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My topic will be customizing WordPress menus (in a slightly modified version of my talk at WordCamp Atlanta), or as I have titled it…
Zazzy WordPress Menus with CSS Tricks and jQuery Magic
Navigation is among the most important elements of a website’s design. Effective navigation allows visitors to quickly and easily find desired content, keeping them on your site.
The session will begin with a review of the custom menu structuring from within WordPress, including how to extend the flexibility of the Menus screen with available screen options. Then we will move onto how you can style your navigation menu with modifications to your theme’s CSS stylesheet. We will cover:
using and styling submenus
adding icons to navigation items
changing the formatting of hovered or active items
adding support for menu item descriptions
Finally, I will demonstrate a few more advanced techniques using jQuery and CSS that can improve your visitor’s experience and improve conversions.
I am not the right fit for every WordPress development project. When I have to turn down a prospective client project, I recommend another developer when possible.
Often I cannot think (or do not know) of a specific developer that meets the needs of the project. I want to be helpful, so I do the next best thing. I suggest three resources that list quality WordPress developers:
The specialized WordPress hosting service, WP Engine recently started their own consultants/developers list that includes specialties, bios, price-ranges and contact information. The consultants/developers WP Engine lists are hand-picked as resources to recommend to their own hosting clients.
Code Poet Directory
Automattic, the company behind WordPress, maintains the Code Poet Directory. The companies and individuals in the directory can be filtered by region, specialty, platform and price-ranges. Those listed are considered to be enterprise-level WordPress professionals, web designers and developers.
I have never found a WordPress social sharing plugin that I loved. I just wanted a simple social plugin that would load any external scripts asynchronously, allowed me to share my posts on Twitter, Google+, Linkedin and Hacker News and never included the words “Sharing is sexy!“.
A few weeks ago I started working on developing my own social sharing plugin, and today it is available to the public via Github.
The Async Social Sharing plugin loads the third-party social scripts asynchronously to improve site performance.
The plugin allows you to display the following sharing widgets:
Twitter
Facebook
Google+
Linkedin
Hacker News
An options panel is provided to allow unwanted social widgets to be disabled:
Why is Asynchronous script loading better?
Asynchronous loading allows multiple files to load parallel to each other. Instead of having to wait for Twitter to respond with their script, the browser moves on and starts fetching the next request.
I have been using Github Gists and the Codebox application to save and share my code snippets, but I wanted to start posting them here on my website to make them easier to find and update. I wasn’t quite happy with any of the existing code syntax highlighting plugins for WordPress, so I built my own, Sunburst Code Prettify.
Sunburst Code Prettify uses Google Code Prettify, a JavaScript module and CSS file that allows syntax highlighting of source code snippets. This plugin contains the CSS file for the Sunburst theme syntax highlighting formatting. You can find the other available syntax highlighting themes available in the Code Prettify Theme Gallery
<div class="span4">
<h2>Reset via Normalize</h2>
As of Bootstrap 2, the traditional CSS reset has evolved to make use of elements from <a href="http://necolas.github.com/normalize.css/" target="_blank">Normalize.css</a>, a project by <a href="http://twitter.com/necolas" target="_blank">Nicolas Gallagher</a> that also powers the <a href="http://html5boilerplate.com" target="_blank">HTML5 Boilerplate</a>.
The new reset can still be found in <strong>reset.less</strong>, but with many elements removed for brevity and accuracy.
</div>
<!-- /.span -->
if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post();
$ideas_posts = $wpdb->get_results(
"SELECT * FROM $wpdb->posts
WHERE post_status = 'draft'
AND post_type = 'post' ORDER BY post_date DESC");
foreach ($ideas_posts as $memberpost):
JavaScript Example
require(["jquery", "jquery.alpha", "jquery.beta"], function($) {
//the jquery.alpha.js and jquery.beta.js plugins have been loaded.
$(function() {
$('body').alpha().beta();
});
});
Ruby Example
# Formats date either as ordinal or by given date format
# Adds %o as ordinal representation of the day
def format_date(date, format)
date = datetime(date)
if format.nil? || format.empty? || format == "ordinal"
date_formatted = ordinalize(date)
else
date_formatted = date.strftime(format)
date_formatted.gsub!(/%o/, ordinal(date.strftime('%e').to_i))
end
date_formatted
end
On January 31st, Twitter released version 2.0 of their popular Bootstrap framework complete with a responsive stylesheet and new components. I have been working to keep BootstrapWP, the WordPress theme for Bootstrap as up to date as possible.
If you have been using any previous versions of the BootstrapWP for theme development, I encourage you to switch to the development branch on Github. The development branch contains many bug fixes along with overall style and device response improvements.
Usage: Customize and override any of the styles using style.css file. All .css and .js files are loaded in functions.php. Don’t forget to disable any of the .js files you do not need
I released Bootstrapwp, a powerful base WordPress theme powered by Bootstrap. Bootstrap is a responsive frontend toolkit from Twitter designed to kickstart web development, complete with core HTML, CSS, and JS for grids, type, forms, navigation, and many more components. Now you can use it with WordPress as a solid base to build custom themes quickly and easily.
WordPress has made improving the experience and communication of feature changes to users a priority. After updating to the latest beta release of WordPress 3.3, I smiled when I saw the screen at the end of the update. Kudos to the WordPress UI team.
I am currently working on a WordPress project where the development site is hosted on Rackspace Cloud Sites. Doing typical administration tasks on the development site (Example: updating to WordPress, updating/installing a plugin, running a backup, etc.) was constantly resulting in a page timeout error.
A little research lead to the discovery that Rackspace Cloud Sites uses a load balancer that times out all PHP requests over 30 seconds. The solution to this problem on any PHP based site hosted on Cloud Sites, is to add a few lines to your .htaccess file to manually override the length of time for the timeout.
The end result of my .htaccess file is shown below, with entries added for increasing the maximum execution time, upload size, post size, and memory limit. Your results may vary, but this setup for WordPress on Rackspace Cloud Sites has me developing happier.
