If you can create a culture of teaching and learning within your community like what went on when Greg showed us git, your project will take off. Those moments are more important to the humans involved than any app feature.
Gina Trapani – Your Community Is Your Best Feature.
Upgraded to WordPress trunk today. The new admin Dashboard and fullscreen writing mode are wonderful updates.
Ray Villalobos, who flew all the way out from Florida, opened the development track at WordCamp Developers with a talk about HTML5, CSS3, and WordPress integration. He posted his slides before the talk as well.
Ray is an author at Lynda.com and runs a course on iOS 4 and web applications. The WordCamp presentation grew out of this course. He works for Entravision Orlando full-time, which manages many Univision stations.
The talk covered core HTML5 and CSS3 concepts and how they can be implemented into your WordPress development.
Ray described HTML5 as a bit of a rebellion against XHTML 2.0. In other words, “XHTML 1.1 makes humans code like machines.” With its flexible parsing rules, support of existing code structure, and common tags HTML5 respects users, browsers, and lets people write code in a more fluid manner.
HTML5 brings support for semantic elements (header, footer, asides, etc.) along with rich media and new form elements.
The semantic tags in HTML5 were created by analyzing the tags people were already using in their markup. The goal was to make things easier and provide for more rapid prototyping.
Mobile browsers have great support for CSS3. Mobile app development allows for more universal support of both CSS3 and HTML5.
Ray warned to be careful when using gradients, custom fonts, transformations, and animations. Browser support for these elements can be dicey and relying on any of them for mission critical features isn’t a great idea.
One of the cool things with CSS3 is the media queries that allow for responsively designed sites. Ethan Marcotte also wrote a stellar article at A List Apart on media queries in May of last year.
Before adding new elements from HTML5 or CSS3 Ray cautions to look at your target platforms. Analyzing your site metrics will give you a better idea of what browsers your users are on. This helps you determine where to add enhancements and how vital it is to provide alternative versions.
To add support for semantic selectors in Internet Explorer and other browsers that don’t natively support them Ray suggested using html5shim or Modernizr.
Ray recommended Browser Labs from Adobe to test sites in multiple browsers side-by-side. It’s free right now but will eventually be a paid tool.
Using cache manifests and .htaccess rules you can easily set up offline storage of files on devices. These provide a great way to store images and other data for use in offline or airplane modes.
I had extra time this weekend and decided I wanted to take a crack at making a really minimal WordPress theme. The product is now on Github and I’m calling it Minimal Stream.
It’s a one-column theme that includes support for asides, galleries, and statuses. Definitely nothing fancy but that’s just what I was going for. You can see it running now on this site so hop on over and take a look.
The first pass doesn’t include styles for tables and surely has some display bugs but I’ll be making some updates this week.
Working on a WordPress theme while listening to Dan Benjamin and Merlin Mann. An awesome way to end the weekend.
WordPress plugins with no configuration settings make me really happy. Hooray for decisions.
Smoke Signals. A manifesto for making the next one billion seconds about distributed, open, and secure software platforms. We should no longer surrender our most vital personal details to a closed-source system. It’s your social data, own it.
Responsive Twenty Ten. A Sara Cannon & Dan Gavin project that turns Twenty Ten in a slick, responsive theme. Scales to mobile, iPad, and large screen resolutions.
On standardized post formats. Andrew Nacin details core reasons behind the post format support coming in WordPress 3.1. It’s a pretty sweet feature and part of why this site is running Release Candidate 3.
Heavy Analytics for BuddyPress. Pretty cool looking plugin in development to display detailed stats about users in a WordPress multi-site installation. Hat tip to Stephane Daury.