Category: Development

CSS Specificity: What You May Not Have Known

Most front-end developers glaze over at the mention of the word. However, having a strong grasp of how CSS Specificity works is key to minimizing tedious debugging. Specificity tells the browser what rules to apply to an element, and if there is a...

Create Simple Inline Media Queries with include-media

Lately, I’ve been thinking that our current method of using inline media queries throughout our Sass partials has not been flexible enough for the projects we’ve been building. While it was simple and allowed for easy implementation, I think it is time...

BuddyPress: The Lowdown on Loop Filtering

BuddyPress has default components that add extra social functionality to a WordPress install. Sometimes you will want to customize what each component displays and that is done through loop filtering. Continue reading if you want to learn more about customizing the output of...

A Day in the Life of a WebDevStudios Developer

A couple weeks ago, one of @WebDevStudios‘ followers on Twitter sent us this: @webdevstudios Hi! QuikQues: what's a typical day like for a WebDev? I want to compare to a IT Support person. Thanks!! — Tony Obfenda (@TonyObfenda) April 30, 2015 That...

Get a Plugin Kickstart with Yeoman & generator-plugin-wp!

Getting started on a new project is always exciting, but it often includes a lot of repetitive work, such as setting up the basics of your code that you need for any plugin, or downloading a boilerplate and filling in your project’s details. Yeoman...

Use Git to Test & Update Your Plugins for WordPress 4.2

So, you get an email like this one every time WordPress publishes a new release. 4.2 just went out, so I got this email a few days ago. I’m not a serious plugin developer like most out there. They aren’t premium plugins;...

Brackets.io, How I Love Thee

Let me count the ways… I have been having a great time testing Brackets.io, the open source text editor by Adobe. Ever since switching from Espresso to Sublime Text, I have missed many of the preview features in Espresso…and then along comes Brackets.

Making Developer-Friendly Themes and Plugins

As every newbie knows, when you’re starting out it’s much easier to download or purchase a theme or plugin than to make your own. However, as you grow into WordPress, you find these ‘commercial’ themes/plugins cumbersome to edit or extend. In this...

The Fundamentals of Writing Clean Code

Writing “clean” code is something we talk about a lot in software development. Developing for the web is no different in the pursuit of code that is “clean” than any other type of programming. It’s also something that you could write a book...