Landing Pages for Theme & Plugin Developers

Thank you! I’ll take a look at it and make any needed changes.

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@norske this looks great. I’ve made just minor changes for flow. Do you want to have a last look, or are you ready for me to publish it?

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Please publish it any time if you feel it’s production-ready. I don’t see any major bugs in markup for now and wording is yours. I completely trust your opinion here)

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This has been added. I’ll send out a tweet about this as well. Thanks for your work on this! Let me know when you’re ready to have me review the landing page for theme developers.

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I think “Increase your plugin audience with ClassicPress developers” is a bit long for a page title, menu entry, and URL slug. Here’s a screenshot of the menu entry:

Can we change this to “ClassicPress for Plugin Developers” instead?

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I hadn’t even noticed that… Could it not be shortened to just “Plugin/Theme Developers”? The extraordinary length of the text makes it seem unconsidered. The page, on the other hand, is a palatable jumping-in point for curious developers. Thanks for putting this together! :+1:

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Isn’t that page only about plugins? What about “Opportunities for plugin developers”.

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I would probably do it like this:

  • “Resources > For Plugin Developers” in the menu entry
  • www.classicpress.net/for-plugin-developers/ in the URL
  • “ClassicPress for Plugin Developers” in the page title

I think the “For” is important, there is a difference in how “Resources > Plugin Developers” sounds vs “Resources > For Plugin Developers”. classicpress.net/for-plugin-developers also flows pretty nicely.

Then the idea is to have other pages later on. “For Theme Developers”, maybe “For Hosting Providers”, etc.

I think this initiative is a great starting point to help specific audiences get oriented to ClassicPress. I’ve noticed that people often don’t know where to start looking at first, so this will provide a good initial overview focused on specific interests, with some links for further investigation.

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These changes have been made. Thanks for your feedback.

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What about increasing the width of the submenu from 150px?

.nav–toggle-sub ul ul {
width: 180px;
}

(in css/autoptimize.css line 38?)

That makes all sub-menu items on one line. I don’t think it upsets anything else.

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Note: That’s a double dash there on the selector .nav--toggle-sub ul ul just in case anyone is testing the code :slight_smile:

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Good idea. I bumped this up to 180px. This is enough for everything to fit on one line for me, and we shouldn’t make it much wider or these could start to run off the screen at some resolutions / zoom levels:

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Picking up on this again – @norske and @james – are we going to create a separate page for Theme Developers? Given the latest developments with WP, it might be a good idea to do that now.

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You would need to have something to say, though.

@joyously your message reads to me as “Why are you thinking about building a theme developers page if you have nothing to say to them?” I cannot come up with any reading of this message that qualifies as being part of a solution rather than a problem.

The “seed” for the content of a theme developers page would be that we’ve kept the classic theme system alive because it is powerful, versatile, and predictable.

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Well it made you think of what to say, didn’t it? So it’s part of the solution. You can’t have flowers without a little rain.
But a page that just says that the theme system hasn’t changed is not as helpful as having docs about how to build themes, or a roadmap of CPs intent of a theme directory, or some link to a statistics page of how many sites use CP (or just download counter).

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I think that’s a great idea! Would you like to help create those documents?

I’ll defer to @james on both of these points. I know the statistics/download counter issue has been discussed at some length here previously.

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I could help, but I’m not much of a writer. I find it hard to get into the user mindset, since I know more (even after years of answering forum questions).
But starting with something similar to the WP Theme Developer Handbook would be good. There are a few missing topics in there, too.

Thanks for your response. Please bear with me for the following questions, because I am not a developer:

You mention the WP Theme Developer Handbook. Is this an open source document?
If it is open source, is there any reason why we can’t fork it and adapt it to CP?

If that’s possible, I think it might be a good start, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.

Again – thank you!

Yes, there has been discussion in the WP docs channel about making the license for the various documents clear. I don’t know if they have put the license somewhere or not (yet).
They already have user docs for the editor, donated from wordpress.com, so this has come up.