THE PENDING DRAFT

WordCamp US – State of the Word 2015

December 7, 2015

Last weekend, the first WordCamp US – the biggest WordCamp ever – was held in Philadelphia and of course Matt Mullenweg gave the annual State of the Word Keynote. He talked about a bunch of things including the upcoming version 4.4 (which brings a lot of interesting stuff like term_meta and support for responsive images using srcset) or changes to how translations for plugins and themes in the repository work and he shared some thoughts about the development Calypso, Automattic’s react-based new interface for WordPress.com as well as self-hosted sites with Jetpack enabled. Also, he announced who the lead developers for versions 4.5 (Mike Schroder), 4.6 (Dominik Schilling) and 4.7 (Matt Mullenweg) will be as well as seven new core committers.

He made it very clear how important he thinks JavaScript is and will be in the future and that we all should take on that challenge and learn JavaScript, deeply.

Matt Mullenweg: State of the Word 2015

U.S. Web Design Standards

October 1, 2015

U.S. Web Design Standards

The U.S. Government released a complete set of Standards to achieve consistency across federal government websites.

Built and maintained by U.S. Digital Service and 18F designers and developers, this resource follows industry-standard web accessibility guidelines and reuses the best practices of existing style libraries and modern web design. It provides a guide for creating beautiful and easy-to-use online experiences for the American people.

It’s really great to see more and more organizations – and especially governments – create and even release Style Guides for Web Design.

U.S. Web Design Standards

Stef. Sullivan Rewis on Building an Enterprise CSS Framework for Salesforce

September 23, 2015

Some very interesting insights on what goes into building a huge CSS Framework for an Enterprise Solution like Salesforce.

At Salesforce UX, we are guided by four design principles. In order of importance, they are — clarity, efficiency, consistency, and beauty . These principles assisted us in prioritizing competing goals and helped us make tough calls.

I’d like to share some of the decisions we made while architecting the framework. Some of these choices may be unexpected. And there have been times when our ideas have morphed while building, as we discovered yet another platform or situation we needed to solve for.

Worth a read!

Medium – Building an Enterprise CSS Framework

WP REST API – Core Merge Proposal

September 22, 2015

In case you missed it: WP REST API is finally being officially proposed to merge into WordPress Core. The idea is to first integrate the infrastructure of the API in Version 4.4 and then merge the endpoints in Version 4.5 as a second step.

What’s also great is that the Team working on the API used GitHub during Development and the experience they gained could lead to a tighter integration of GitHub for the work on WordPress core too, which would be a great side effect.

Make WordPress Core – WP REST API Merge Proposal

Reasons to switch to HTTPS

July 11, 2015

A collection of 10 reasons why a switch to HTTPS is a good idea, for any page.

Today, however, there are more reasons than ever to switch to HTTPS — even for a news site, corporate site, or any site that doesn’t consider itself at the top of the security food chain. HTTPS adoption grew 80% last year alone, much faster than previous years, but we’re still very far from encryption being the norm.

If you’re not convinced HTTPS is right for you, or need ammo to convince your peers and bosses, here are 10 good reasons to go HTTPS.

Up until now, i was a bit hesitant to flip the switch on my own and also on client pages, mostly because i have no idea where to start and the certificates aren’t cheap. But i’m looking forward to the possibilities with upcoming free initiatives like Let’s Encrypt, which should be available by September 2015.

10 Reasons To Use HTTPS

W3C Mobile Checker

June 28, 2015

The Mobile Checker is a tool for Web developers who want to make their Web page or Web app work better on mobile devices.

The W3C released a tool to check your mobile websites. Pretty sweet.

W3C Mobile Checker

WordPress Plugin – Airplane Mode

June 27, 2015

WordPress makes a whole bunch of connections when you are using the Dashboard. For example to fetch external files like fonts or to display the latest news and so forth. While this is convenient in most situations, it can completely slow you down or lead to error messages when you are on a slow/unstable connection or don’t have a connection at all, as we had this week. The solution to this is called Airplane Mode, a WordPress Plugin by Andrew Norcross which disables all external calls from WordPress.

Control loading of external files when developing locally. WP loads certain external files (fonts, Gravatar, etc.) and makes external HTTP calls. This isn’t usually an issue, unless you’re working in an evironment without a web connection. This plugin removes/unhooks those actions to reduce load time and avoid errors due to missing files.

GitHub – Airplane Mode