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Fluid Width Site Tips
Design & Coding Fluid width sites give the visitor control over how wide your site appears to them (within the limits set) and allows you to make more use of larger screen resolutions. A fixed width site designed to fit for an 800px wide resolution looks very thin on a 1600px wide resolution. A fluid width allows you to specify a minimum and maximum width to display the site in, so that you can prevent the site going too thin and breaking and also make use of ...
Continue readingSet Up WordPress as a CMS
WordPress If you’re used to how WordPress works, then using it as a CMS (Content Management System) to power a standard website is an excellent idea. It’s lightweight and easy to use, has fantastic support from the WordPress community and is easily extendable with the various CMS style plugins available. If you also want a news or continual archive style section for information (eg. news, announcements, events etc) then you can still utilise ...
Continue readingCreating a Drop Down Menu
CSS Horizontal navigation is quite popular however it becomes restrictive once you’ve got too many pages to list. Once you reach this point then you either need to convert to using a vertical navigation, or start using drop down menus. Drop downs used to rely on JavaScript however all modern browsers can now manage drop down menus with just CSS (IE7+, Firefox, Opera, Safari; note, JavaScript is still required for IE6 and below). The HTML ...
Continue readingPlugin Administration Menus
WordPress Coding & Design When creating your own plugins you’ll often want to add one or more admin pages to allow users to configure options and add content, depending on what your plugin does. A couple of weeks ago I explained how to add an Options Page, this week I’ll run through how to add pages to other sections. Creating a Submenu Page The syntax of using these predefined functions is the same as using the options page function. To remind ourselves, ...
Continue readingCSS Image Replacement
Design & Coding The available fonts to a web designer is quite restrictive for making headings and menus look sleek and stylish whilst still maintaining usability and accessibility. We don’t all have the same fonts available, yet that shouldn’t stop us from using our favourite fonts. A lot of designers/developers will simply create the text they want and save it as an image, then place it on the page where they want it eg. a Logo, using an image ...
Continue readingCreating a WordPress Plugin III
WordPress Coding & Design This is the final part on the subject of creating a WordPress plugin (read part 1 and part 2). We’ll be modifying our original function, that outputs social bookmark links after each post, so that it works with our new options page. So first we need to modify our display function. At present it just echos out the markup, however we need it to do the following Put the markup into a variable Check which option is set If you should attach the ...
Continue readingExplaining CSS Selectors Part III
CSS This is the final part in this 3 part series (see Part I and Part II), and we’re on to Pseudo-element selectors. :first-line The :first-line pseudo-element allows you to target the first line of a given target, which must be either a block level element, inline-block, table cell or caption. So, for example, if you wanted to make the first line of a paragraph red then you could use [sourcecode language="css"]p:first-line { color: red ...
Continue readingCreating a WordPress Plugin II
WordPress Coding & Design Last week I explained how to take a function and turn it into a plugin for your WordPress site. The plugin was fairly basic, just a function that created a list of social bookmarks. To use it you would just make a call to the function within your template file. However, we can go one better and give the user an option of either controlling where the bookmarks are displayed (as it currently is), or for those less confident in editing their ...
Continue readingExplaining CSS Selectors Part II
CSS See last weeks post for part one of Explaining CSS Selectors. Attribute Selectors Attribute selectors allow you to target a group of items on a page by matching a particular attribute. This opens up a whole new method of selecting your targets. Unfortunately attribute selectors are not supported in IE6 (which is why they’re not very commonly used), and IE7′s support is a bit buggy at times, however with IE8 out today, hopefully ...
Continue readingCreating a WordPress Plugin
WordPress Coding & Design Over the past couple of months we’ve started to look at creating functions and using actions and filters in our functions.php theme file to help manipulate the content output by WordPress. If you create something and feel it’s worthy of releasing for others to use then rather than just posting the code up for others to copy, it’s usually better to write a plugin. To start a plugin file off you use a PHP comment to contain the ...
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