True words from Joel Hladecek about the whole “Skeuomorphic VS Flat Design” Debate.
Essentially, every user interface on Earth is ornamentally referencing and representing other unrelated materials, interfaces and elements. The only questions are: what’s it representing, and by how much?
Why Apple’s Interfaces Will Be Skeuomorphic Forever, And Why Yours Will Be Too
Michelle Schulp redesigned the WordPress Template Hierarchy to make it easier to use. Based on her design, Rami Abraham already created an HTML Version. I think they both did a very good job and i am sure this will find it’s way into the Codex sooner or later.
As a person with a passion for infographics and simplifying the display of data, I am always looking for ways to make information more clear. The world is filled with an ever-increasing amount of data, but this data is only useful to us if it is usable. A well designed infographic makes even the most complex ideas understandable, but a poorly designed infographic can make simple ideas needlessly confusing. It is this exact usability issue that plagues most infographics today, even within a place I seem to be spending an ever-increasing amount of my time: the WordPress Codex.
Redesigning The WordPress Template Hierarchy – Marktime Media.
Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career or your business. The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to you. But people find it very difficult to recognise what’s relevant.
A good article about how news affect our brains and our ability to concentrate and eventually to think. Would be an interesting experiment to stop reading daily news and focus more on books and long form articles for at least a month or so. Maybe i’ll give it a try.
News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier | Media | The Guardian.
Creating a high quality WordPress Theme is about more than just a nice design. What’s going on under the hood is equally important: using the right Template files, writing clean code and testing for all kinds of content.
Luckily there is a wealth of information, plugins and other helpful tools available on the web. This is an overview of the best resources to help you develop Themes according to the best practices.
Fränk Klein composed a handy list of resources on WordPress Theme Development Best Practices. Definitely something to bookmark.
A fantastically exhaustive set of test data to measure the integrity of your plugins and themes.
It’s easy to move the cursor from Amazon’s main dropdown to its submenus. You won’t run into the bootstrap bug. They get away with this by detecting the direction of the cursor’s path.
Ben Kamens (lead dev at Khan Academy) takes a look at how Amazon handles their Mega-Dropdown.
He even wrote a little jQuery Plugin and shared it on GitHub.
There are decentralized alternatives to any of the services and platforms above. Self-hosted, open source solutions. But hardly anybody uses them. They will forever rot in the forgotten world of nerd tools on SourceForge, BitBucket or GitHub. A few idealists may try to give them a chance and probably will give up sooner or later, realizing that it’s all about global adoption.
But does this really mean that a more open, decentralized approach to a social web and all these tools we use will always be doomed to fail? I don’t think so. It’s up to us. We have the chance to make a big impact on the future of the web.
I just recently played around a bit with app.net, and i loved the decentralized idea behind tent.io when i read about it. But many of those tools are too complicated and too geeky for normal users to use today.
Bastian Allgeier did a very good job in not only pointing out problems we have today but also a solution which might not be a reality in a few weeks or months, but could definitely be possible. I would love to see something like this becoming a reality. And i’m sure it will, in some form or another!
For the most part, I dislike WordPress shortcodes. I think they are unintuitive, difficult to use for the average user, and go against much of what the core functionality of WordPress aims to offer.But the challenge is that there’s not yet a suitable alternative.
Tom McFarlin with some interesting thoughts on Shortcodes. Be sure to also read the discussion in the comments.
I completely agree that shortcodes – even if they work in some cases – always feel to hacky for me especially if normal users should be able to handle the content at the end.
My current “solution” is to be as helpful for the enduser as possible. That means including custom TinyMCE Buttons in the editor to add shortcodes, trying to show a placeholder image instead of just the shortcode text where possible. Generally speaking: If i have to explain to a client what a shortcode is, it’s not the optimal solution.
And most importantly: Always write a custom plugin for shortcode! There’s no reason to implement a shortcode in a theme.
"The stresses and worries in life are like that glass of water. Think about them for a while and nothing happens. Think about them a bit longer and they begin to hurt. And if you think about them all day long, you will feel paralyzed – incapable of doing anything."
I can’t tell you how much i agree with this little piece of advice. As easy as it sounds, it can get very hard to achieve, especially if you work from home. Go read it, and don’t forget to put your glass down!
So, with little data supporting our belief and more cost required to perform the work, we had set ourselves up for a recurring conversation with clients. “We know this will help you, you’ll just have to trust us with a bigger part of your budget.” You could say that just about everything we do has to be taken on some measure of faith.
Many of us believe responsive is the way to go. So do i, but believing is not very supportive to convince a client or anyone else to spend money on something. Luckily Electric Pulp made a little three weeks test on a lively e-commerce site and backed our “believes” with some real data.