The following is an extract from our book, Scrum: Novice to Ninja, written by M. David Green. Copies are sold in stores worldwide, or you can buy it in ebook form here. The sprint backlog is the set of developer stories that the team has committed to working on during the current sprint. A sprint […]
Continue reading %Scrum Artifacts: Sprint Backlog%
SitePoint recently released a new WordPress base theme. It's very easy to customize and you can quickly and easily build advanced WordPress themes to suit your needs.
The SitePoint Base Theme gives you full permission to edit and modify the base theme. After downloading this theme, I customized it to build a theme for my WordPress blog.
There are two different ways to customize this theme:
In this tutorial, I am going to explain, how to create a child theme and modify the SitePoint Base theme.
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I prefer to use a local WordPress installation to create and test new WordPress themes. A local development environment can make your development workflow much faster and simpler.
I'm using WAMP Server for Windows. You can use any tool of your choice to set up local WordPress development environment. MAMP for MAC, WAMP for Windows, XAMPP and Bitnami are cross platform tools to install WordPress locally.
After setting up a local WordPress installation, run your local WordPress site, install and activate SitePoint base theme.
Continue reading %How to Customize the SitePoint WordPress Base Theme%
[special]This post was previously published on the 99designs blog. Want the best designs to revamp your business? Consider launching a design contest on 99designs![/special]
Pillar of our Platinum Community, designer Konstantin Yastrebov – known here as DSKY – has been dominating contests for almost five years now. He was one of the first batch to be designated the Platinum label (way back when we came up with it!) and has continued to expand his amazing portfolio of designs ever since.
A winner of Top 9 at 99, and a winner or runner up in a whole bundle of community contests (such as the Pelican’s Logo, 99designs Habla Espanol and Brazilian World Cup), he’s also been unfailingly supportive of the larger community at 99designs — like the time he told us all about his Winning Design Process on the blog.
Learn a little bit more about his design background and how he’s gotten so far in our interview.
Continue reading %Learning from Long-Time Community Leader DSKY%
Here are our latest front-end treats:
As front-end developers, it's our job to stay abreast of the techniques and tools that make our final products easy to use, accessible and, why not, beautiful.
Louis Lazaris shares with us the 11th installment of his list of free 20+ docs and guides for front-end developers.
The list is impressive and includes resources on functional programming, ES6, Progressive Web Apps, accessibility, and more. Feel free to pick your favorites. As for me, the CSS Reference and the the Typography Handbook are the ones I immediately checked out.
The CSS Reference is a visual guide where CSS properties are organized into:
You can also access a list of all CSS properties in alphabetical order.
The guide explains each property and possible values in clear and simple terms and offers great visuals to illustrate the results.
Any tool that teaches principles, best practices and code for great web typography in a practical and accessible way has my vote. It seems to me that The Typography Handbook does just this.
This is an open source project on GitHub covering:
The last part in particular shows a fair amount of code samples focusing on topics such as relative units, vertical space, font size, color, etc.
If you find most resources on web typography a bit intimidating and jargon-laden, The Typography Handbook will surprise you (totally in a good way).
We've evolved to be really good at noticing movement. ... Observing movement and visual cues enable us to understand complex actions and ideas in a nonverbal way.
Animation on the web can be leveraged to the same effect and can add extra depth and meaning to the conversation between our users and the User Interface.
Bringing Websites to Life with CSS Animations — Donovan Hutchinson & Guy Routledge
Animation has become a key ingredient in web design and development. User interface designers teach us how subtle animation effects help users perform tasks on a website, prevent boredom when visitors wait for a resource to load, guide readers' attention as they scan web content.
At this time, the most common ways of animating web content are:
To learn more about web animation, SitePoint Premium offers a brand new course — Animating with CSS — by animator rockstar Donovan Hutchinson.
The course covers the principles of effective user interface animation and their implementation using CSS transitions and @keyframes, easings and timing functions, multiple animations, animations on scroll, browser support and accessibility.
If you prefer articles, below are just a few of my favorite ones from SitePoint:
Using CSS for web animation remains my preferred way of doing things, but there are instances when you need a robust JavaScript library to get the job done.
For complex web animations requiring a JS solution, check out my series Beyond CSS: Dynamic DOM Animation Libraries. The first installment is an introduction on how to work with Anime.js and the second installment is about animating the DOM with KUTE.js, a modular and open source animation engine with lots of capabilities.
