Archive for the ‘Web Development’ Category

The Poor Man’s CSS3 Button

Friday, September 3rd, 2010
The Poor Man’s CSS3 Button

I call them Pez

I received a tweet the other day about these cool CSS3 buttons called BonBon Buttons. The site says they are named after the French word for candy, but after looking at them, they look like Pez to me. Hmmm…that is what I will call mine…Pez! Regardless they are very pretty. Even better, the creator of them lists where it won’t work. He was just tooling around one day and made these buttons. Well, I decided to do the “poor man’s version” of those. And unlike the BonBon buttons, my Pez button will work in IE6 as long as you use CSS PIE, with the exception of text-shadow, and the radial gradient. Those two properties don’t add all that much, and even without them they look good in IE.

(more…)

CSS Positioning – Relative and Absolute

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010
CSS Positioning – Relative and Absolute

It takes all types

There are four types of positioning: static, fixed, relative, and absolute. Static is the default position state which means it isn’t positioned. It goes where it normally would on the page. Fixed is positioned relative to the browser window, and won’t move even if the window is scrolled. Relative positioning allows you to use the top, right, bottom, and left CSS properties to position an element relative to where it would appear in the document. Absolute is the tricky one, because it is basically removed from the document, and placed EXACTLY where you want it to go.

A note on :relative

If you position something relative, and then use top and left to shift it over, don’t expect everything below it to shift as well. It still occupies the space in the document normally, you are just shifting it from its initial placement.

(more…)

Adding A Sidebar For Specific Pages In WordPress

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010
Adding A Sidebar For Specific Pages In WordPress

Widgets are actually pretty damn cool

I used to think they were stupid, which is why I hard coded the sections pulling data for this blog. If you read my last post though, you will know I am building a theme for work and I had to use widgets. I gotta say, these things are handy. Now the client will be able to stick whatever he wants wherever he wants it. I did run into a problem though, which took me a while to solve.

I needed to get a widgetized sidebar onto a specific page, without showing up on any of the other pages. Luckily it was the blog page, which uses the index.php file within your theme folder, and not something where I would have to create a custom page for. I started the theme off of ‘TwentyTen’, and pretty much deleted all the content in all the theme files, meaning all I had left was the php that calls the header, footer, and sidebar. The function file remained the same other than adding the code to call jQuery from Google’s server, and renaming all the function names from ‘twentyten’ to ‘mythemename’ (not posting what it was really called, because it is irrelevant).

(more…)

Learning While Building A Theme In WordPress 3.0

Friday, August 27th, 2010
Learning While Building A Theme In WordPress 3.0

I plugged it in, but it didn’t go to 11

Today I was going to write about an awesome plugin a coworker found and is using, which I tried out. The problem is, that it didn’t work for me, but I don’t believe it is the plugin’s fault. We deal with a lot of custom things at my work place, and I believe something could have been interfering with it. Not sure though. I did see it in action though and it worked incredibly well for him. It’s called Page.ly MultiEdit and works with 2.9 and higher.

Ever need multiple places for a customer to be able to edit, that uses the same editor for posts and such? With this plugin it really makes WordPress a great CMS for regular sites, not just blogs. Not that it wasn’t before, this just makes it easier. To see screens, and instructions, visit there site. It was easy to install, and place the code, I just don’t think the environment I am working in played well with it. I’ll have to test it out in the project theme I am building.

(more…)

CSS3 – Just When You Thought You Knew It All

Thursday, August 26th, 2010
CSS3 – Just When You Thought You Knew It All

You can do that?

So I read an article today that I thought was going to suck. Nope, I was wrong. While I knew most of it, there was one thing that popped out at me today. See? Learnin’ all the time! CSS3 has some cool stuff that is easier to do than opening up Photoshop and creating an image for it. If you got my tweet today, which most of my subscribers didn’t because you don’t follow me on twitter (FOLLOW ME!), then you have an inkling of what I am talking about.

(more…)