Tag Archives: Sp-P5 Final Project

Heading Font Weights and List View Toggles Arrive in Block Editor and WordPress 5.8

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Let’s dive into some recent block updates meant to improve your efficiency and spice up the look of your blog or website.

Stylish Heading Font Weights

Headings not only draw your audience in, they help get your message across. Now you can enhance the font weight of headings with the click of a dropdown menu. Between the options for font size and font weight, you’ll be able to create the perfect look you’ve been aiming for.

To start experimenting, select the Heading block you want to edit, then head to the right-side block menu. Under Typography, change the Font weight. When you select a new option in the menu, you’ll see your heading font change on the left.

Persistent List View Toggles

As we mentioned last month, the List View button acts as a table of contents and outlines all the blocks in use on your page or post. And most importantly, this outline is persistent — meaning it won’t disappear as you edit your content so you can quickly find and edit any block on the list.

The List View just leveled up: you can now expand and collapse nested blocks in the list.

Deeply nested layouts will benefit from this feature. But even for straightforward layouts, certain elements such as content in columns can make the List View a little daunting. Less searching + more focus = improved editing.

WordPress 5.8

WordPress.com updated to WordPress 5.8 on July 20. This release starts the wave of functionality centered around Full Site Editing.

Full Site Editing aims to bring blocks to every aspect of the WordPress experience, including navigation menus, site logos, templated content, global styles affecting your site’s overall look, and much more. Between adding functionality to your site or editing what’s already there, Full Site Editing will allow you to do it with a visual editing experience — without the need to learn code.

Learn more about Full Site Editing here.

Keep Building, Keep Exploring

Your feedback is crucial to expanding the block editor’s capabilities, so keep it coming. Watch here for more updates, and in the meantime, have fun experimenting!

P2 Puts Easy, Flexible Project Tracking Tools In Your Hands

From to-do apps and day planners, to spreadsheets and full-blown subscription services, making your work trackable and visible can really help with productivity.

P2 is the tool we use at Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com), and today we’d love to share some ways you can do the same.

What sets P2 apart from other project tracking tools?

There is no shortage of project management tools out there, but the killer feature of P2 is its total flexibility.

Instead of having to adapt to a particular, fixed way of working, P2 adapts to the way you and your team work.

That’s made possible by the baked-in integration of the WordPress block editor, giving you a really flexible tool that can adapt to whatever you need to throw at it. 

P2 is your project tracking canvas

From a blank page upwards, P2 makes it easy to track and feature what’s most important to you, using any of the nearly 80 (and growing) blocks at your disposal.

In practice that means that any page can include images, Google Calendars, PDF embeds, Figma designs, checklists, and a wide spectrum of video players and social media integrations (just for starters). And of course, you can arrange them on the page any way that meets your needs.

Three project tracking blocks you can add to your P2 today

Among the options available to you on P2, three blocks in particular can be really useful for project tracking. Let’s take a look at those.

1. Task block

Tasks are the atomic unit of getting things done. 

With the Task block, you can add your team to-dos and assign whoever’s responsible for them right from the editor. Clicking the “cog” button in the top right of the editor will open up further options to set start and end dates. 

Here’s an example of a Task block in action:

Four Task blocks with two items marked as complete, one item assigned to somebody, and one item with a start and end date.

2. Project Status block

Tasks often add up to a bigger project. The Project Status block does what it says on the tin by tracking a group of tasks together.

Just add it to your post, optionally set a due date and assign tasks, and then update it as tasks are in progress and are completed:

A progress bar updates as items are being checked off in a task list.

Find advanced tips on the Task and Project Status blocks here. 

3. Changelog block

A changelog is a log or record of all notable changes made to a project. If you’d like to call out those changes visually, the Changelog block lets you assign colorful preset or custom labels, with a description for each:

Changelog blocks with "Launched", "Improved", "Fixed", and "Metric" labels.

At Automattic, we use the Changelog block to summarize the work status for a team or product. But P2’s Changelog block can really be used for any projects that you want to keep a record of.

Find advanced tips on the Changelog block here.

