Alongside your ecommerce needs, you’ll also want to develop responsive development skills as well. Take a look at the SitePoint Premium course Responsive Tips and Tricks for details! If you have ever wanted to sell anything online you will have wrestled with the issue of how to do it. There are many tools available, such […]
Continue reading %How to Add a PayPal Button in WordPress%
The modern web user expects to be informed of everything that happens within the application. You don’t want to be that one website that doesn’t even have the notifications dropdown found not just in all social media websites, but everywhere else these days, too. Luckily, with Laravel and Pusher, implementing this functionality is a breeze. […]
Continue reading %How to Add Real-Time Notifications to Laravel with Pusher%
All designers have their own way of working. Whether you design directly in the browser (with code, I mean), or you only use web browsers for live-testing web designs in real-time (or otherwise), there are plenty of Chrome extensions for designers that will make your life exponentially easier. My biggest pet peeve? Having to open a huge desktop app to accomplish a relatively minor task, so I'm always looking for Chrome extensions that solve common design problems quickly.
Here are 7 super-useful Chrome extensions I can’t live without, and also, here's 6 Great Firefox Extensions for Designers,
in case you work in Firefox too (if you're a web developer you probably cross-test in all browsers!).
Page Ruler is a useful Chrome extension for finding out the positioning and/or size of any element in the browser — it’s quicker than using the Chrome code inspector, or worse, awkwardly traipsing through CSS files. To start, use the crosshairs to draw a selection around the element in question. The bar at the top of the browser will tell you the length and width of that element, as well how far it is from the each edges of the screen (as if it had been applied fixed/absolute positioning).
Tip: use the arrow keys to fine-tune your selection for maximum accuracy.
As I constantly have to inspect fonts on webpages, to see what font-size is being used on certain blocks of text, what the actual font name is, and its color, the WhatFont Chrome extension is incredibly useful to me.
Click on any section of text to find out the Hex/RGBA value, weight, line-height, font style, and of course the font family.
Sometimes, adding the Chrome inspect window at the bottom of the browser throws things off while you're working, so being able to obtain all of this information without bringing up the entire inspect window makes things much easier!
CSS3 Generator is a Chrome app that will help you generate somewhat complex or hard-to-remember snippets of CSS code. You won’t need it for simple things, but let’s face it, some CSS values are difficult to code from scratch (such as the CSS needed to create cross-browser compatible gradients, or CSS transformations). With a couple of clicks you can generate some pretty useful CSS, preview it in the extension preview, then copy the CSS and paste the code into your real CSS file.
Here’s a list of what’s supported:
It’s fairly easy to mistype URLs (or forget to include them entirely, but that's another story), so whether your clients need help with existing websites, or if you’re building a website from scratch, Check My Links is a must-have for any web designer.
Check My Links will scan a webpage and look for broken links — simple as that. It saves you the hassle of having to manually check them yourself. The UI is pretty intuitive. Rather than presenting a list of dud links, Check My Links simply turns the broken links on the actual webpage red, while valid links will appear in green, so you can see what to fix at a glance. Simple!
If you need to design a graphic, but you don’t want to open a resource-heavy design app (or if you don’t have one/don’t want to pay for one), download the free Gravit Designer extension for Chrome.
Surprisingly, it’s really fast. It’s super-easy to start a design with commonly-used artboard sizes, including presets for blog graphics, social media graphics and common print dimensions. Gravit is a vector design app, which makes designing scalable resolution-independent designs a total breeze.
I was surprised by the amount of options and features—it wasn’t too different from using a premium design app like Sketch, although the visual UI feels more like Affinity Designer.
Continue reading %7 Super-Useful Chrome Extensions for Designers in 2017%
The "Headless CMS" is a relatively new type of tool, but what is it? What makes it different? And, how do you get started with one?
Traditional CMSs typically have two major components: a back end where you create and manage your content, and a front end which displays the content. The front end is almost always a website which is often built using outdated techniques, tools, and libraries.
Headless CMSs take a different approach, only having a back end where you create and manage your content. They typically deliver your content via a robust API which allows you to easily retrieve your content in a developer-friendly way. This separation of concerns means the CMS does only one thing: manage your content. Headless CMSs don't dictate how or where you display your content. You can deliver your content to any device or platform, using practically any programming language, framework or library.
Looking for more CMS topics? Check out these great links:
And check out SitePoint Premium for more books, courses and free screencasts.
Let’s take a look at how we would build a simple portfolio site using Elemeno, a popular Headless CMS cofounded by yours truly. We'll use a typical Node.js development stack, but the same principles could be applied to any language or framework.
