Trying to disable MySQL strict mode

Community links: Open source motivations edition

What’s more fun to do over the weekend then catch up on WordPress community links? Set up the Christmas tree? Clean out the gutters? Shovel the driveway?

Alright, if you have to. Chores are chores. But when you’re done, reward yourself with a hot coffee and a good dose of WordPress reading. We have a truckload of links for you, so settle in.

The full list of links is after the jump.

In blog posts this week:

• Alex King, a well known WordPress plugin developer and entrepreneur, posted his thoughts on what motivations exist for WordPress plugin developers today. Chris Olbekson followed up with his own thoughts, as did Joost de Valk. Jeff Chandler started up a commentary at WBTC as well.
• WooThemes posted a preview of the upcoming launch of WPBundle. They also shared a few thoughts on the increase in support time that’s required of them with so many themes released.
• Dev4Press redesigned their site.
• James Dalman at WP Design Coach is now accepting themes for review on his new blog.
• Jeff Chandler wrote up how anyone can contribute to the WordPress.org theme review process. He also started a discussion around the legacy that plugins leave behind when they are deactivated.
• ThemesForge has decided to post 24 theme tips throughout December. I love the attitude and initiative behind the posts so far.
• WP Plugins has an interview with plugin developer Jonathan O’Shea.
• Matt Mullenweg was on The Big Web Show with Jeffrey Zeldman.
• Dre on the Sucuri blog wrote up yet another WordPress security post. These posts are always good reminders to secure your WordPress site. While we’re on the topic, WPZine has a collection of WordPress security plugins this week too.
• Brandon Cox wrote a really interesting post on how one particular WordPress theme ad depicted developers.
• 9seeds’ plugin WP Event Ticketing seems to have a few issues with the popular WordPress theme Thesis. They’ve posted a fix that should take care of the problem, though.

There were a few WordPress resources posted fresh this week too:

• DBS>Interactive created and released the Template Tag Reference Guide this week.
• Sarah Gooding at WPMU.org listed myself and WPCandy in their list of 50 people to follow for WordPress news on Twitter. Thanks Sarah! They also put up a collection of plugins to use with Foursquare.
• Paul Andrew posted a collection of plugins for integrating Flickr into a WordPress blog.
• Jean-Baptiste Jung posted a solid roundup of WordPress code snippets.
• iThemes has released the video tutorials in their Builder Basics series for free online.

Finally, in WordPress tutorials this week:

• WPEngineer has been laying into the tutorials this week, with a custom login page tutorial and a walkthrough of the upcoming post formats feature.
• WPBeginner has a new tutorial up showing how to add the official LinkedIn share button to your WordPress blog. They also have a nice roundup of plugins for managing images with WordPress.
• Vladimir Prelovac posted about how to disable post revisions and delete them from your database.
• Scribu showed how to insert a banner between posts, without editing the theme files.
• Chris Coyier put together a tutorial showing how to make the WYSIWYG editor really WYSIWYG.
• Sumeet Chawla at Nettuts+ put together a tutorial showing how to create an FAQ page with custom post types.

Wow, that may be a record for number of WordPress related links in a roundup post (for us). Who gets the plaque?

That’s it for links this week. If you run across something link worthy, don’t hesitate to let us know about it. If it’s worth a story we’ll jump on it, and if it’s best suited for a community news post it will show up in this space next week.

WPEngineer gears up for their own WordPress Advent Calendar

In the spirit of Christmas, WP Engineer is cranking up their second annual advent calendar of tips and tricks.  They will be publishing new tips every day from December 1st through December 24th.

Last year provided all sorts of good stuff, from an interesting discussion on working with WP 2.9 post thumbnails, to extending user info, managing multiple excerpt lengths, and more.

Check out their blog post about it, and be sure to keep up with WP Engineer throughout December to open new doors to WordPress knowledge.

Also, Merry Christmas.  Was I the first to say that to you this season?

Why Percentage-Based Designs Don’t Work in Every Browser

Here’s a rule any web designer can live by: Your designs don’t need to look exactly the same in every browser, they just need to look good in every browser.

It’s a maxim that will spare you many a hair-pulling hour. That said, there some things you would expect to be the same across browsers that aren’t. One such problem that’s likely to crop up more often as designers jump on the responsive, flexible-width bandwagon is percentage-width CSS rules.

According to the spec, browsers, given a percentage width, would simply render the width of the page based on the size of the container element. And, in fact, that’s what browsers do, but how they do it varies quite a bit. As a result, percentage-based widths are often displayed quite differently across web browsers.

Developer Steffan Williams recently ran into this problem when trying to create a percentage-based version of his Gridinator CSS framework. Williams created a container

with a width of 940 pixels and then wanted to create a 12 column grid within that container. Do the math and you end up with columns set to a width of 6.38298 percent.

