jQuery: television channel effect

Here is another jQuery demo of mine which reproduces some typical effects of a TV channel, such as statics, loading, presentation and interactive menu. Feel free to use my code if you like it. This demo makes an extensive use of jQuery's deferred objects for chaining animations. Enjoy!

Object-oriented programming with Wordpress: utopia?

A long debate among Wordpress developers is essentially about the possibility of using truly object-oriented code in their themes and plugins by exploiting the latest features of PHP 5. Most developers who don't are accustomed to OOP in PHP think that OOP in Wordpress is rather difficult to accomplish and, in a certain sense, even counterproductive. But if you take a closer look at the inner structure of the Wordpress core, you'll surely notice the abundance of classes and most of the OOP features we're all used to see in other frameworks. This post is written in the hope of stimulating a renewed interest in OOP with Wordpress.

Inserting jQuery in an application's namespace

The global jQuery's function noConflict() is useful not only to avoid conflicts with other libraries using the $ alias, but also to include jQuery in our application's namespace by storing it in a property. Let's see how.

jQuery: attaching events to objects

The jQuery's event handling goes far beyond the simple attaching events to HTML elements and allows us to attach events to JavaScript objects. In fact, the $() wrapper works also on objects, thus providing a quick and simple access to object's properties and methods when combined with the bind() method. Let's see the details.

WPUtils: a jQuery utility for Wordpress

WPUtils (now in its first version) is a jQuery utility to hook into a Wordpress site. I've created this utility to help developers with attaching actions to specific Wordpress sections. For that reason, WPUtils features several helper functions that check if we're on a specific Wordpress page. Let's see the details.

CSS: best and bad practices in Wordpress theme development

One of my daily tasks as a developer is to modify the default styles which come along with a new Wordpress theme chosen by our clients. I have to say that this task is made harder and harder by some obtuse practices followed by many theme developers when it comes to CSS. I don't want to be rude because I love your work, but you should consider the fact that your styles may be changed by another developer or user, so you should code your CSS accordingly. Here are some of these bad practices that make me feel frustrated.

jQuery: Wordpress dynamic menu

Yesterday evening I found a nice Wordpress theme with an interesting, cursor-driven effect on the main menu made with CSS. I decided to recreate it with the aid of jQuery in order to get the maximum benefit from its effects. Let's see the details.

jQuery: deferred objects and sequential animations

With deferred objects and the powerful pipe() method we can chain animations and run them sequentially and serially. jQuery allows us to do so through the Deferred object's syntax. Let's see the details.

jQuery: cover flow effect

I was actually inspired by the cover flow effect found among the various folder options of Mac OS X to create this demo. Let's see the details.

CSS: create social network icons

CSS3 allows us to control almost every aspect of the visual layout of an element: properties such as border-radius, text-shadow, opacity combined with gradients and web fonts gives us a first-class control over elements. We can combine all these features to create the icons of social network. Look ma, no images!

jQuery: why an empty text field cannot be null

There's a widespread tendency to consider the value property of a text field as an attribute instead of a simple property whose value is a string. Such property cannot have a primitive null value because the DOM specifications allow only nodes to have such a value. jQuery wraps the value property with its method val() and it uses the same principles. Let's see why an empty value of a text field cannot be null.

jQuery: check if an attribute exists

jQuery doesn't provide a method similar to hasAttribute() to determine whether a given attribute exists in the DOM. However, we can use the attr() method for this task. In fact, this method returns a boolean value when used with conditional statements.

jQuery: table pagination

Paginating a table with jQuery requires only the use of a repeated CSS class used as placeholder for our table rows. Most of all, tables must be properly marked up using thead and tbody. Otherwise, selecting rows becomes quite troublesome. Let's see the details.

jQuery: deferred objects and animations

The jQuery's deferred objects, introduced in jQuery 1.5, allow us to concatenate synchronous and asynchronous actions in a chain of actions. They can be applied to animations in order to avoid nested functions, thus increasing code readability and maintainance.

jQuery: transforming and animating text

Today my smart father showed me an animation when all the letters of a word were scrambled together and wrapped within a container. Then the letters moved to the right, their container bent forward and the whole word started to appear in the correct order. An ideal challenge for jQuery!

JavaScript: parsing CSS selectors with regular expressions

CSS selectors fall into several categories. Each category can be actually parsed with JavaScript and regular expressions. In this post I will show you several useful regular expressions used to match CSS selectors taken from the CSSUtilities library.

Useful jQuery snippets

I'd like to present here some useful jQuery snippets which I use for my daily work with this library. I hope you find them useful.