At Floate, we employ three developers. There is one full time developer and two designers who can also develop. None of us are ninjas. Nor are we rock stars.
Dear Drupal: Season’s Greetings. Love, Smashing WordPress.
Every day I work with WordPress in one way or another. My Twitter feed is full of WordPress types, and I’m a regular at my local WordPress meetup. I’m a WordPress fan.
The White House hosts a number of Web developers who use Drupal every day. Their Twitter feeds are probably full of Drupal types, and some may well attend the Washington DC Drupal meetup. They are Drupal fans.
Faux Columns Revistited
It’s time to update Dan Cederholm’s faux columns to take advantage of CSS3 gradients and reduce http requests.
I’ve put a demo on Github where you can also see the source code.
The Developer’s Guide To Conflict-Free JavaScript And CSS In WordPress
Imagine you’re playing the latest hash-tag game on Twitter when you see this friendly tweet:
You might want to check your #WP site. It includes two copies of jQuery. Nothing’s broken, but loading time will be slower.
WordPress Theme Elements
A client asked us to put together a list of every design element required in a WordPress theme but it’s the sort of thing we think we should share.
When producing a theme, we try not to limit the website owner’s options within the WordPress Dashboard. The owner may wish to enable an option down the track and be disappointed if they can’t.
The downside for the designer and developer is they may put in work for elements that are never used. The upside is happy clients and return business.
Like most things web, the site’s purpose will dictate that some things just aren’t feasible. Consider this as a series of guidelines that you can adapt for your purposes.
How we do IE Hacks
We recently changed the way we do IE hacks at Soupgiant. For years we used conditional comments to load separate CSS files.
For a few sites, we used Paul Irish’s conditional HTML classes hacks. Without workarounds, this puts IE in compatibility mode.
Big Red Framework on WordPress.org
Big Red, the Soupgiant WordPress framework, has been added to the WordPress.org theme repository.
If you have any code suggestions, you can fork the theme on Github and submit a pull request.
Maintaining Link Focus
Anyone who has attempted to navigate a web page using the keyboard, will have experienced sites that remove the default a:focus style without adding in a replacement.
The cause – but not the fault – lays with Eric Meyer’s original CSS reset, subsequently included in the YUI CSS framework, among others.
Minimum Page, A CSS Base
We decided to release Soupgiant‘s CSS base to the world at large. You can find it at minimumpage.com.
Minimum Page comes from a frustration with CSS resets and bases. Ripping down the styling only to rebuild many of the same styles is unnecessary, especially for defaults common to all browsers.
To encourage people to consider the code they insert in their site, the styles aren’t provided in a minimised form. Developers should edit the original base to make generic, site wide changes.
It’s exactly what we use to start all of our CSS at Soupgiant. We think it’s important to share.
Euthenasing Internet Explorer 6
I think, much of the time, when website owners and developers decide to drop support for IE6, we go about it the wrong way.
For a not-for-profit, like WordPress.org, the decision can be simple. The project is free and the cost is resources. To no longer support IE6 in their admin means the WordPress team can develop more efficiently. When a website makes a profit, however, I think the decision is black and white.