Toby's Log page 93

Responsive Behavior

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Styles (ie CSS) are the primary focus when it comes to making a site responsive, but the behavior (ie JavaScript) must also be able to react differently to different circumstances. A site might have a horizontal navigation with drop-down menus for wider viewports, but a simple vertical slide open and closed navigation for narrow viewports. The site must not only be able to change the styles that make those menus look right but also the script that drives the behavior. Some behavior might even need to manipulate that DOM to function properly, such as sliding banners with inserted navigation. The DOM will need to be changed one way for certain viewport sizes and those changes reverted, and possibly other changes made, when switching to different viewport sizes.

One might contend that most viewers won’t be switching their viewport dimensions, but window resizing does happen, text can be resized (for ’em’ breakpoints), and mobile devices can be rotated. The site should not break when this happens. Also, even without changes, the correct behavior must be run.

For dealing with this, I have created a ResponsiveHandler class that listens for resizing of the window and fires an event when changing breakpoints. For each behavior that needs it, I listen for this event and run the appropriate construction and destruction depending on what the new and old breakpoints are/were. Behaviors can also simply use the class to determine which breakpoint the site is currently in and act accordingly.

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WPThemeHelper, my helper for WordPress themes

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In remaking my website using WordPress, I’ve been working on a base theme that I can use for other sites. I decided to take some of my experience from the Symfony world, such as organizing functionality into namespaced classes, grouped into “bundles” of functionality that can be (somewhat) independently installed as needed depending on the project. I already mentioned the PHP-BufferManager I’m using in a previous post. I’ve also created a more specific to WordPress project with more varied functionality, a theme helper called WPThemeHelper.

The theme helper has several classes to help make theme development cleaner and perhaps a bit easier. The readme on github has more details, but some of the more important ones are:

  • SettingHelper: Allows setting of WordPress settings with a map (associative array). It calls the appropriate WordPress function at the appropriate time in WordPress’s initialization cycle. Helps clean up the ‘functions.php’ file and makes remembering what functions to call for various theme settings easier.
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PHP Output Buffer Manager

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With rebuilding my website with WordPress, I have made progress on the WordPress starter theme I’ve been working on. One thing I used for it was PHP’s output buffering to control output and allow me to define “blocks” of content, then render them at a later point in their proper location. To this end, I created some helper methods to manage this for me and allow easy creating of named buffers. I got the idea for this from the slots of Symfony’s PHP templating engine.

I have since broken this out of my WordPress theme helper classes into its own class and created a github repo, PHP-BufferManager to allow its use for generic purposes. This is a very simple repo and class. The most common way to use it would be to use $instance->start('name'); to start a buffer named ‘name’ and $instance->end(); to end it, then $instance->get('name'); at a later point to get the string value of the buffer for output or other purposes. A simple example:

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My new resumé site

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Well, I finally did it. After several years of effort, I finally released a new version of my CV / resumé site. How did I accomplish such a difficult task? Let me tell you, it was not easy. There was the desire to accomplish perfection that I did not have enough time for in my day job, to make everything organized and set up in the best possible way, that I might be able to draw from for other sites. There was the want to learn new things that I don’t use at work that might be useful or at least give me ideas and be important to know for my career in general. And, of course, there was the fatigue from doing very similar work for long periods of time at my actual job, and working on some of the more general use projects I work on on github.

I spent countless hours reading about different best practices and methods. I researched and tried several different frameworks / CMSs. I built and rebuilt my site numerous times in different ways. I played with different design, development, and content ideas, and was not entirely satisfied that any was the best.

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CSS: Position absolute with auto values

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I have been using ‘position: absolute’ for a long time for a lot of things, such as drop down menus, pop ups, decorations, and things that need animating, yet I never realized what using ‘auto’ for one of the coordinates (eg ‘left’ or ‘top’) meant and how useful this could be. I had thought it was the same as ‘0’, but it simply means (in all browsers I test in, including IE 7) that the element will be where it was for that coordinate as if it were statically positioned. This is very simple, but very useful in certain circumstances and probably would’ve saved me a lot of work in the past. I have spent a lot of time getting things positioned properly below items when both are variable height or below fixed height items when I need the positioning parent to be a parent container so that other attributes (such as width and left) can be based on that container.

As an example of where this could be useful, I was recently working on something similar to the grid with slide down details on Zoraab (I’m linking to this because the one I worked on is not live yet and we used it as an example for ideas). It has a grid of items with a variable number of columns. The details slide down below their item when the item is clicked, but they are the full width of the entire grid. I spent some time setting up JavaScript to calculate the ‘top’ the item needed to be at to be below it’s containing item while using the entire grid as a positioning parent so I could have the details be at the left of the grid and 100% of its width. It worked fine, except when switching from one item to another that is below it. Then the top would be off (because it was calculated when the other item was open) and the item would be overlapping items below it. I was going to spend more time working on a JavaScript fix, but then I discovered how the ‘auto’ value works (Zoraab uses it, should’ve looked at that earlier). With it, I still get the ‘left’ and ‘width’ from the grid container, but the top is right where it is in the markup, below the clickable part of the item.

