 namespace.
So, if we navigate to /wp-json/wp/v2/ we can see all of the information about this namespace. As newcomers, we don’t have to worry about this at the moment, but it’s worth understanding the path we take to what we’re really trying to get from the REST API.
If we add posts/ to the end of the above URL, we finally start seeing the data from our website. By default, posts/ will show us the same content that a generic loop on our homepage would. On a clean install of WordPress, this is usually the 10 most recent posts.
We can further narrow down our request to the REST API by adding a post’s ID to the URL. So in this instance, /wp-json/wp/v2/posts/1241/ will show us just the one post with ID 1241.
The REST API provides typical things that we might want in relation to a post. We can see the date, modified date, permalink, title, content, excerpt, format, whether or not it’s sticky, and more.
Now let’s consider an example where we use the REST API to render content on a page using JavaScript.
I’ve set up a basic HTML document set up in my text editor, including a div with the id "page", an anchor link with text “Hello world,” and an empty h1 and div element. The div has an id of "content".
Beneath that, we have some inline JavaScript inside a script tag. To begin, we use JavaScript’s native XMLHttpRequest API to fetch our data. This is what’s behind jQuery’s Ajax functions, you may remember this from part 1 when I spoke about the website YouMightNotNeedjQuery.com.
What this does is fetch the URL from the REST API that we were just looking at. If it’s successful, it will parse the JSON response so that we can access the different elements as a JavaScript object. We then use the querySelector and innerHTML methods to change the data in the HTML on this page. At the moment we aren’t dealing with errors, we would want to deal with these if we were doing this in production.
Let’s see how this works. If I activate the session 2 theme on my test site, we can see what this does. There we go, the data from the REST API is being rendered in my theme demo.
One last thing before we end this tutorial. We still have that link that I added at the top — let’s look at how this is connected.
Well, if we go back to the index of our little theme and scroll down, you can see we also have a function, changePost. This does exactly the same thing as the other bit of JavaScript, but it gets a different post (with ID 1). Beneath this, you can see that we add an event listener to the link. The link listens for a click, if it gets clicked it fires the function. Let’s see what happens.
There we have it.
You can now see how a very basic WordPress REST API-based theme can work. In the next screencast we will consider more advanced approaches to theming and the challenges we face when taking this approach.
Dive into the brave new world of JavaScript WordPress theming, looking at best practices and pitfalls along the way.
WordPress theming hasn’t changed very much over the past few years. It’s certainly become more refined, and projects such as Underscores (_s) have helped promote best practices and robust standards. That said, we can still go as far back as Kubrick and find plenty of common ground with the most recent WordPress themes.
This isn’t a bad thing, and it’s probably one of the reasons WordPress is so popular and so many people have been able to get involved in theming. But the web has changed substantially since WordPress welcomed its first default theme in 2006. More than half the web’s users now access it from mobile devices. We have HTML5, and with it a whole host of browser APIs that didn’t exist in 2006. These advances have helped a whole new ecosystem of JavaScript-based web apps blossom.
Some aspects of this ecosystem have found their way into WordPress themes. Most of us have probably seen our fair share of jQuery-enabled carousels. We have JavaScript-enhanced tiled galleries and lightboxes available through plugins like Jetpack. Yet very few of us would consider building a theme entirely in JavaScript. The thought may even send shivers down many of our spines.
Building a WordPress theme with JavaScript might be considered lunacy by some, who may wonder why you’d want to attempt such a thing. Others may have questions about SEO, performance, accessibility, plugin compatibility, among a myriad of issues. There are definitely challenges to building a theme with JavaScript, and before reading any further you should know that this is still an experimental area of WordPress theme development.
But, and this is a big “but,” a JavaScript-based approach to theme-building opens up a wonderful world of new possibilities to the curious developer, including:
Along with these exciting improvements, the WordPress REST API is being integrated into Core. The REST API makes it much easier for us to build themes with JavaScript. There is no better time to start getting familiar with how the WordPress ecosystem is changing.
In this five-part tutorial, we’ll expose you to the brave new world that WordPress theme development might inhabit in the coming years. While the best practices for building a theme in this way are still to be established, we’ll do our very best to guide you into the secret garden of the future.
Stay tuned for:
We’d like to introduce another pair of free themes now available in the WordPress.org directory: Blask and Colinear.
Putting the Jetpack portfolio custom post type to good use, Blask showcases all types of creative work – like photography, graphic design, illustration, or painting – in an elegant, minimalist way. Blask was developed by Automattic’s Ola Laczek, based on a design by Mel Choyce.
Colinear is Thomas Guillot’s revamp of the classic Coraline. With six layout options accessible via the Customizer, Colinear offers tremendous flexibility in displaying large amounts of content, perfect for news or magazine-style sites.
Both Colinear and Blask support a Site Logo with Jetpack active, and are fully responsive, looking spiffy at any screen size. We hope you enjoy this handsome theme duo.
