Siobhan McKeown wrote this awesome, birds-eye view of the whole WordPress economy. Make sure to read this two-part article so you know what’s up with WordPress and identify what opportunity lies ahead.
I agree with Matt’s prediction on that article:
I think the next big opportunity is around agencies and consulting—there will be five to six companies as large as Automattic, just providing high-end consulting and services to the large customers who are adopting WordPress en masse.
Start with Part I of the article.
13 April 2012
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The one issue with creating responsive web design is in displaying images, especially getting the most appropriate size in a particular screen size. One solution for it is the Responsive-Enhance jQuery plugin. It works by loading small-sized images by default, then checks the screen size and loads the bigger version if necessary.
According to its creator, Josh Emerson:
This results in a faster perceived page load speed, but a slower actual speed. I’m happy with this solution as I care more about perceived speed than actual speed.
This tutorial by Keir Whitaker takes the whole thing further by teaching us how to apply Responsive-Enhance in WordPress.
The WordCamp Central has been redesigned, now sporting pleasant shades of blue. I particularly like the individual WordCamp page like this one for San Francisco, which features date, location, and archive links to past WordCamps there.
A little peek under the hood shows that the site now uses a Twenty Ten child theme called “WordCamp Central 2012″. The site uses a plugin called WP Event Ticketing for ticketing purposes, and WP Super Cache for speed.
10 April 2012
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Dan Cederholm, of SimpleBits fame, recently releases Pears,
an open source WordPress theme for creating your own markup & style pattern library
What a fantastic idea. This is a very niche theme, not trying to be everything to everyone, but clearly made with solving a particular problem in mind. It’s also well designed, as can be expected from Mr. Cederholm’s works. The project is also available in Github. (Oh, and it’s open sourced, of course).
13 February 2012
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10 February 2012
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One of the options on the default category widget is to display it as a dropdown. When a category is selected, user is immediately redirected to the category archive page.
This functionality is provided by the wp_dropdown_categories function. Surprisingly, this same function can be used to display a list of tags as well (which, design-wise, seems to be a better alternative than a tag cloud).
Here’s the code, modified from the example available on the Codex page:
<li id="categories">
<h2><?php _e('Posts by Tags'); ?></h2>
<form action="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/" method="get">
<div>
<?php
$select = wp_dropdown_categories('taxonomy=post_tag&show_option_none=Select tag&show_count=1&orderby=name&echo=0');
$select = preg_replace("#<select([^>]*)>#", "<select$1 onchange='return this.form.submit()'>", $select);
echo $select;
?>
<noscript><div><input type="submit" value="View" /></div></noscript>
</div></form>
</li> |
Above, note the taxonomy=post_tag parameter that tells the function to generate a list of tags. If you have your own taxonomy, you can use that too. Pretty nifty!
3 February 2012
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