Lara Schenck 10:05 am on August 2, 2021
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Call for CSS contributors! Help implement custom properties in WP Admin.

WordPress needs your CSSCSS Cascading Style Sheets. chops!

In #core-css, we have been working for over a year to devise how to implement custom properties for WP Adminadmin (and super admin) in order to allow extended flexibility of color schemes, e.g. dark mode and high contrast. After much deliberation, research, and prototyping, we are now going forward with replacing the current color scheme implementation with custom properties as outlined in ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. #49582, and we need some help!

If you’d like to get started on your own or learn details about this work, we are keeping track of our workflow and collecting information that will serve as future documentation in this Google Doc: WordPress Core CSS custom properties.

Join our Custom Property Work Sessions

We also know that it can take time to understand the nuances of a project enough to contribute, it can be intimidating, and it can be hard to designate the time for it. That’s why we are devoting the next three weekly CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. CSS Chats to work time and “office hours”, where experienced folks will be available to help with any issues in SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/..

The dates and times for the CSS Chat: Custom Property Work Session editions of the weekly meeting will be:

  • August 5, 2021 at 21:00 UTC
  • August 12, 2021 at 21:00 UTC
  • August 19, 2021 at 21:00 UTC

Excellent Opportunity for New Contributors

This is a great opportunity to get involved with contributing code to WordPress! The knowledge you’ll need for contributing is:

  • Ability to fork and clone a repo from GithubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ and create your own branchbranch A directory in Subversion. WordPress uses branches to store the latest development code for each major release (3.9, 4.0, etc.). Branches are then updated with code for any minor releases of that branch. Sometimes, a major version of WordPress and its minor versions are collectively referred to as a "branch", such as "the 4.0 branch".
  • Run commands to start the WordPress development environment
  • Read CSS selectors from a file and find what they refer to in the DOM
  • Understanding of CSS custom properties (a.k.a. CSS variables) syntax

Some helpful links for where to obtain this knowledge:

That said, this knowledge is not required for attending the work sessions. If you run into an issue or have trouble following the doc above, just ask in Slack during one of the meetings, and someone will help.

We hope you will join us to help advance and maintain WordPress’ core stylesheets!

#core-css