Helen Hou-Sandí

Senior Engineering Manager for the GitHub OSPO and WordPress Lead Developer

Blog

Category: Programming

  • Updating a WordPress plugin with a publish metabox field for the block editor

    Many years ago (October 2015, to be exact) I wrote a small plugin that allows you to add a note when updating a post, intended as a way to describe what was changed in that revision. For the developer set, it’s kind of like commit messages for your WordPress post/content updates. It was created to fill a need on various WordPress.org sites, such as the handbooks, but it seemed generally useful so I released it as a public plugin. After one more update in August 2016, it just sat there, usable and useful but without any attention. Until this week.

    I stream my open source work semi-regularly, and decided that working through how to adapt an old plugin to the block editor (2 years late) would make for a useful exercise. So I did that, for almost 4 hours! But that’s not how long it takes to do this – the base work of this really took about 45 minutes, with the rest of the time spent chatting and chasing a bug related to revisions. So, for this post I’m going to explain the process of achieving the final code, first demonstrating what most people will need, then what I actually did because of some specific UX needs, and then dissect the revision bug and things I tried that didn’t work out.

    (more…)

  • I love this and I want more!

    The part that everybody’s laughing about: 

    //Finish up
if(composer == "beethoven"){
    coda.length_in_min=10
}else{
    coda.length_in_min=1
}
coda.play();

    I move that Tchaikovsky be added to the list of long-winded coda writers. Have lots of other ideas for sonata form… and now thinking about things like fugue!

    Symphony in C++ at Classical Convert