Tag: Web

With release of HTML 5.2 comes the dialog element. The dialog element has been around for a while now but was an experimental technology. Previously, if we wanted to build a modal or a dialog box of any sort, we needed to arrange our markup in a way where we have a backdrop, a close button, keep events trapped within the dialog, find a way to pass message out of the dialog... It was really complicated. The dialog element solves all the problems above and more. Heads up: I'm going to interchange between modal and dialog a lot. Quick comparison between bootstrap modal and the new dialog element <!-- Trigger the modal with a button --> <button type="button" class="btn btn-info btn-lg" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#myModal">Open Modal</button> <!-- Modal --> <d...

Lessons Learned While Developing WordPress PluginsLessons Learned While Developing WordPress Plugins Jakub Mikita 2018-05-24T13:30:28+02:00 2018-06-05T08:35:40+00:00 Every WordPress plugin developer struggles with tough problems and code that’s difficult to maintain. We spend late nights supporting our users and tear out our hair when an upgrade breaks our plugin. Let me show you how to make it easier. In this article, I’ll share my five years of experience developing WordPress plugins. The first plugin I wrote was a simple marketing plugin. It displayed a call to action (CTA) button with Google’s search phrase. Since then, I’ve written another 11 free plugins...

Ever wanted an accurate and reliable currency data that can be easily integrated into your business; be it CRM, ERP, accounting applications etc., built in any programming languages? Then say hello to currencylayer. In this article, I will show you how to use two of currencylayer’s services: live exchange rates and historical exchange rates. What is currencylayer? Currencylayer provides a reliable exchange rates and currency conversion for your business. It does these by providing an easy to integrate REST API with real-time and historical exchange rates for 168 world currencies and precious metals, delivered in universally usable and easily parseable JSON format, and compatible with any application. The universal real-time exchange rate data solution In addition to providing update to d...

Creating The Feature Queries Manager DevTools ExtensionCreating The Feature Queries Manager DevTools Extension Ire Aderinokun 2018-05-23T12:00:00+02:00 2018-06-05T08:35:40+00:00 Within the past couple of years, several game-changing CSS features have been rolled out to the major browsers. CSS Grid Layout, for example, went from 0 to 80% global support within the span of a few months, making it an incredibly useful and reliable tool in our arsenal. Even though the current support for a feature like CSS Grid Layout is relatively great, not all recent or current browsers support it. This means it’s very likely that you and I will currently be developing for a brow...

Express is one of the most popular Node.js frameworks out there. With about about 4+ million weekly downloads, Express has clearly made its mark in the world of Node.js and JavaScript. Koa is a newly popular web framework created by the team behind Express. It aims to be a modern and more minimalist version of Express. Some of its popular characteristics are its support and reliance on new JavaScript features such as generators and async/await. Koa also does not ship with any middleware though it can easily be extended using custom and existing plugins. In this article, we will examine the Koa framework and build a simple app to get familiar with its functionality and philosophy. Requirements To follow along with this tutorial, you would need the following installed: Node.js and NPM You al...

In a world where there are lots of different front-end frameworks, it's always hard to know which one to pick. Do I want to use the ever popular Angular? Or would diving into VueJS be beneficial to my scope of knowledge? Then we have ReactJS, a framework created by Facebook that seems to be taking the front-end framework world by storm. Using components, a virtual DOM, and JSX (that's for a different day!), React seems to cover it all, making it a powerful framework. The new Context API was recently introduced in React 16.3 as: A way to pass data through the component tree without having to pass props down manually at every level Sounds great! Let's dig in. Props and State In React, you have props and state. Two very important things to understand. Props, short for properties, is the d...

The Future Is Here! Augmented And Virtual Reality Icon SetThe Future Is Here! Augmented And Virtual Reality Icon Set The Smashing Editorial 2018-05-18T15:45:28+02:00 2018-06-05T08:35:40+00:00 What once sounded like science fiction has become a reality: All you need is to grab a VR headset or simply use your web browser and you suddenly find yourself in an entirely different place, a different time, or in the middle of your favorite game. Augmented and virtual reality are changing the way we experience and interact with the world around us — from the way we consume media and shop to the way we communicate and learn. Careless of whether you’re skeptical of this ...

Monthly Web Development Update 5/2018: Browser Performance, Iteration Zero, And Web AuthenticationMonthly Web Development Update 5/2018: Browser Performance, Iteration Zero, And Web Authentication Anselm Hannemann 2018-05-18T13:51:17+02:00 2018-06-05T11:39:14+00:00 As developers, we often talk about performance and request browsers to render things faster. But when they finally do, we demand even more performance. Alex Russel from the Chrome team now shared some thoughts on developers abusing browser performance and explains why websites are still slow even though browsers reinvented themselves with incredibly fast rendering engines. This is in line with an art...

One of the biggest distractions to any software team building web and mobile applications is the act of fixing up problems in previously written code. I'm willing to bet that your personal performance is measured on how much you build, innovative and deploy rather than how much error free code you release or how much technical debt you manage to scoop up on your way. So it always seems like a huge hassle or distraction to be having to go back and fix up bugs. Trying to diagnose and fix those problems is terribly inefficient too. Digging through log files, matching time and date stamps and asking non technical users over support tickets what happened and when cause a lot of frustration. But it doesn't have to be that way. Here we'll talk about how effective error monitoring in production me...

In a bid to lower the load times of a website, several techniques have been developed. One such technique is the lazy loading of images on the page. TL, DR As seen above, in this challenge we shall be lazy loading the images on the page. When the page is loaded, only the image placeholders which appear completely in the viewport are fetched. Hint: The code from this previous challenge could be helpful. The Challenge As a performance improvement technique, lazy loading involves the loading of only images whose placeholders come into view. Implement this lazy loading feature on the provided page containing quite funny animal memes. Placeholder images with smaller dimensions and size are stretched to fit the image size. A larger image is specified using the data-src attribute but isn...