Brian Krogsgard

Anonymity is bullshit

anonymous-bobI’m a little fired up. Tonight, I saw an open-ended and, honestly, silly post from Torque about a strange WooCommerce extensions shop called WP Avengers.

WP Avengers, as it turns out, is a group of essentially anonymous folks who claim to be experienced developers. I say “essentially” because the site claims to be led by “Nathan Walker”, but there are no links to real profiles, and I literally can’t find anything on this guy. All they said when Carrie Dils and I asked them to reveal who they were was that, “that too shall happen when the time comes.” Ugh.

They say they are fed up with WooThemes WooCommerce ecosystem and have decided to create their own. They say they have been around since before WooThemes forked Jigoshop. Okay, fine. Me too. And whatever they want to do is up to them. But what really rubs me the wrong way is when someone takes pot shots, as they do on their website, anonymously.

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The Theme Foundry releases a Backbone powered theme

collectionsThe folks from The Theme Foundry have released a new theme called Collections, which is a post formats centric, Backbone powered WordPress theme. They emailed me to let me know they were wrapping up a Backbone powered theme, and I was intrigued and asked if I could take a closer look.

So they showed me a demo preview of the theme along with a copy so I could peak at the code to see how it was structured. I came away pretty impressed.

Collections is very post format centric, and uses Backbone to reload content with JavaScript without reloading pages. The design is by Veerle Pieters, a very well known and talented designer. The unique design for the various post format archives on this theme were really impressive.

The theme has some basic options for filling out social information and optionally showing extra about content for the home page. But what’s more interesting is what this theme doesn’t support. There are no built in widget areas, and custom background and custom header images are not supported. Collections makes decisions for the users.

Backbone in WordPress themes

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Code should fail nicely

fail-codeWeb designers tend to be pretty particular about their designs. However, often times, if you watch how end users use a website, it can be surprising when they don’t do things how the designer and developer would expect.

Perhaps the client or buyer didn’t have images for a section of the website where you expected them to have images. Or maybe you included a recent events widget, only to find they aren’t posting events frequently. Or maybe you built a custom metabox that you anticipate the user will fill out every post, before they don’t.

There are various potential scenarios for a website administrator to not use the site as it was designed and intended to be used, but it’s the designer and developer’s jobs to build appropriate fallbacks for custom display functionality to help prevent the website from looking awful.

Let’s discuss a few instances where you will want to consider how well your code fails.

Post loops

Be sure in a WordPress posts loop to include an if statement to make sure you have posts, before you actually show markup for a particular section. That way, you can create a custom output to show users if no posts are available.

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