Development
How to Clean SVGs in bulk
in Development
Oftentimes, we need to use specific icon sets from a design for a site rebuild. SVGs are often the best way to display these on the frontend because they’re more performant, more flexible and much easier to work with than plain images. However, the icons that get exported from Zeplin/Sketch/whatever have a lot of junk […]
Read MoreThe Gotchas of `position: sticky`
in Development
position: sticky is an excellent newer CSS property for working with designs where an element needs to stick to point a page as a user scrolls down. This allows us to replace large amounts of legacy JS and bring styling of sticky elements back into CSS. However, position: sticky has a lot of gotchas and they’re […]
Read MoreHot-Reloading using Webpack with PHP File Changes
in Development
We use Webpack at Human Made to power our frontend JS and SCSS compilation and refreshing. Webpack is a powerful tool, but there’s always been an important piece missing on our local builds when working on monolithic WP themes: refreshing PHP files when they are modified. There is a plethora of Webpack plugins for handling […]
Read MoreSimplifying Overly-Nested Code
in Development
While working at Human Made on enterprise codebases, we get to see a lot of legacy code and review code from developers a wide variety of skill levels. This lets us see quite a few interesting and anti-patterns and one of the most common patterns that I see cropping up across projects and developers is […]
Read MoreTest Content Generator
in Development
Testing is one of my favorite parts of building a website. The in-depth, detail work involved in quality testing is something that I’m really drawn to and enjoy building tools for. When testing, content is an integral part of making sure that there are no visual bugs or ticks on the website – however, spinning up […]
Read MoreA More Perfect WordPress
in Development
Imagine your dream, perfect, developer-focussed version of WordPress. What does it look like? — Ryan McCue ⍨ (@rmccue) March 17, 2016 Ryan McCue pushed up a great monologue/question today on what would make WordPress more enjoyable to work with from a developer perspective. I’ve had several thoughts on this topic and figured the best way to share […]
Read MorePerformance: A Case Study
in Development
I’m going to start writing sister posts to talks that I give to make it easier to reference the information. This post is attached to a talk I gave last year at the Fort Collins WordPress Meetup. You can find the presentation slides here. Why bother with performance? Performance is a crucial piece of development […]
Read MoreNew Design – Simplicity
in Development
I redesigned my blog this weekend with a focus on the text and photos – nothing else. I quickly found the last design to be incredibly restrictive when it came to any kind of custom layouts or reading more than a paragraph. Poor typography, narrow view for content, and the lack of contrast added up […]
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Just Stop.
in Development
There comes a time in some projects where you have to just stop. In the last several months we had to do this with one of our projects. It was built about 8 months ago on a tight deadline with loose parameters from the client and had a LOT of complex content and integrations built […]
Read MoreWant to Make More Money? Refactor All the Things
in Development
I recently went refactoring on one of the core pieces of our workflow at OTM. We’ve had a mu-plugin that handles everything from cleaning up the admin section to creating CPTs to setting up the initial settings on a site and installing plugins. It is (was) a handy piece of software that automated a lot of […]
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