Archive for March, 2008

Codenamed "Brecker", is a milestone release with a tone of improvements.

They have totally revamped the Admin area. It looks much slicker now and the publishing process feels much more pleasant, it wasn't even bad before! But it has improved ten-folds with more Web 2.0 goodness.

I'm especially excited about the new stuff they have added. With the Media library you can now create a gallery in any post/page using the new Shortcode API. Visitors can comment on your photos. The gallery display is a bit bland though, but I think they did this on purpose as gallery display is something the Template should handle. I can see many Lightbox2 for WordPress plugins popping up very soon!

WordPress is fast becoming a more viable CMS solution in general due to the introduction of the Media Library and a better publishing interface. The Shortcode API also gives developers ability to directly inject PHP code into content areas allowing for more sophisticated displays and embedded widget add-ons.

I haven't talked about this before, but the Portfolio area on this site is actually a WordPress plugin. It's a pain to manage as it uses XML for data storage and XSL to transform the data into what you see. When I get some time I hope to build a more robust Portfolio plugin leveraging WordPress' new features so I no longer have to mess around with XML, FTP and image resizing!

You can read more about the release at Wordpress.org

What is CSS diagnostics? It's a method of applying styles to elements in your markup to catch standards compliance issues. A way of ensuring you don't leave any serious accessibility holes and a visual deterrent for web authors editing pages with diagnostics switched on.

Here are some resources I found useful in understanding the practicality of this pioneering concept:

• Diagnostic styling
• CSS Tools: Diagnostic CSS
• Helping your client maintain markup quality
• Find depreciated elements using CSS

The only problem with CSS diagnostics is that it relies on the CSS capabilities of a browser to find issues. So if your browser is less capable, meaning it doesn't understand the diagnostic styles, then it negates the idea totally. Mind you, we're at a point in CSS support whereby this is becoming less and less a problem but it is still a potential one.

Luckily CSS diagnostics isn't the be all and end all of diagnostics. We have the king of diagnostics — Firebug, Web Inspector for Safari and more recently the much improved IE8 Developer Toolbar. And if you're looking for a cross-browser solution there's always the brilliant XRAY. Oh, how spoilt we all are!

As a generalist I usually have to open multiple applications just to get work done; Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks/Image Ready, VS2005 and all major browsers are but a few apps in my developer toolbox I use frequently. Having multiple desktop applications open at the same time makes ctrl-tabbing frustrating—killing productivity. Development tools are usually very memory intensive too, so the more you have open the slower your system gets.

I love the Eclipse platform and the way you could extend core functionality via plugins. For several months now I have been using the Apatana plugin for Eclipse which adds better support for CSS, (X)HTML, JavaScript and a few of the latest platforms such as Adobe AIR and iPhone.

Eclipse is platform independent as it's built on the Java Runtime environment. So theoretically if you have a team of developers with different OS taste you could even share project settings.

I'm currently running Eclipse IDE 3.3 with the following plugins:

• The Aptana plugin
• Aptana Radrails
• Subclipse
• Adobe Flex Builder
• PDT (PHP Development Tools)
• WST (Web Standard Tools)

I don't ctrl+tab as much now but Eclipse does get pretty sluggish at times, which could be a downer if you have a slow system.

Wow, Microsoft actually listened to the out pour of the developer community with regards to IE8's version targeting feature. IE8's Standards Mode will now be the default:

In light of the Interoperability Principles, as well as feedback from the community, we’re choosing differently. Now, IE8 will show pages requesting "Standards" mode in IE8’s Standards mode. Developers who want their pages shown using IE8’s “IE7 Standards mode” will need to request that explicitly.

I can't wait to bin those standalones!

Thank you Microsoft!