How to add project tracking blocks to your P2

Once you have a P2 up and running, you can add the Task, Project Status, or Changelog blocks to your post or page by either:

  • Using the “+” button on the top left of your editor and typing the first few letters of the block name
  • Typing “/” anywhere in the editor itself, and searching for the block that way by starting to type the name of the block

How do you P2?

Signing up for P2 is free. Take a look around our demo P2 to see some ways we use it at Automattic.

We’d love to hear how you use P2 and its project tracking blocks in your work. Let us know in the comments.

Built-in Duotone Image Filter, Editor Navigation via Persistent List View, and Other Block Editor Improvements

The next batch of exciting updates to the block editor is live on WordPress.com. Powerful duotone image editing, a persistent list view to edit your page or post, and an update for picking table colors are all ready for you to build and improve the look of your site. Let’s take a closer look.

Built-in duotone image filter

Duotone is a much anticipated feature that allows you to choose between any two colors for an image’s shadows and highlights. Think black and white photos, but in any color combo of your choosing. What was once the power of standalone image-editing software is now at your fingertips in the block editor.

Establish a consistent tone across your site’s images or draw your audience’s eye with a catchy color combo for a big post.

Try it out by adding an Image or Cover block, select “Apply duotone filter” from the floating block menu, and experiment by choosing colors.

Editor navigation via persistent List View

Level-up your editing game by selecting the List View in the top menu bar—this displays the entire block structure of your page or post. It’s essentially a Table of Contents of all the blocks currently in use. List View is now persistent, meaning it will remain expanded in the sidebar as you edit. 

This update will vastly improve the navigation of complex content and the editing of nested blocks.

And there’s a bonus! Anchors added to blocks are also shown in this List View for easy identification.

Customize your Table colors

Background and text colors are easily edited within the Table block for a more consistent feel across your site.

Keep building, keep exploring

Your feedback is crucial to expanding the block editor’s capabilities, so keep it coming. Watch here for more updates, and in the meantime, go forth and create!

Sp21-P6-Final

Dino’s Revenge

For this video I decided to try a genre of film I haven’t done before; comedy horror. My goal for this project was to start with more comedy from the toy Dinos not being taken seriously and then slowly build my way up to a suspenseful ending. My original video was way too long so I had to shorten it, and honestly I like the new and improved shorter version a lot better than the original. In my original video there was a sharp contrast in terms of the speed and pacing of certain scenes, some felt boringly long while others felt so short your could almost miss what happened. That was definitely not what I wanted! After updating, the pace is much more consistent throughout and everything necessary to the storyline was able to stay.

The most time consuming part was definitely creating props and filming, I’m actually planning on re-using some of the props for another film project involving the Dinos. My secret weapon of choice for getting the Dinos or their props to stay in place for more complicated scenes was poster putty! After scratching some old left over poster putty from my wall and realizing how effective it was, I bought some more of it and it worked great!

Some of the most frustrating parts while filming were when I had to get behind the camera. Although I was in theatre in high school, acting in front of a camera was something I had to adjust to. I found it difficult to focus on the movements, expressions, camera framing, and pacing all at once. Pacing was especially hard, because if my scene was too long even by a few seconds it would mean making cuts in other areas to keep the total running time in check. Moments where I had the most fun while filming involved the salt and spitball scenes, that was when I was able to see this idea that I had in my head really come to life before my eyes, which was a really exciting and encouraging feeling. Overall I’m super happy with the outcome!

By Miya Ott

Sp21-P6 Final Project

I had a bunch of fun writing this song in audacity. There was a lot of ups and downs through this project and I was worried about finishing it accordingly due to being tired, frustration, and sickness. But I think the journey was well worth the ride this term. This video ” ink on my fingertips” is about me and my development this course. I actually struggle with a lot of depression, and making content really helps make me happy. I took Basic design this term, after getting ink on my hand’s multiple times; I thought it would be poetic and mesmerizing to put that in a song.  I wanted to incorperate story telling from taking photography as well and use it in my song. So, I wrote about struggling with setting in manual and not getting it very quickly and making noise with ISO as a bit of a pun ironically while I was making noise in my microphone. Overall, this song sort of worked out as a trifecta because I was able to use the same concepts in my photography and basic design classes as well.  The Thumbnail on the YouTube video was used in my Photography final, as well as, the ending picture with ink on my fingertips. Although I didn’t technically incorporate the song in to my art class the same, it was the driving influence for both my photography and multi-media final. So, in the back of my mind, the basic design final for that class had to be great in able to make my other finals just as on par. But I loved every second of it. There were times when I thought I wasn’t going to complete all these finals but managed to pull it off some way or another. I can’t way to see what next term brings me.  