tmclasses: my javascript class library

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I’ve decided to take my JavaScript class system out of my more general JavaScript library, tmlib. It can now be found in my js-tmclasses repository. I felt it needed to be separated to make it easier to work on without the clutter of all of the other functionality in tmlib. It also will be easier for others to make use of, not being buried among a bunch of other junk and not having all of that junk in the default build file. This decision was made easier since I converted to using require.js a while back. I can include tmclasses in a vendor folder, pull into tmlib and attach everything to the same places in tmlib to provide the same interface as before, and it is basically the same as it had been usage-wise. The build is slightly heavier, but that is partly due to duplication of methods that I will eliminate or limit.

tmclasses is a fairly simple class system so far. It provides a method for creating ‘classes’, which in JavaScript are basically functions with properties attached to their prototypes. The feature set is basic, but I intend to add more to it to get some of the niceties of Qooxdoo’s class system. I like a lot of things about Qooxdoo’s class system, but found it hard

Usage

The heart of tmclasses is the create method. It is passed an argument with all of the configuration to create a class.

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GiveCamp 2013

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Finished my third Cleveland GiveCamp last weekend. Another successful event. This year, my project was a new web site with more features for Bike Cleveland. We were doing well enough with that project that I was able to help another project Saturday night and Sunday, a web application for the Cuyahoga Valley National Park Environmental Education Center.

Bike Cleveland

Bike Cleveland is a bicycle advocacy group for the greater Cleveland area. They had an existing site that was in WordPress, but wanted it to be more engaging for members, allowing more involvement and discussion. Our group was composed of a team lead, four developers, a designer/ux person, and a learning teen with photo editing knowledge. Our client was good with WordPress, able to install plugins and what not, and generally understood what we were doing, so he was very easy to work with.

We started Friday night discussing what he wanted. We decided what was most important and what we could skip if time was short. He wanted to involve members with forums, an ability to submit events, forms to submit accidents and thefts, to have buttons to share things, and to emphasize ways to become involved with the organization. They also wanted the site to work on mobile devices so that people could use it from phones while out cycling.

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Working on a new WordPress bare theme

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I haven’t been doing much with WordPress, since at Cogneato we have our own CMS. But a customer request for a WordPress site a while back and the upcoming GiveCamp which I will be participating in this weekend have rejuvenated my interest in working with it. Back when I was using WordPress more often, I had built a bare theme I used as a starting point, including for the Stearns Homestead site I was working on when I first started this blog. That was the WordPress 2.x era though, and the theme is now outdated. I decided to begin work on a new theme, making use of the new 3.x features.

I have learned a lot since building that theme, and wanted to bring in some of my new knowledge and coding practices to the new theme. I also wanted to put this one on GitHub, since I now have an account and others might find it useful. I still haven’t decided for sure what I’ll call it (for now it is TJMBare) and have more work to do, so it isn’t on there yet, but hopefully will be by this weekend. Anyway, I wanted to mention some of the things I have done or will be doing with it.

Class helpers

I am putting all of my functionality and data into classes that in most themes is put into the global namespace. The classes will help group functionality and data together, making it easier to develop and to avoid collisions. Since WordPress doesn’t yet require PHP 5.3+, I am avoiding using PHP namespaces, but am compensating by putting the equivalent on the front of the class names. Functions.php will just include the class files and instantiate what is needed. Child themes will be able to extend parent theme classes to change functionality.

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Responsive: Turn Image Maps Into Selects

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I’ve been doing quite a few responsive sites since I first started into them. I like doing them. They are fun to build, requiring new techniques and a different way of thinking to handle different situations. I like the concept and I like looking at the sites. One recent fun thing was dealing with an image map. Scaling the image and coordinates would be a pain and very expensive. An alternative option is to replace the image with a select drop down when the screen is too small for the image.

Breakpoint detection

I don’t remember where I found this method of dealing with breakpoints in JavaScript, but I’ve been setting the line height on the html tag with media queries and reading it with JavaScript to determine which breakpoint I’m in. This works with the ’em’ based breakpoints I use. I convert the numbers to more descriptive names, such as ‘small’, ‘medium’, and ‘large’. It looks something like this:

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Conference: Rustbelt Refresh

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I went to my first real full length web development conference today, Rustbelt Refresh. It was a very good conference with good speakers and interesting topics. Finally something like this in Cleveland. I learned and got to thinking about various things. I was rather tired though after waking up so early and spending a whole day there. I will summarize / talk about each presentation, as sort of a minimal review, but primarily to store and cement what I’ve taken away in my mind.

Presentations

Eric Meyer: The Era of Intentional Layout

Eric Meyer is our local global CSS celebrity. I’ve gone to every local presentation he gave that I was aware of, which I think totals three with this one.

His talk started with a history of CSS layout, and how CSS never got a real layout system and the things we still use today are mostly hacks, limited in what can be done with them, and often create problems. To summarize this history: At first the web had no layout, and content just went with the flow. Then tables came in for tabular data. They quickly became used for layout because of the lack of alternatives, and soon made markup a nested mess that was difficult to maintain and impossible to change the layout without changing the site structure. Floats were added to allow content to flow around things like images, and quickly became usurped for layout. Since they were designed without layout in mind, they had a lot of problems in use for it, and a lot of creative hacks have been created to get around them, like equal height columns and zero height containers. Then came positioning, which was actually designed for layout, but had the problem of taking things out of flow and thus not allowing things to move in relation to each other, etc.

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