Very good meat and vegetable stew here in Vancouver. Couldn’t quite finish it all.
Tag: Vancouver
Breakfast in Vancouver
Super delicious food at Scoozi’s in Vancouver. The yogurt and fruit was wonderful.
Everything is going to be alright
Taken from the Chinese Gardens here in Vancouver.
Making Custom Theme Options Easy
Toby Mckes, a WordPress developer at I Can Has Cheezburber, gave the second talk at WordCamp Developers on the theme options panels their sites use. CheezCAP is the custom theme options panel they’ve open sourced.
Cheezburger runs over 50 sites on WordPress.com VIP. CheezCAP, which stands for Cheezburger Custom Administration Panel, makes their deployment process for themes really simple.
Background
The internet is a series of tubes filled with cats. Toby started on the farm team at Cheezburber where they were putting out many sites every week. The goal was “OMG moar sites plz.”
Their initial theme deployment process was terrible. Toby had to spend half his time as a server admin. On Thanksgiving 2009 one of their sites was posted to the Guardian UK and hit 700,000 pageviews. He got to spend his Thanksgiving rebooting the server.
They also didn’t have version control. There was no way of tracking what was being changed and many sites were hacked together to the point of looking pretty bad. It was easy to make new sites but difficult to update and maintain them. They switched to a unified theme on WordPress.com.
Early on they had 10 sites running this unified theme and one file which contained all of the customization options for the sites. CheezCAP was the solution to make this easier.
CheezCAP
Licensed under the GPL v2 CheezCAP adds an options panel to make customization easy. There’s a pre-configured config file that you can customize to your liking. Its core contains a few key aspects:
- Boolean options create as basic toggle switches.
- Text options can represent alphanumeric strings to be inserted.
- Dropdown options serve as more complex options.
- User caps to limit editing ability to specific user roles.
All of this goes right into your Dashboard and lets you get new sites set up and running with custom options that require minor configuration changes. Google Analytics integration, A/B testing, custom 404 pages, and much more can all be configured with CheezCAP.
The killer feature of all this is import/export. All of these options can be exported from one site and seamlessly imported into a new site. Setting up development sites is super easy using this.
Update: Toby gave a similar talk at WordCamp Seattle and will be updating the slides from that talk.
HTML5 and CSS3 with WordPress
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.
Core concepts
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.
CSS3
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.
Status
Up in Vancouver today for WordCamp Developers. Getting ready to watch the keynote interview with Lorelle and Nacin.