For a couple of months I’ve been carefully preparing to dive into JavaScript and the purpose of this post is to outline the steps I’m going to take, which books I’m going to read and which sites I’m going to use to start learning Javascript.
With the REST API being scaffolded into WordPress in 4.4 and with live examples such as Calypso demonstrating how we can build applications on top of WordPress in new ways with JavaScript libraries such as React, we really have no other choice but to embrace what JavaScript can bring to the table.
WordPress
A Quick WordPress Plugin: There Can Be Only One
It’s been over seven years since I last built or maintained a WordPress plugin, thanks in large part to the great community of WordPress plugin developers who share their hard work for the community as a whole. Yet, I finally ran into a situation that wasn’t handled by an available plugin. I patched this in my custom functions.php file with some help from code that I found here (thanks Craige!) and have cruised along for a good while, but I wanted to strengthen my solution while giving back to the WordPress community.
(TLDR – the WordPress community is awesome, and I published this plugin: There Can Be Only One)
My Goal
There should always be one (and only one!) sticky post visible at the top of my home page.
The Setup
I post many links and images on my site, which means the majority of my front page is made up of links elsewhere, and anything that I write is quickly lost in the stream. Sticky posts help to address this, allowing me to designate that a post should be shown at the top of my home page, regardless of whether it is the newest or not. Awesome!
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Web Performant WordPress
Dave Rupert provides an excellent breakdown of how to speed up your WordPress-powered site. There's no excuse to not spend the time implementing these changes. Even if you're like me, and have already done a lot of the work, I'm willing to bet there's a step or two that will make your site even better. For me, it's the super-duper-easy cut-and-paste improvements to the htacess file to enable gzip and browser caching.
Genesis Theme Framework – Hook Reference
Genesis Theme Download & Tutorials
The Guardian Releases a Newsfeed Plugin
The Guardian just released a news feed plugin for WordPress as a part of its Open Platform initiative, making it easy for anyone to post Guardian stories to their WordPress-powered site in full, images and all. They’re working on other platforms as well.
Oh, and did I mention ads? Because they’re including ads and performance tracking in the stories too.
This is smart on so many levels – when so many other publishers are trying to lock everything down, the Guardian sees the future and is going to make money from it.
If you aren’t familiar with The Guardian’s efforts on the Web, you should be. They have an absolutely amazing team of developers building out their platform, which includes a content API, politics API and curated data sets.
As they put it “Our vision is to weave the Guardian into the fabric of the Internet, to become ‘of’ the web rather than ‘on’ the web.”