Every so often I stop work and stick my head above the parapet and see what the rest of the Web Developer community is doing, and every time I do I’m amazed by some of the ideas and applications that are being built. They aren’t always useful but who cares; the technology is available so why not try it and push the boundaries a little.
Want to see what samples were used in the new Girl Talk album?
The first application I really like is Mashupbreakdown by developer Benjamin Rahn. Mashupbreakdown is a visual representation of the samples used in the latest album by Girl Talk called “All Day”. That in itself is very cool, but where does it get the sample information from? Well that’s the really clever part; it gets it from Wikipedia.
Wikipedia has a page for the “All Day” album that contains all the sample information used in each track. Mashupbreakdown scrapes this page and and visualises it. Since Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, if you spot a mistake / new sample you can easily update the page information and the application with change accordingly!
At the moment it only shows one album but there’s no reason the application can’t be adapted to handle more albums. Benjamin has a post on his blog appealing for more breakdowns so I’ll be checking back with the site now and then to see if any other breakdowns have appeared. Great work Benjamin.
When chemistry and HTML combine you get the periodic table of HTML elements!
The second application that really caught by eye is the Periodic Table of Elements by developer Josh Duck. When I find a site I like, I immediately do a “view source” (don’t all Web Develepers?) to see how it’s been built. The Periodic Table of Elements takes any URL you pass it and tells you what HTML elements were used on the page. It’s basically a prettified / simplified version of view source! The application may not be that useful but kudos to Josh for taking the time to build it. Definitely one of those ideas that I wish I’d thought of!
Over the past couple of days I decided to start using the SVN post-commit hook for deploying sites to my staging servers. Once you get it working it will save you a massive amount of time. Make changes on your local server, then, when you’re ready, commit your changes to the repository and the server will auto-update the staging site. Nice! For instructions on how to set this up on your Dreamhost server take a look here.
Unfortunately a slight over-site on my part didn’t make deployment easy. I followed the instructions to the letter (more than once!) but received the same error on commit:
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| post-commit hook failed (exit code 255) with no output. |
At first I thought this was a permissions issue but that turned out not to be the case. The solution in the end was because I was saving the do_update.cgi script in Windows format in Notepad++! Doh! Windows and UNIX new lines just don’t mix!
To save a file in UNIX compatibility mode in Notepad++ click “Edit” then “EOL Conversion”. Make sure UNIX Format is greyed out (why greyed out? no idea) when you save your CGI script. Upload to the server and you’re done. Won’t be forgetting to do that again any time soon!
Every new iteration of WordPress (version 3.0.1 at the time of writing) brings a host of new features and bug fixes. One feature that I completely missed in 3.0 was the new custom header functionality. Before 3.0 it would be a case of hacking together your own solution using custom fields or using a separate plug-in. Thankfully the WordPress team have added this functionality directly to the core.
It just so happens that I’ve had a request for a customisable header image on an future project, so decided to have a play and see how difficult it is to implement. Well it isn’t difficult at all, very simple in fact.
First you will need to edit your functions.php located in your theme directory. Go ahead and create one if it isn’t in the directory. Now copy and paste the code below into the file. I’ve commented the code but it’s all quite self explanatory. Change the height and width of the image and change the directories where needed.
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| <?php
//Check see if the customisetheme_setup exists
if ( !function_exists('customisetheme_setup') ):
//Any theme customisations contained in this function
function customisetheme_setup() {
//Define default header image
define( 'HEADER_IMAGE', '%s/header/default.jpg' );
//Define the width and height of our header image
define( 'HEADER_IMAGE_WIDTH', apply_filters( 'customisetheme_header_image_width', 960 ) );
define( 'HEADER_IMAGE_HEIGHT', apply_filters( 'customisetheme_header_image_height', 220 ) );
//Turn off text inside the header image
define( 'NO_HEADER_TEXT', true );
//Don't forget this, it adds the functionality to the admin menu
add_custom_image_header( '', 'customisetheme_admin_header_style' );
//Set some custom header images, add as many as you like
//%s is a placeholder for your theme directory
$customHeaders = array (
//Image 1
'perfectbeach' => array (
'url' => '%s/header/default.jpg',
'thumbnail_url' => '%s/header/thumbnails/pb-thumbnail.jpg',
'description' => __( 'Perfect Beach', 'customisetheme' )
),
//Image 2
'tiger' => array (
'url' => '%s/header/tiger.jpg',
'thumbnail_url' => '%s/header/thumbnails/tiger-thumbnail.jpg',
'description' => __( 'Tiger', 'customisetheme' )
),
//Image 3
'lunar' => array (
'url' => '%s/header/lunar.jpg',
'thumbnail_url' => '%s/header/thumbnails/lunar-thumbnail.jpg',
'description' => __( 'Lunar', 'customisetheme' )
)
);
//Register the images with Wordpress
register_default_headers($customHeaders);
}
endif;
if ( ! function_exists( 'customisetheme_admin_header_style' ) ) :
//Function fired and inline styles added to the admin panel
//Customise as required
function customisetheme_admin_header_style() {
?>
<style type="text/css">
#wpbody-content #headimg {
height: <?php echo HEADER_IMAGE_HEIGHT; ?>px;
width: <?php echo HEADER_IMAGE_WIDTH; ?>px;
border: 1px solid #333;
}
</style>
<?php
}
endif;
//Execute our custom theme functionality
add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'customisetheme_setup' );
?> |
By adding the code above you will now see a new option under “Appearance” in the admin panel called “Header”. From there you should be able to see all the images and options we just set in the functions.php file. The only thing left to do now is add the header image to the theme.
