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Summary for the Work Done and Plan for the Next Semester

Summary

Last Friday my first theme Plum Blossom version 1.0.0 was put alive for the testing purpose. Below is a list of features I want to emphasize for this theme.

plum-blossom

  • Oriental style. As Randall and I discussed from the very beginning of the FYP, OSS is a platform for sharing and blog theme is the part that can best show one’s style and interest. We would like to include more themes with different designs to provide students with a rich set of choices. In order to present the oriental style, some elements were added, like the plum blossom image in the header, background pattern, border style and transparent background. It is hard to present the oriental style as well as to keep it simple and minimal, more work needs to be done on that.
  • Readability. The font, font size, line height and font color are chosen to make reading more comfortable.
  • Responsive. The font size, layout of all pages will change accordingly to fit in all window sizes.
  • Accessibility. In all window sizes, it is handy to find any content using widgets, menu and search function.
  • Customizable. The Customizer provides customization options of the header image, text color, background image, background color, sidebar position and so on. However, the customization may destroy the oriental style the theme intends to present, some customization options may be removed from later versions.
  • Excerpt Meta Box. Plum Blossom display excerpt instead of full post content on home page. The displaying content on index page can be changed manually by writing in the Excerpt Meta Box in the post edit page. (Can be changed later if it is not preferred)
  • Post format. Except the standard post, Plum Blossom also supports Aside and Gallery post formats.
  • All-width page template. Page can go with or without sidebar.
  • Support all OSS features and functions. All the font styles and html tags in posts and pages, the category page, tag page, search function, comment function and all other things should work well within the theme.

 

For my second theme Palette, I want it to be completely different from Plum Blossom.

palette

  • There is no clear style for it. It simply uses color to partition the areas.
  • It is image-based on index page. Instead of displaying post content or excerpt, it displays feature images (requires students to add feature images or it displays a default one).
  • It uses infinite scroll for posts navigation. (Still has some bugs when sidebar is longer than content)
  • The customization of it does not need to worry about the influence on style. Full control of color should be given to students. I intend to also provide 2 or 3 color existing color schemes for students to choose.

Plan

I plan to finish the version 1.0.0 of Palette and push it alive before the next next week (12 Feb). After that, I will gather the advice on Plum Blossom and modify it accordingly.

If time allows, I want to start to think about the final report writing. I know that report writing is my weak point so I plan to spend more time on it.

7 comments on “Summary for the Work Done and Plan for the Next Semester”

  1. All excellent documentation of your new theme. I have an idea regarding the testing. Can you create a simple tutorial for using your theme? This would include how to select and activate it from the theme menu. Then explain to the user how to access the customization and all the other features you want them to test. I would include relevant screenshots as well. You could do this by creating a page on the Team OSS site, and then we can send students the link to the page. This way, I think you will have a much higher success rate for testing. If you want to do this, why don’t you also add the page to the Team OSS site main menu. Let me know your thoughts.

    1. Yes I think that’s a good idea! I can do it as a page in my site. But I don’t think I can add the page directly to the team OSS page since I don’t have privilege for that. Actually as long as it’s a page accessible by students, it doesn’t matter where it is.

  3. Boyan, great work! I am a little busy over the weekend, but can we schedule a meeting next week to discuss? I think this is fantastic what you have done but I do have a few comments what would be best discussed via Skype. I could do Tuesday evening at 9pm your time, except you may be celebrating New Years. Otherwise, how about Thursday?

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