jQuery: curtain effect on slideshows

jQuery Easing is a fantastic plugin, surely one of my favorites. Today I've created a nice curtain effect on a jQuery slideshow that I'd like to share with you. Let's see the details.

WordPress is for blogging: any other use is a costly mistake

I don't understand why most web agencies tend to use WordPress as a catch-all for every project they work on. In short, WordPress is a CMS designed to manage blogs or blog-like web sites. WordPress was not designed to manage e-commerce sites, communities or even newsletter or file downloads. The more the task diverges from the original design, the more it's likely that your project will fail or, if you're lucky and patient, need continuous assistance for bug fixing, maintenance and plugin customization. You'll probably end up with a disappointed and angry client and a significant increase of your budget costs. You don't deserve this.

WordPress: Timthumb vulnerability fix

If you're viewing the above screenshot on your site with Chrome, your site has been compromised by the Timthumb vulnerability. The best thing you can do is to follow the instructions provided below.

jQuery: Observer Pattern on slideshows

I've just finished to work on an interesting jQuery/WordPress project (you can find it here) where I had to build an interactive slideshow very similar to a classic jQuery slot machine in its inner functioning. The only problem was to keep track of the visibility of the slides, that is, being sure that the current slide was visible. This is a fantastic use case for the Observer Pattern.

CSS generated content tutorial

In this article I'll discuss some possible uses of generated content. Generated content is a powerful feature of CSS. Before going on, I'd like to explain what generated content is not.

Image slideshow with jQuery UI effects

jQuery UI come bundled with an outstanding set of visual effects. In this article I'll show you how to apply such effects to a jQuery image slideshow. As you will see, results won't disappoint you.

WordPress: the_post() in depth

the_post(), as a matter of fact, is the most used WordPress function in any theme but also almost unknown to the masses. We all know that this function initializes The Loop, but we actually don't know what kind of internal routines it uses. Let's see them together.

CSS reset considered evil

CSS resets are wrongly considered as a necessary part of any CSS template. After fixing a long series of WordPress themes that relied massively on this feature, I have to say that CSS resets are evil. More precisely, they're overused even when they're not necessary. Let me put it in this way: are we absolutely sure that all HTML elements must be reset? Are we absolutely sure that, in any circumstances and templates, we have to normalize the default rendering of all elements? Are we absolutely sure that all the default styles used by browsers on all elements need to be reduced to a lowest common denominator? Or, more properly, should we start rethinking the whole process behind normalization and realize that perhaps some default styles might be useful in some cases?

Alternatives to CSS hacks

The so-called "CSS hacks" are particular patterns used by authors to deliver style rules only to one browser or to prevent a browser from reading certain rules that might cause rendering problems. These patterns may rely on parsing bugs, wrong DOM implementations or syntactical constructs supported only by the targeted browser. Hacks may validate or not. In this article I'll review the most popular hacks used by authors, explaining why such patterns should be avoided and how one can actually target a browser by deploying other techniques.

WordPress: compact posts

WordPress posts are usually displayed as full posts. Now let's say that we want to display them in a compact way, e.g. the first post in full followed by an unordered list of posts which also feature a post thumbnail. Let's see the details.

WordPress: how the eShop plugin works

The most interesting working experience had so far with WordPress is surely the radical changes I had to make to the eShop plugin. A client wanted that instead of processing orders the plugin should send an e-mail with a pre-order receipt. Further, the shopping cart must be modified so that it can accept a discounted value for each item. Said that, let's see how eShop works.

jQuery: slot machine slideshow

I'm currently working on a complex WordPress slideshow and in the meantime I'm also doing some preparatory testing. As a result, I've created a really simple jQuery slideshow that emulates the basic behavior of a slot machine thanks to the jQuery's Easing plugin. Let's see the details.

CSS: a web standard in context

In this article I'll introduce Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) through a brief historical overview on its origin and some remarks about standards and their usage. I'll explain what is CSS, why it's been created, why we should know CSS and, overall, why CSS can be regarded as the present and the future of web documents.

CSS counters tutorial

Counters are a powerful feature of generated content. Through counters we can add an automatic numbering to the elements of a web document. Thanks to the :before and :after pseudo-elements, the numbering will appear before or after the actual content of an element, respectively. In this article I'll explain how to use counters by providing some useful examples.

jQuery: serialize a form as a JSON object

If you're using AJAX with a form and you want to pass a JSON object to one of the jQuery's AJAX methods used to process the request, you will probably wonder how this could be done. Basically, you should convert your form values to a plain array, loop through all the items in the array and finally return a plain object literal. Let's see the details.

CSS: better styling for code blocks

In this article I'll explain how to use CSS for styling code blocks. Code blocks are generally formatted by using the pre element. Roger Johansson has proposed another way to accomplish this task and I'll follow his example with further improvements.

WordPress: use a post title as a thumbnail overlay

We can easily create the effect of post titles used as overlays over post thumbnails by combining a little WordPress coding and some CSS techniques. Let's see the details.