archGFX » design

A List Apart | The Survey 2008: I Took It

adam — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:20:28 +0000

New Competencies for Theme Designers

adam — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:26:08 +0000

Wordpress 2.5's new image uploader solves the longstanding bug of using deprecated XHTML attributes to float images (align="left", etc.), rather than it being done in CSS. This is handled by applying classes to the image when it's inserted into the post, rather than via inline CSS. This is good, in terms of semantics, clean markup, and separating presentation from content. It's something that Scott suggested a while back, that I've been building into my themes and designs since.

This places the responsibility on theme authors to support the new classes. They are:

alignleft
alignright
aligncenter

I'm not convinced of the need for the align prefix, but it's great progress nonetheless. If your theme doesn't support those classes, here's the code you can insert at the end to handle them:



.alignleft,.left {
	float:left;
	margin: 0.5em;
}
.alignright,.right {
	float:right;
	margin: 0.5em;
}
.aligncenter, .center {
	display: block;
	text-align: center;
	margin: 0 auto;
}

Graded.

adam — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 03:22:31 +0000

I wouldn't say up-graded, but WordPress 2.5 is definitely different. I feel the need to punish myself thusly, since wordpress is now my day job, besides my 'hobby' of supporting the themes I've developed. I've been playing with the SVN upgrades for a month or so now, making sure my themes work. While I was working on Disconnected, my frustration came to a head:

In that screenshot, there is:

A list of things you can do right now
A list of statistics about your blog's history
A Message alerting you to upgrade your theme.

Guess which one's the alert (*hint: it's not the red one*) ? I was wrong: nearly all of Joen's comments about the wordpress admin are still valid. Among the other things that I am incredulous that a professional design firm chose: The mystery meat navigation above the post area:

Let's be honest: Even if I could tell what the hell those first two images were supposed to represent, years of using Word, WordPerfect, and OpenOffice have taught me to click on the tree when I want to insert a picture. Why is the same tree there, if it doesn't mean the same thing?

It's disheartening that the design of the dashboard goes on completely behind closed doors, when everyone keeps talking about how big the community has become. Yes, allowing people to comment directly on the photoshop mocks before coding them out might have yielded a lot of stupid comments, and possibly taken forever.

But listening to the valid comments might have prevented this. After all that money and effort, Fluency is here, taking over for AFD admin as my monochromatic dashboard of choice. And it does usability better than the default.

In Defence of my Absence

adam — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 14:30:08 +0000

I haven't been exactly forthcoming with posts this month. I haven't been lazy, though. Most of the free time I would normally devote to posting has been spent working on our office's new site. I think the results are well worth the effort, but click the screenshot to see for yourself:

My design was the last in a long line of remixes by everyone in the office. Basically, I poured the trendy web 2.0 juice on top of everyone else's designs Patrick H. did the really kick-ass blur in the flash menu. I find myself playing with that for far too long. Check it out, and tell us what you think. Now that the site's done, I'll be posting the promised "beginner" wordpress tutorials starting later this week.

Buckshot Ep. 8: Release

adam — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 02:11:03 +0000

The Moose is Loose! Joen has released Fauna 1.0 Final(ly) - I doubt Andy's response carries much weight for wordpress.com after a year and a half, but hey, fauna's still a great theme.
Also overdue, but less so: Movable Type OS has been released. WP-super-cache and MT-Burn plugins make it less different from WordPress than it used to be. It's still great to see competition. Especially in the area of database agnosticism.
This may be my last post of the year. As of Monday I'm off to spend the holidays in England and Belgium.
When I return, the WordPress-powered re-launch of Blueprint's website should be live. It's looking pretty hot, but there's still a lot of work left. Eric and I will be writing resources to help clients understand what they can do with their WordPress sites in the blog, and they should be pretty useful to anyone just starting out with WordPress.

archGFX » design

A List Apart | The Survey 2008: I Took It

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New Competencies for Theme Designers

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Graded.

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In Defence of my Absence

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Buckshot Ep. 8: Release

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