Stay tuned, more is to come.
If you have a JavaScript animation library you'd like to see in this series, get in touch!
Continue reading %Awesome Front-end Resources and CSS Animation Course%
Would you like to generate more profitable leads on LinkedIn? Wondering how LinkedIn Sales Navigator can help? Improvements to Sales Navigator give marketers an edge in lead generation, business development, and brand awareness on LinkedIn. In this article, you’ll discover how to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to build your business. #1: Import Your Leads to Sales [...]
This post How to Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator for Better Prospecting first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
HTML5 is the backbone of the modern web. And nowadays, when it comes to creating interactive images, SVG and Canvas are often the technologies of choice — Flash has been forgotten, Silverlight is a rare unicorn that dwells on the outskirts of the Web, and there are few who remember 3rd party plugins.
The pros and cons of each are well documented, but in a nutshell, SVG is better for suited to creating and handling interactive elements. This is because SVG is an XML-based vector format, and when an image is loaded into a page using an <svg> tag, every element within it becomes available in the SVG DOM.
In this article, I want to introduce you to GraphicsJS, a new and powerful open-source JavaScript drawing library, which is based on SVG (with VML fallback for old IE versions). I'll start with a quick introduction to its basics, and then showcase the functionality of the library with the help of two short, yet spectacular samples: the first one is all about art, whereas the second one illustrates how to code a simple time-killer art game in less than 50 lines.
There are a lot of libraries out there that can help developers work with SVG: Raphaël, Snap.svg, and BonsaiJS to name a few of the best. Each of these has its own strengths and weaknesses, but their thorough comparison will be the subject of another article. This article is all about GraphicsJS, so let me explain what makes it good and special.
First of all, GraphicsJS is lightweight and has a very flexible JavaScript API. It implements many rich text features, as well as a virtual DOM — detached from the browser-specific implementation of the HTML DOM.
Secondly, it is a new open-source JavaScript library that was published as recently as last fall by AnyChart, one of leading global software developers in the field of interactive data visualization. AnyChart has been using GraphicsJS to render charts in its proprietary products for at least three years (since the release of the AnyChart 7.0) so GraphicsJS has been fully battle-tested. (Disclaimer, I am the head of R&D at AnyChart and the lead developer of GraphicsJS)
Thirdly, unlike AnyChart's JavaScript charting libraries, GraphicsJS can be used for free in both commercial and non-profit projects. It is available on GitHub under the Apache license.
Fourthly, GraphicsJS is cross-browser compatible, supporting Internet Explorer 6.0+, Safari 3.0+, Firefox 3.0+, and Opera 9.5+. It renders in VML in older IE versions and SVG in all the other browsers.
Finally, GraphicsJS allows you to combine graphics and animation to great effect. Check out its main gallery which features an animated bonfire, rotating galaxy, falling rain, procedure generated leaves, playable 15-puzzle, and much more. GraphicsJS contains many further examples in its extensive documentation and its comprehensive API Reference.
To start with GraphicsJS, you need to reference the library and create a block-level HTML element for your drawing:
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<title>GraphicsJS Basic Example</title>
</head>
<body>
<div id="stage-container" style="width: 400px; height: 375px;"></div>
<script src="http://ift.tt/2k70bYv"></script>
<script>
// GraphicsJS code here
</script>
</body>
</html>
Then you should create a stage and draw something in it, such as a rectangle, a circle, or other shape:
// create a stage
var stage = acgraph.create('stage-container');
// draw a rectangle
var stage.rect(25, 50, 350, 300);
Here is the example on CodePen in which we go a little bit further and draw the Deathly Hallows symbol.
Any shape or a path can be colored using fill settings and stroke settings. Everything has a stroke (border), but only shapes and closed paths have a fill. Fill and stroke settings are very rich, you can go as far as a linear or circular gradient for both fill and stroke. Also, lines can be dashed, and image fill with several tiling modes is supported. But all this is a pretty standard stuff you can find in almost any library. What makes GraphicsJS special is its hatch and pattern fill feature that allows you not only to use one of the 32(!) available hatch fill patterns out of the box, but also to easily create your own patterns made of shapes or text.
Continue reading %Introducing GraphicsJS, a Powerful Lightweight Graphics Library%