P6 Final Project – Music To My Ears

This project was a hot mess. At first. I had created the entire video and ended up not liking any of it and scraping it. I restarted with the same idea and different execution. I completed the project once more, but once again, I didn’t like it and restarted. I finally got the story I wanted after a few tries and got those around me to be my talent. In this project, I wanted there to be a sense of continuity to create a story. The project was intended to ask the question, ” What is music to you?” and “Where does your mind wander when listening to it?” Music is a huge thing in just about everyone’s lives. It can help people study, be productive, bring people together, or even be a getaway. Essentially, music is very important in our lives and for me, music takes me to another place. I daydream a lot when I listen to music. I try to depict a scene in my head that would fit the music and would try and place myself in different scenarios based on the music I was listening to. Music has put me through a lot of rough times in my life and I don’t know what I would do without it. I made the project ask this question because It usually generates interesting answers. Go ahead and ask yourself, “What is music to you?” I hope this story can be both fun and interesting for the viewer. It is pretty cut and dry, but I think the world of music can create an impact bigger than most people realize. Overall, I learned a lot about filming during this project and I can’t wait to continue this practice. I hope many of you feel the same. Thank you for a great term!

P6 Final Project

I wanted to try and create a simple 2D animation in Adobe After Effects. Unfortunately, I did not have as much time as I would have liked which is why it lacks sound and was not even finished in time. It is very rough around the edges but I learned a lot in the making of this. The robot characters were created by me in Photoshop, although it would have been better if I made them in Adobe Illustrator. The background images were found on the internet. My original plan was to have more movement and even parallax with moving backgrounds and foregrounds for a sense of depth. I also planned on having an entirely different design for the attacking robots but could not do so due to my extremely poor planning. At the very minimum, I did get to test out an idea I had that sparked this entire idea which was to animate shapes by rotating them around their anchor points. I think it suited the movement of the robots fairly well. This project also tested me in how I can simplify things. The robots’ design could have easily been more complicated with more shapes and a varied color scheme but their simple black shapes with white outlines look quite good in my own opinion. If I were to do this project again I would make a better plan of action in order to tackle the multitude of challenges that will arise in a more effective way. If I had firmly established the pre-production phase then it would have been a far better end product. While this end result is underdeveloped it serves as a reminder to set realistic expectations and make absolutely certain that a proper schedule is followed to make sure that a fully developed product is achieved.

Sp21-P6 Supply Run – Bryson Edlund

This final project was a lot of fun for everyone and they all want to do more projects like this, although they all want to play bigger rolls so we will have to take turns being the main protagonist. We didn’t film during the night like we wanted too and we had some great ideas we didn’t get to use because of the limited time we had. It was still one of my favorite projects to do.

This is a story of a survivor who is simply looking for supplies, but runs into some complications and has to fight his way out of it and to survive.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1L-1LOReN3U9PoaZazeTFqEtkTXkBTOOr/view?usp=sharing

Sp21-P6_Life in the time of COVID-19

Here we are at the last spot of the term. I have the idea of making this video because I want to show everyone some part of life that we all have to wear mask for a living. Things are much different than they used to be. I defiantly feel the panic from others as grocery stores sellout of things like toilet paper or bottled water. I think the reaction is appropriate and I appreciate everything that people are doing to help stop the spread, no matter how boring it may be.

Things are going back to normal but I want everyone to still be careful about this virus. I’m so happy that I learned a lot from editing this video and used camera angle. I hope everyone like this video! Thank you for watching.