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Archive for the ‘Development’ Category

November 9th, 2010

Vertical Alignment with CSS

I’ve been using CSS and non-table based layouts for about 5 years now and until recently one thing I had never had a consistent solution for was centering objects vertically. Either it didn’t come up often in designs, we purposely went around it or, if forced to, used some hacky solution. I finally decided it [...]

Filed in CSS, Development

September 22nd, 2010

Extending WordPress search with Sphinx (Part III)

In part III of this series, I’m going to cover a few more topics including Delta Indexing, Index Merging, and Distributed Indexes. If you used part I to get Sphinx up and running, and part II to get it integrated with WordPress, we’ll continue from there. Delta Indexing Using the sphinx.conf from part I, we’re [...]

Filed in Development, Programming, Search, WordPress

September 20th, 2010

A Pattern for Creating Supportable Custom Meta Box Handlers in WordPress

Back while helping work on WordPress 3.0 and all the changes that were involved in adding better support for custom post types, I saw a need for improving the registration of meta-boxes. Specifically, making it so custom meta handlers could be supportable like the built in ones such as the editor, excerpt, and thumbnail meta-boxes. [...]

Filed in Development, Programming, WordPress

September 9th, 2010

Tools of the Trade: Front-End Developer

Here’s a quick rundown of some of the tools I use to turn a new project’s design into a shiny, new website. The goal in every case is to have the final product (website) mirror the original design… for every user. ← That’s the tricky part. I like to think of my role as the [...]

Filed in Development, Voce Platform Services

August 6th, 2010

4 Things WordPress Should Borrow From Drupal

I made the switch to WordPress from Drupal seven months ago and I don’t ever think I’ll go back. WordPress’ speed of development, template tags and elegant admin user interface would be to hard to give up. But as I have worked more with WordPress I’ve found there are some features from Drupal that would [...]

Filed in Development, Usability, Voce Platform Services, WordPress

July 13th, 2010

Extending WordPress search with Sphinx (Part II)

Once theSphinx server is setup, we can begin with WordPress integration. The first thing we need to do capture the override the query_vars in WP_Query before it runs it’s own search. We’ll do this by running an action on ‘parse_query’ with the code below. function my_parse_query(&$wp_query) {   if($wp_query->is_search && class_exists(’SphinxClient’)) {     $results [...]

Filed in Development, Programming, Search, WordPress

July 12th, 2010

Extending WordPress search with Sphinx (Part I)

Sphinx is a powerful open source SQL full-text search engine. It runs as a single process in the background, and can be connected to over a specified IP and port. It supports weighted ranking of search results, different search matching modes (all words in the query, any words in the query, exact phrase), and filtering [...]

Filed in Development, Programming, Search, WordPress

July 6th, 2010

Web Typography: 3 Choices

For all of the advancements in web design and development, one problem has remained: the inability to easily incorporate real fonts into websites. It’s frustrating for designers because they want to make a visually inspiring site and don’t want to be shackled by the ‘web-friendly’ fonts such as Arial, Verdana, Times New Roman, Courier, Comic [...]

Filed in CSS, Design, Development, WordPress

June 2nd, 2010

Adding Editable Content Areas to your WordPress Theme

Sometimes when creating a website, there is a need for small blocks of content to appear in certain areas of the page. This may be a small feature panel on the home page or just a notification in the sidebar or header. Before WordPress 3.0, there were a couple of ways of doing this. The [...]

Filed in Development, WordPress

June 8th, 2009

Building a Better WordPress Live Blog with P2

Today is the kick-off of WWDC and specifically the keynote (1p.m. eastern) where we learn about the next device we’ll be buying. To keep up we’ll be following Gizmodo’s Live Blog of the event for several reasons: Brian Lam and his team over at Gizmodo are the best damn live-bloggers out there. They’ll post it [...]

Filed in Development, WordPress