Author: Yelena Shabrova

Style Tiles

Samantha Warren came up with a client-friendly way to present the look and feel of a future website that is less puzzling than a mood board and not as precise as a comp image. This is something I definitely want to try for the next project.

Ethan Marcotte refers to static comps during the responsive design process as a “catalog of assumptions” Style Tiles are the perfect complement to that catalog, whether it be in place of comps or to reinforce visual themes. Style Tiles don’t imply dimensions nor device; only that the design will be digital.

Samantha Warren
styletil.es

Want to know more? Read Samantha’s article about Style Tiles on A List Apart.

Removing Stumbling Blocks In Mobile Forms

Robert Brauer discusses tripping hazards that delay so many users from filling out forms on a portable device. He talks about design strategies that help \facilitate a safe and quick stroll through forms for mobile users. The goal is to allow people to navigate through the form, achieving the quickest possible success with the least necessary effort.

17 Must Have Premium eCommerce WordPress Plugins

This post discusses WordPress plugins that let you perform the following tasks:
Show products via slider.
Integrate Cart to a theme.
Embed Amazon style Wish-list.
Display random products.
Add credit card payment gateway to your website.
Add earnings graph.
Embed PayPal.
MailChimp integrated Subscribe checkbox.
Automatic postage calculation
Add donation system.
And much more…

Responsive text

Some websites now contain ‘responsive images’. These scale (or crop) depending upon your screen’s viewing area, so the image sizes remain appropriate whether you’re looking at the website on a mobile phone, or on a huge flat screen monitor.

This is an example of responsive text. The amount of textual detail scales relative to your screen size.

The effect is achieved using simple HTML class names and CSS media queries which show or hide the content depending upon the current screen width.

Creating a custom WordPress theme options page | Webdesigner Depot

Whether you’re developing WordPress themes for yourself, for a client, or to sell commercially, having the ability to customize aspects of your theme via the WordPress control panel makes your theme infinitely flexible and many times more versatile and appealing.
The methods discussed here will only apply to WordPress 2.8 or above. There are a number of other tutorials available if you’re using an older version of WordPress

The WPMU 100 – The Top WordPress Related Blogs On The Internet

The WPMU 100 – The Top WordPress Related Blogs On The Internet
http://wpmu.org/the-wpmu-100-the-top-wordpress-related-blogs-on-the-internet/
February 7, 2012 | By Tom Ewer
The 100 published by WPMU is not intended to represent the views or opinions of WPMU.org. The ranking algorithm is based upon publicly available data and is completely objective.

Use Linux Cron to Trigger WordPress Cron Scheduler

Ever ran into a situation where your scheduled post does not publish or a scheduled backup does not happen in time? Makes you want to talk to the host, does not it? But before you do so, make sure that your problem site does not suffer from extremely low traffic. If there are just a handful of visitors coming to your site daily, this is the root of the problem. WordPRess and its plugins schedule tasks with a pseudo-cron service that does not work the same way as the real cron on Linux. WordPress needs someone to actually visit the web site to trigger a cron; Linux cron always run on time no matter what.

The problem got really annoying when I worked on a staging server with next to no traffic but still need regular backups. For a while I resorted to backing up files and databases manually, and it was far from ideal.

Luckily, I came across a great solution to the WordPress cron problem posted by Ryann on the Pogidude Studio blog. All you have to do is create a real cron job that simulates a visitor thus triggering the WordPress cron process. Ryann’s example is for cPanel but will work for any type of a control panel as long as your host allows you create cron jobs. WordPress’ own cron process will need to be disabled so it does not trigger itself with real visitors.