Yesterday I was working on the planning of a new site to be built with ExpressionEngine and was wondering about the best way to let editors link to other entries from within the body of an entry they’re creating or editing. ExpressionEngine doesn’t have this sort of functionality built into it by default so I asked on Twitter to find out if anyone knew of any add-ons that had been created that might do this.
Articles archive
Articles on areas relating to web design & development.
Redesigning ExpressionEngine sites
With ExpressionEngine you give your clients a lot of power and flexibility to update the content of their own site, but at some point in a site’s life there’s going to come a time when changes will be required that the site owner or his/her staff can’t do themselves via the control panel. Changes to a logo or other graphical elements of the site, adding new sections or functionality, giving the site a new ‘skin’ or theme, or completely rebuilding from the ground up will require a designer of developer to get involved.
Web design ‘pre-flight’ checklist
Over the years of being a freelance web designer, I’ve been developing my own processes for the business of designing websites. One of those processes has been compiling a list of tasks that need to be completed before launching a website, whether it be a new site or a redesign. This list is kept in a spreadsheet which I work through, ticking off each item after the client has given final sign off for the site to go live. I view it as my final quality control procedure and I usually find that the process will highlight a few of the ‘little things’ that I might have overlooked in general development. Usually nothing too major; more a case of ‘dotting all the Is and crossing all the Ts’.
Calling a Wordpress loop from inside a Wordpress loop
Recently I came across a sitution whereby I wanted to call a list of Wordpress posts from inside the body of another post, i.e., not coding it into a template, but embedding into the body of the post itself. Not a big drama
, I thought to myself: I already have the exec-php plugin installed to enable the execution of PHP from within Wordpress posts, so all I needed to do was call the Wordpress loop from the point inside the post where I wanted my list of links to appear, e.g.:
<ul>
<php $my_query = new WP_Query('cat=XX');
while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); ?>
<li><a href="<php the_permalink(); ?>"><php the_title(); ?></php></a></li>
</php><php endwhile; ?>
</php></ul>
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The @font-face snowball
Håkon Wium Lie’s article, CSS @ Ten: The Next Big Thing on A List Apart in August 2007 may have got the (snow)ball rolling, but it seems that it was the announcement of Typekit on May 27 this year which has prompted an avalanche of interest in web fonts. Or maybe I’ve just woken up to the issue since then and been taking more notice. But I seem to be adding a lot of font and type-related bookmarks lately and thought it would be worth sharing some of them.
Site updated to Microformats Value Class Pattern
It may only be a very small amendment, but I’ve just updated the HTML of this site to bring it in line with the new Microformats Value Class Pattern which has just been released as an alpha draft.
Removing unwanted fields from TinyMCE’s image and link popup windows
If you use TinyMCE in your Content Management System (CMS) projects, you no doubt also give clients the ability to add images and links to their content with TinyMCE’s Link and Image buttons. But by default, these popup windows come with a variety of fields into which unsuspecting clients can input values which will translate into unwanted code when delivered to the page.
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Fetching posts in Wordpress and ExpressionEngine with jQuery and AJAX
Recently I was asked by a client to do some customisation of a Wordpress site to enable a site visitor to load posts from a certain category into the same part of the page via AJAX. This could have been done in a couple of different ways – using AJAX as requested; or all the posts could’ve been printed to the page, with javascript then used to hide all but one and also used to navigate between them in some sort of hide/show, fading/sliding effect. I’ve done similar things like this before using jQuery, but there were two reasons why I didn’t go that route on this occasion:
- With javascript turned off, all the posts from the selected category would’ve been displayed on the page and as the design called for three short columns of text on the page, having one column much, much longer than the other two would really have looked wrong.
- The client specifically asked for AJAX to be used.
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Save the Net in Australia
I don’t normally write about current news topics on this site, but I thought the implications behind the Australian Federal government’s Cyber-saftey plan are serious enough to warrant a comment.
Which is better for search engines: plain text or alt attributes?
Which is better in links from the search engines’ point of view: plain text or images with an alt attribute that says the same thing? For example, is this:
<a href="">This is a link</a>
better than this?
<a href=""><img src="" alt="This is a link"/></a>
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