UPDATE: Paul Thurrott, a Windows journalist, has featured some commentary on our post over at his Winsupersite. Check out his post, and the great discussion below it! Thanks for the input, Paul!
have me concerned that there’s a growing and false notion that IE8 is just great, and its rendering problems are the result of web developers writing non-standard code optimized for IE7.
To understand why IE8 is a legitimate disappointment, we need to start by providing background on how different browsers impact web development, both from a cost and design standpoint. If you think you already have a handle on this, you can skip ahead to our 3 straightforward examples of IE8 disappointments.
Continue reading 3 simple examples: why Internet Explorer 8 disappoints web developers
Although there’s a lack of good documentation, adding a function that takes parameters (i.e. Function_Name(Parameter)) to one of JavaScript’s standard ‘On’ events (i.e. ‘OnClick‘ or ‘onKeyDown‘) is relatively simple for JavaScript coders. Advanced programmers might refer to this as dynamic runtime event assignment with functions using parameters passed.
Confused? Here’s a practical example.
Let’s say we have a text area field on a web page, and we want to execute some function every time they make a keystroke inside that field. In our real world example, we wanted to count the number of characters, so we could let the user know how close they were to the limit, and warn them when they exceed the limit. To capture keystrokes, we need to hook into JavaScript’s ‘onKeyUp‘ and ‘onKeyDown‘ events.
Continue reading JavaScript Tutorial: Hooking Events at Runtime with Parameter Functions
Slideshow of Recommended Reading screenshots
Have you noticed our new Software section? Many of our projects involve innovative “mini-applications” that have greater application beyond the immediate project. One of our goals is to abstract some of these projects or apply new skills from these projects into generally available software. We’ll probably charge for some premium applications, but sometimes we’d just like to give back to the open source, GPL community that’s given us fantastic platforms like WordPress.
This week we christened our Software section with a called Recommended Reading: Google Reader Shared. The plug in, optimized for the latest major build of WordPress (2.7 at the time of writing), will let you easily feature selected items from any number of standard web feeds (be it a blog or company news) on your WordPress site. All you need is a free account!
The plug-in is also in less than 100 hours.
Continue reading Google Reader WordPress Plugin
Increasingly, we’re building sites – like our own – that are completely managed by WordPress. WordPress makes it very easy to output a list of pages using the wp_list_pages function; you can control depth levels, surrounding tags, and even explicitly exclude certain pages. And with the precise classes that accompany the output HTML elements, you can finely control the output with stylesheets.
Many sites, also like ours, list pages only under the current top level page (or, put another way, pages in the current section) in a sidebar. For example, if you go to the Services page, or any of the pages inside that section, you’ll notice a box atop the right sidebar called “More in Services” that provides navigation within the Services section.
Taking advantage of the wp_list_pages function to create section-based navigation for sites with two levels of page depth is a pretty straightforward matter, as I’ll explain. But how do we efficiently output section based navigation for sites with 3 or more levels of page depth?
Continue reading Current section navigation in WordPress
Last weekend I debuted a new talk at WordCamp Chicago. Aimed at developers, Customizing WordPress Administration might have been a little bit dry, but the tips – many of them unique to this talk – are killer for consultants looking to tailor the other end of WordPress for their clients.
Ever since WordPress 2.5 was released, we’ve been pushing the boundaries of