The tools we'll be using include:
We’ll get started first by setting up our project on Elemeno. Elemeno is a hosted product, so there's nothing to install and no databases to set up. Simply create an account, if you don’t already have one, then create a new project. You can get started 100% free by choosing the development plan, which will fit our needs perfectly for this demo.
The next step is to define our content models. You can think of a content model as the template of inputs that will be displayed when creating content. Elemeno has two different types of content models: Singles and Collections. Collections allow you to create many items from the same content model. This is perfect for things like collections of products, articles, or projects. Singles allow you to create a single item from a content model. This is ideal for things like contact info, or about us pages.
For our simple portfolio site, we'll create a Collection to store information about our projects. We'll need to determine what information we want to display for each project, and what type of input is best suited to capture that information. For our portfolio, each project will have:
When creating a collection on Elemeno, you start by giving your collection a name at the very top of the screen. We’ll call our collection “Portfolio”. You'll see that our collection starts with a single “title” input on the left side of the screen, and a list of input elements on the right. To define our content model we simply drag and drop input elements from the list onto our blank slate on the left. These inputs are exactly what you'll see when creating the content items for your portfolio.
After placing each input element, click on the input to change its settings. We'll set the “label” for each input and leave the other options to their default setting for now.
Our Portfolio collection should now look something like this:
Once we’re happy with what we have, we can click the “Save” button to create the collection.
Now that we have our Portfolio collection defined, we can start creating items. Simply click the “Create the first item” button to get started. Fill out each of the inputs and click the “Save and Publish Now” button to create our Portfolio item. Next, create a few more items to fill up our Portfolio Collection a little bit.
Now we’re ready to jump into the code and start building our site. First we’ll need to ensure we have Node.js and NPM installed for our development environment. You can do a simple check by opening Terminal and entering the following command:
node -v
You should see your installed version show up, or command not found: node if Node isn't installed. If you need to install Node, simply download the installer from the Node.js website.
First create a new directory to store our project files, and then navigate to that folder in a Terminal window. We need a couple of node packages for our project, so we’ll use NPM to install them by entering the following command:
npm install elemeno express pug
We'll create a new file called server.js, and we’ll get started by including the packages we just downloaded:
var Elemeno = require('elemeno'),
express = require('express'),
pug = require('pug');
We’ll create a new Express application by simply calling Express:
var app = express();
Now we need to create a new directory called views to hold all of our Pug template files. Then we’ll configure Express to tell it where our templates live, and which templating engine we’re using. Note: you can use any other supported templating engine based on personal preference.
app.set('views', './views');
app.set('view engine', 'pug');
We can now create the route for our landing page. We’ll keep things nice and simple by defining all of our routes right inside server.js. To define our first route, we’ll use:
app.get('/', function(req, res) {
res.render('index.pug');
});
This simply tells Express when someone makes a GET request to our root / we want to render our index.pug template.
The next step is to create the index.pug template inside of our views directory. Create a new file, save it as index.pug and for now we'll just fill it with something simple like:
h1 Hello World!
Now back in server.js we just need to tell Express which server port it should listen on:
app.listen(3000, function () {
console.log('Portfolio listening on port 3000');
});
From a Terminal window you can now type node server and hit enter to get our website up and running.
Voila! We have a super basic node website. In your web browser go to localhost:3000 and you should see our super awesome “Hello World!” message.
Now let’s include the content from Elemeno in our website. We’ll start by creating an API Key which will allow us to access the content from our portfolio website. Go to the Settings screen on Elemeno, find the API Keys section and click the “Create API Key” button. We'll give our key a name of “Website” and we’ll leave the other settings to their defaults. We'll see our new API Key listed, click on it to view the details and copy the “Access Token” value.
Back in our server.js file, we'll create a new instance of the Elemeno client near the top of our file:
var Elemeno = require('elemeno'),
express = require('express'),
pug = require('pug');
var app = express();
var elemeno = new Elemeno('PASTE-ACCESS-TOKEN-HERE');
Paste in the Access Token we copied from Elemeno. Now inside our index route we'll fetch a list of projects from our Portfolio collection
app.get('/', function(req, res) {
elemeno.getCollectionItems('portfolio', function(err, response) {
res.render('index.pug', {projects: response.data});
});
});
We pass the slug for our Portfolio collection, portfolio, to the getCollectionItems function. This function will return an array of objects representing the items in our collection. We then render our Pug template and pass along the data that was returned.
Continue reading %Off With Your Head! Build Better Web Apps with a Headless CMS%
|
A set of experiments with an animated image pieces effect where an image gets shattered into rectangular fragments powered by anime.js.
