The last couple months have been busy ones for me on Github, as I continue to complete and iterate on personal projects and tools I can use for client work. This weekend, I finally added repositories for some of my biggest projects, and updated several others, and I wanted to share them with you here. Most of them are extensions for the plugin Advanced Custom Fields Pro, which is my personal field manager of choice.

These all seem kind of random, but they have one thing in common, which I’ve embraced as my own personal development philosophy: I enjoy developing tools that focus on visual logic and output, and I enjoy abstracting common patterns into reusable tools and components. As such, these are all Theme Developer Tools rather than client tools with options pages. These are tools I use to build solutions for my clients or myself.

Super Thorough Admin Color Scheme

Has a GitHub repository now in addition to being available on the WordPress repository. It seems like every week I find some new components of the WordPress Admin that I wasn’t styling yet, and I’m trying to make my rules more cohesive so you can build an attractive color scheme with the least amount of unique variables. Using a dark color scheme has been the best way to test it so far, since the untouched areas show up as light.

ACF Term and Taxonomy Chooser

The built in ACF Taxonomy field is great, but it was frustrating to me that I had to select a particular taxonomy in advance, and could only select terms from that single taxonomy for each field. What if I want to be able to select a term from one of several taxonomies, or if I’m trying to build something where I don’t know in advance which taxonomies I’ll have available to me? Or, what if I want to select the taxonomy itself (like “categories” or “projects”) for example to use it as a basis to output a list of all terms in that taxonomy?

This project was very loosely built off the work found here (in fact I contributed a fix back to that one, but I think it’s no longer active), as well as the cohesive instructions/samples for extending ACF. Props to Dan for helping me with some of the logic.

Page Components for WordPress and ACF

This project has been my pride and joy since the end of December, when I decided that I wanted to create a stripped-down “page-builder-esque” custom field and visual template system for some of the most common design patters I encounter in website building: namely, custom archives (list/grid), tabs, calls to action, and mutli/single scroll pages. I decided to use custom Page Templates to achieve these goals. I wanted it to be in plugin form so I could quickly use it with any project, and have the template parts be overrideable in the theme so that I could style them as needed, or able to be called from other parts of the theme.

I didn’t want to release it until it met two criteria: it was compatible with most normal WordPress themes (I use a Roots/Sage based theme that has an abstracted wrapper and doesn’t call header/footer on every template) and it made the plugin dependencies known (it requires ACF and my Term & Taxonomy Chooser plugins to work). Thanks to this great resource for adding dependency notices to themes and plugins, I was finally ready to release it yesterday.

If you use it with my options page (activate the options page first) it’ll also pull in that default thumbnail functionality.

ACF Options Page

A basic Theme Settings page for my clients, which is a standard feature for ACF Pro, but this one ships with some helper functions for all the fields which automatically fall back to standard behavior if the settings fields have no content. Most pleased with the default image thumbnail function.

Feel free to contribute, leave comments, open issues, star, favorite, like, or whatever it is the kids are doing these days.