Obsolete Archives - Peter Wilson

Soupgiant WordPress themes on Github

Update: We’ve released our updated framework and renamed it the Big Red Framework.

The Soupgiant base WordPress themes are now available on GitHub. There’s no documentation at this stage, I’ll write up a blog post with details in the coming weeks.

There are two parts to the theme

Soupgiant Parent Theme
We use this as the parent theme across multiple projects. Any bug fixes or new features applied to this theme will be available to all child themes.
Soupgiant Child Theme
Starting point for each project. Once duplicated for the project, CSS styling and per project PHP customisations are applied/overridden in the child theme. Most projects require a custom header.php & footer.php.

As I say, documentation to come.

Rounded Corners Everywhere

Spending some time looking at CSS3 support on caniuse.com, I noticed how similar browser support for border-radius and rgba colours is:

rgba-vs-border-radius

The striking similarity allows us to use both the old graphical and new css3 methods for rounded corners, giving us the same look in almost all browsers but without wasting the bandwidth of users with modern browsers.

On a previous version of this website, I used this method with the following CSS:

.aktt_widget .aktt_tweets {
  background: #999
              url(10pxrounded-210w-24.png)
              no-repeat top center;

  background: rgba(153,153,153,1) none;

     -moz-border-radius: 10px; /* FF1+ */
  -webkit-border-radius: 10px; /* Saf3+, Chrome */
          border-radius: 10px; /* Opera 10.5, IE 9 */
}

Browsers that don’t support rgba colours use the first background call which includes an image to emulate rounded corners. Browsers that do support rgba use the second background call, which includes a fully opaque colour but no background image, for the most part these browser can interpret the border-radius calls that follow.

This method falls over in Opera 10.1, which displays a square border, and will fall over in IE9, which will interpret the border-radius call and download the image. I don’t see these couple of exceptions as a big problem, as browser support always involves catering to the majority.

Why I will not be dropping support for IE6

Increasingly I’m reading of web developers deciding to drop IE6 from their list of supported browsers, usually, because of its creative interpretation of CSS standards, besides IE7 is over a year old, and, IE8 about to be released.

I’ve decided to continue support for IE6 as it’s still in wide use – especially in corporate environments – and, I don’t think it needs to take a lot of work to develop for. I’ll say that again, I don’t think IE6 is as bad it’s sometimes made out to be.