Where you place the following code will be depend on your theme setup; I’ve decided to place it in the header.php file as I want the image to appear on every page. You may only want the image to appear on specific templates e.g. pages, archive, category (you could also use WordPress conditional tags to do this).
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| <div id="header">
<!-- other header code here.... -->
<!-- This line adds the header to the theme -->
<img id="headerimg" src="<?php header_image(); ?>" width="<?php echo HEADER_IMAGE_WIDTH; ?>" height="<?php echo HEADER_IMAGE_HEIGHT; ?>" alt="Header image alt text" />
</div> |
And there you have it, one header image that you can customise via the WordPress admin panel. An ID is attached to the image for CSS styling where needed.
The example above is quite a simplified version of the header image functionality. It is possible to place text over the image and even have a different image per blog post by using the custom thumbnail functionality, but these are beyond the scope of this blog post. Copy & paste and enjoy!
The number of times I’ve built a website based on a CMS only to have the client utter the words “Oh I’m confused, it’d be so much quicker if you made the changes”. Right, so the CMS was a bit of a waste of time then! But fingers crossed thanks to Aloha Editor that may be a thing of the past. Often the problem clients have is actually finding the content that needs to be edited in the CMS; Aloha to the rescue!
What Aloha actually does is make the content editable right on the page; no need to jump into the CMS, find the page, make the changes then preview the result. Just click on the text you wish to edit and type away. Done! It’s hard to believe it actually works until you try it. Why not give it a go on their demo page. It incorporates a few HTML5 technologies which could cause issues with older IE versions, but the demo page seems to work (with a few quirks).
Quickly and easily edit the demo webpage.
The core has been written to be very small and streamlined, with additional functionality being added by the way of user contributed plug-ins. There’s already an extensive API for developers to play with so I’m sure many of the missing features will be plugged very soon.
There are alternatives about such as TinyMCE and CKEditor, but they’re integrated directly into a CMS’ administration pages rather than as an inline editor like Aloha. Now before you get too excited there are a few cons:
- It isn’t as simple as just dropping the scripts into a page, it needs to be integrated into a backend system for the changes to be saved.
- Still in early development so could be quite buggy.
- Doesn’t work with Opera Browser at the moment but this is being worked on.
- Some features aren’t available yet, like image / media insertion. But I’m sure these will be developed as it matures.
So there are still a few issues to iron out but it all looks very promising! There were even murmurs on Twitter today about a WordPress plug-in and a Drupal v7 module (not 6 though I presume) in development. So it won’t be long before we’ll be able to try it out on a live site; hopefully it’s also simple enough for clients to use too!
So I finally pulled my finger out and took the HTML5 plunge over the past day or so; the Nooshu WordPress theme now has a sprinkling of HTML5. Mmmm I have that warm fuzzy feeling of completeness! In all honesty it’s been an easy way to learn about the new HTML5 specifications (although they aren’t complete and won’t become a W3C recommendation until 2022… no that isn’t a typo!).
HTML5 has added a host of new tags which have much more semantic meaning. So instead of using ‘divs’ to section off areas of your page layout, you can now use:
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| <!-- Some of the new HTML5 Tags -->
<header></header>
<footer></footer>
<article></article>
<section></section>
<nav></nav> |
It’s certainly a welcome addition to the modern web. My favourite part of HTML5 has to be the doctype (other than the canvas element):
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| <!-- No more -->
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<!-- Much better! -->
<!DOCTYPE html> |
Look how simple it is! No more copy / paste from a previous project for this doctype.
My main concern when converting the theme to HTML5 was how it would work in IE; as IE8 supports parts of HTML5 but IE6 and IE7 not at all. When IE comes across a tag it doesn’t recognise it just ignores it. Since the tags aren’t recognised you won’t be able to style your lovely new HTML5 template in IE6 & IE7. Lucky you can patch this missing functionality using JavaScript. Remy Sharp has created a script called html5shim, that adds the missing tags to IE. Just add the following code to your header and you will now be able to style your HTML5 tags:
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| <!--[if lt IE 9]>
<script src="http://html5shim.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js"></script>
<![endif]--> |
The script must be in the header and must fire before the DOM is created. The script simply creates all the new HTML5 elements using the document method ‘createElement’, you don’t even need to attach the created elements to the DOM! Now IE will recognise the tags and you can get on with your page styling. Yay!
Those who use WordPress 3.0 may have noticed that the default Kubric theme is no more and it’s been replaced with a new theme called twenty ten. The theme uses the HTML5 doctype but it doesn’t use any of the new tags. I guess because of the IE issues. Maybe this will be changed in future releases.
The Nooshu theme is still a work in progress, and I’ll modify areas as I learn more about the new HTML5 features. Here are a selection of links that I found incredibly useful while working on the theme:
- Dive into HTML5: Read through this article and you will be well on your way to learning HTML5. It delves into the history of HTML and progresses forward right up to implementing the new specifications.
- HTML5 Doctor: Looking for HTML5 related news or need some clarification of a new tag? Look no further than HTML5 Doctor. Lots of articles available for you to read and there’s even the option to ask a question if you don’t find the answers you are looking for.
- HTML 5 Outliner: So you’ve created your shiny new HTML5 template; why not check it with the outliner to see if it makes sense to a user / search engine.
- W3C Markup Validator: It’s been a while since I’ve used a validator since I have one built into Firefox, but the W3C validator was very handy for pointing out attributes and tags that are no longer supported in the specifications. It also gives you a quick benchmark to aim at.
If you have any other useful HTML5 tips and links let me know below.
