Category Archives: Opinion

Opinion

WordPress User Group London

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Yesterday evening I went along for the first time to the WordPress User Group London (WPUGL).

This user group is managed via the popular Meetup.com site. You can find out more at http://www.meetup.com/WordPress-User-Group-London/

WPUGL brings together London’s community of WordPress users to share knowledge, tips, ideas and inspiration, helping each other get the most out of WordPress.
The organisers run free evening events in central London with an informal atmosphere, encouraging everyone to share their knowledge and learn from others.

Each event focuses on a specific aspect of WordPress. Meetups can include hands on ‘peer to peer’ workshops, advice from WordPress professionals and the chance to network with other WordPress users.

This meetup group is specifically for people who use WordPress in their business, jobs or personal projects and want a supportive local community to help them achieve their goals.  WPUGL is not a developer meetup but typically there are developers and industry professionals at events and who support the user community.

There is another WordPress user group – http://www.meetup.com/London-WordPress/ –  that is much more technical, mostly for developers (in my opinion), and 2020Media are often in attendence there too. Yet another, which is solely developer focussed is http://www.meetup.com/wp-hooked/

WordPress London User Group meetup 22nd September 2015
WordPress London User Group meetup 22nd September 2015

Last nights event was all about Theme Modification.

Organiser Eugene went through the steps involved in modifying a theme including

  • Starting point – does your theme do it already.
  • What is, and how to create a child theme.
  • CSS changes affecting design (stylesheet modification).
  • PHP changes affecting functionality (functions.php modification).
  • HTML change affecting layout (pages modification).

There was plenty of discussion amongst the approx 30 people who came along, with views for and against various suggestions happily coexisting.

The meeting ended at 9 o’clock. We’ll definitely be back! Talk on speeding up your site anyone?

 

 

 

Opinion

Passing data from PHP to JavaScript · A Beautiful Site

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Source: Passing data from PHP to JavaScript · A Beautiful Site

 

Ever needed to send a PHP variable, array, or object to JavaScript? It can get complicated trying to escape the output properly. Here’s a way that always works—no escaping necessary.

Passing data from PHP to JavaScript

Have you ever needed to send a PHP variable, array, or object to JavaScript? It can get complicated trying to escape the output properly. Here’s a way that always works—no escaping necessary.

Let’s say we have the following variable in PHP:

  • $name = ‘Bob Marley’;

And we want to pass it to a JavaScript variable called name. Here’s the trick:

  • echo ‘<script>’;
  • echo ‘var name = ‘ . json_encode($name) . ‘;’;
  • echo ‘</script>’;

Using json_encode(), you’ll always get a properly formatted JavaScript object.

Opinion

So Your Client Wants a WordPress Slider? Here’s What You Need to Know

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Whether you love them or hate them, sliders are still a popular feature of many free and premium themes. It’s not too difficult to see why: they’re eye-catching and draw attention to key information on your site. Despite the pros, there are many cons to using sliders. Here’s our verdict on whether you should use sliders or not.

Source: So Your Client Wants a WordPress Slider? Before You Cringe, Here’s What You Need to Know

Old-skool slider - not responsive, not accessible...
Old-skool slider – not responsive, not accessible…

We love a slider so we don’t think they’re going to disappear so soon.

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