Once upon a time Compass was an invaluable value add to any SASS project. Rather than looking up vendor prefixes all of the time or understanding the priority order, you could just include a Compass mixin and away you went. It was a great timesaving tool, but now the time has come to move on.
The one tool that I use nowadays is Autoprefixer. Basically what it will do is go through your CSS and add in vendor prefixes where required. This means you can write standard prefix-free CSS and not have to worry about finding fallback vendor prefixes or different syntax (I’m lookin at you Internet Explorer and Flexbox).
Chances are if you’re a web developer, front-ender, PHP programmer, web expert or whatever your title is, you use Sublime Text Editor and there is also a chance you’re using a single digit percentage of its true power.
This isn’t an overly complex or comprehensive list of shortcuts, just shortcuts I believe every developer should know. Knowing how to select a line or delete an entire line just using your keyboard is invaluable in itself.
Provided nothing is pushed back, the WordPress JSON REST API plugin is being integrated into the WordPress core and is slated for version 4.1.
As WordPress becomes more and more like a PHP application framework, the robustness of WordPress continues to grow. The JSON REST API will be a massive feature that will make creating single page websites and applications a whole lot easier. Being able to fetch a page, archive or single post as JSON and then use that to create fast and lean single page websites will be a welcome addition.
The common mistake that newbies make when using MySQL is using the same username and password for all of their connected applications. Generally, I’ve seen the default “root” user used as the user in an application like WordPress with permissions to modify all databases. This is bad.
Before we proceed, we want to login as the root MySQL user (the super admin). We achieve this by typing: mysql -u root -p – you will be asked for the root user password. Once you are in, this is where the magic happens. We are now logged in as the MySQL super-boss.
I have been writing a lot about Laravel lately and recently I was asked about database table seeding. Chances are you already use the awesome migrations feature, but probably don’t use database seeding. I have seen people using migrations to seed a table, but it’s messy and not exactly ideal. Using the seeding functionality in Laravel, you’ll discover how easy it actually is.
When should I use seeding? I personally use seeding in Laravel quite extensively during the development phase of a web application. Being able to add in mock user accounts, pages and other data for testing purposes is a lot easier than manually doing it every time.
As the web continues to evolve and front-end development continues to become even more complicated, the need to adapt and implement processes for workflow grows immensley.
Photoshop is dead We are well and truly living in the golden age of front-end web development. Photoshop is dying, designers and developers now design on the fly using HTML and CSS. This isn’t to say Photoshop is going away completely overnight, but the transition is well and truly in motion.
In Bootstrap 3, the buttons (well a lot of elements) have a border radius value giving them rounded corners. Now I don’t know about you, but I find rounded corners on buttons horrible.
If you are using the LESS version of Bootstrap, set the following variables:
@border-radius-base: 0px; @border-radius-small: 0px; @border-radius-large: 0px; If you are using Bootstrap SASS port, set the following variables:
$border-radius-base: 0px; $border-radius-small: 0px; $border-radius-large: 0px;
I was asked this question by a colleague recently when discussing SEO and modern front-end web development. I think most of us assume that using proper sectioning elements that HTML5 provides us would help with SEO a tiny bit, so I set out to find the answer and you might be surprised.
Understanding semantics In HTML5 we have tags that provide semantic meaning like; main, section, aside, figure, article, header, menu and footer (amongst many others). Using these tags in our page makes for better structure, it also means when Google comes along they don’t have to guess what content is what in your page.
If you’re using jQuery to AJAX post a form then you’re already more than familiar with the caveats of using jQuery to POST a forms contents. One thing I often see overlooked is the disabling of the form while the content is being submitted, there is nothing worse than receiving duplicate form submissions and knowing the fix was simple. Or worse yet, I’ve seen instances where a form has been used to attack a site by constantly submitting it quickly.
Recently I encountered one of Google’s latest search engine algorithm tweaks and saw a site that was getting roughly 500 visitors a day drop down to less than 70 visitors per day. It was shocking to say the least, but kind of expected.
I left the site, updated it occasionally and noticed the traffic remained low. This wasn’t a problem that was going to solve itself, I knew I had to try and fix it and return the site to its former glory.