Author: Tom (Page 236 of 428)

How Would You Teach Yourself WordPress?

December 24, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

With tomorrow being arguably one of the largest holidays in the world, I thought that it might be a decent change of pace of the posts and offer up something a little bit shorter and a little more open ended in hopes of getting some feedback from the rest of you WordPress designers, developers, bloggers, and other users.

So here’s the deal: Back when you first became acquainted with WordPress, you started at ground zero. We all did.

Sure, there might have been a few things that we knew – like how blogging work, or how HTML and PHP worked together, but we weren’t necessarily familiar with WordPress templating nor the WordPress API (or any part of the API for that matter). Continue reading

Tabbed Navigation in WordPress Themes

December 23, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the neater trends that we’re seeing in WordPress themes is that we’re able to introduce tabbed content into a single page when leveraging front-end frameworks – like Bootstrap or Foundation – so you can load up all of the content in a single request and not have to use outdated elements like iframe.

For example, say that you have an index template like this:

The template includes the usual header information
There’s a content area that’s composed of tabbed navigation (where each tab is a menu item)
When the user clicks on a menu item, it brings the corresponding content to the activate state and hides the other content
It then includes whatever other widgetized areas and footer content necessary for completing the page

It’s pretty cool when it’s executed correctly. Though I’m not saying I have the definitive way to go about doing this in WordPress, here’s what I’ve found to be most effective.

On The Productivity of Distributed Teams

December 22, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

For the past year or so, I’ve been working with Eric Dye on revamping a theme that he’s been selling for sometime. The gist of the theme is content for another post, but one of the things that has been the most important, in my opinion, in our collaboration is making sure that we’re balancing our discussions via text and chat with voice and/or video calls.

This is me “collaborating.”

This is also true for how I balance my time with Envato, and how I balance my time with my team at Pressware. Some of the time, we use tools like Slack to stay in touch, other times we use tools like Google Hangouts or Skype or conference calls via cell phones to have our voice chats.

The point that I’m trying to make is that for as much of a fan as I am of distributed teams, and as much as I believe that they can – and do – work (though I think it requires a certain personality type to make it work successfully), I think it’s important for those who are considering doing any kind of remote work to distinguish when it’s best to chat – which is using text – when it’s best to use voice which is obviously using the phone or something similar – and when it’s best to use a hybrid such as Hangouts or Skype.

My Suite of Apps: Dispatch

December 19, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things about using both OS X and iOS is that I try to make sure that every application that I use on both devices helps me to make sure I’m getting as much stuff done as possible.

That is to say that I want the work that I do on my phone to play nicely with the applications and the work that I do on my laptop and vice versa.

But one place in which I’ve had a hard time in getting things in a suitable state is with email. Regardless of what email strategies, clients, and all that other jazz that I’ve found, I’ve never really dug my workflow.

Until I found Dispatch.

Improving Time Management By Identifying What We Need vs. What We Want

December 18, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

No one would argue that for those of us who spend the majority of our working day on the Internet that there’s a proverbial firehose of information that we have to keep up with. Some of the things by necessity, some of the things are by desire, but I think that sometimes we convolute the two.

That is to say that sometimes we think we need to keep up with things when in reality we just want to keep up with them. This ends up creating a weird trend where we feel as if we’re missing out on something if we aren’t keeping up with everything.

This makes it tough to stay productive during the work day because we’re not particularly great at multitasking (at least not as good as we’d like to think we are), and our attention is pulled in n-different directions.