Pull that up in Firefox or Internet Explorer 6/7 and you’ll see what you expect to see. In Safari, Chrome and Opera, however, you’ll see something different. IE 8 and 9 are also slightly off.

The problem is not a new one; developer John Resig pointed this out years ago. But as Williams notes, it’s odd that browser behavior when rendering percentage-width grids is still so inconsistent across vendors, especially given how much today’s browsers tout their CSS 3 support.

The problem isn’t necessarily a simple case of Firefox and IE being right and the others wrong. As Opera CTO and CSS creator Håkon Wium Lie tells Webmonkey, the problem is “the CSS specification does not require a certain level of precision for floating point numbers.”

This means browsers are free to round your carefully computed percentages up or down as they see fit. According to Lie, Opera considers the result of Williams’ experiment to be a bug. Same with the WebKit project, the engine that handles rendering in both Safari and Chrome, though in Webkit’s case the bug has been unassigned since 2006. But really, there is no right or wrong here, just different ways of rounding.

Fortunately, for most of your stylesheets, the differences in each browsers’ floating point precision will not result in visible differences on the screens of various devices. However, as Williams’ experiment shows, it’s easy to write a page where those very small differences in rounding become visible when compounded — like a grid-based layout.

What irks Williams and others is that these problems are old and well-known, and yet most browser vendors have still made no move to fix them. Instead, they focus on supporting the shiny new features in CSS 3.

We certainly wouldn’t want to suggest that browsers should stop innovating and supporting the latest and greatest standards-based tools, but sometimes it’s worth postponing playtime with the newest toys to make sure the foundations are solid. In this case, Opera, Safari and Chrome have some cracks showing, and it’s high time they fix them.

Until they do, we suggest you learn to live with the slightly different rendering behaviors in those browsers. After all, pixel-perfect cross-browser support is never going to happen. Given that the web of the future will have even more mobile phones, tablets, and small screen laptops, responsive designs and fluid grids are a trend we expect to grow.

There are also some workarounds. For example, you can use ems instead of percentages, which render much more consistently across browsers. Opera’s Lie also points out that the CSS Working Group has several specifications in draft to address the need for grid-based design, including multi-column text and the CSS Template Layout Module, though neither are widely supported at the moment.

iPad photo by Jim Merithew/Wired

See Also:

• Make a Big Splash on Tiny Screens With Media Queries
• Slide Show Time: Rethinking the Mobile Webhttp://www.webmonkey.com/2010/09/slide-show-time-rethinking-the-mobile-web/
• A Guide to Internet Explorer 9’s HTML5/CSS 3 Support

Enhance your web forms with new HTML5 features

Please note that HTML5 is an emerging technique. These examples are not intended for use on a production site. Results may vary according to browser implementation. Please use Chrome or Safari for best results.

Required fields

Whose ever tried to submit a form and gotten an error message saying that you “forgot” to enter your email address? Probably not a lot of us: In fact, 99 percent of all web forms have at least one field marked as required.

In good ol’ HTML, we had to manually display that a specific field is required, most of the time by using a red asterisk. But with HTML5, you can set up a input field to be required:

<input type="text"  name="client_name" required>

And on the CSS side, something like

input:required {
    border: 1px red solid;
}

will save you a lot of time.

Two similar attributes are also available:

and

. They work exactly as the

attribute explained above.

Placeholders

In a form, an input field always has a label explaining what kind of information is required. While you can currently use the

tag to display a label for a specific text field, HTML5 introduces the

attribute. As shown below, using it is pretty simple:

<input name="firstname" placeholder="Please enter your first name">

The HTML5

attribute works exactly as the

attribute, except that when the user click on the text field, the placeholder text is automatically removed so the user can easily enter his information.

The placeholder attribute currently works only in safari/webkit. Don’t worry about other browsers though, it is pretty easy to simulate placeholders using javascript:

Autofocus

A new HTML5 attribute is named

. If applied to an element, the element will automatically receive the focus once the page is loaded. This can be seen on some sites and most search engines.

Nothing complicated, just use the syntax below, and remember that in HTML5, there’s no more need for attributes to have a value like in XHTML 1.0.

<input name="search" autofocus>

Email fields

Asking someone’s email on a web form is extremely common because email is still the easiest way to contact someone over the internet. HTML5 introduces a new type for the input element, named

.

<input name="email" type="email">

Pattern attribute

When validating a web form, we have to validate the data entered by the visitor. The new

HTML5 attribute allows you to define a regular expression pattern. Only the data that matches the defined pattern will be validated. If the data doesn’t match the pattern, then the form will not be submitted.

This is, in my opinion, an extremely good thing, which will save lots of time to developers when coding forms. Though, remember that you should always validate data on the server side as well.

<input type="text" name="Phone" pattern="^0[1-689][0-9]{8}$" placeholder="Phone" required>

Url fields

Nowadays, many people have a website, blog, or at least a Twitter profile. This is why many web forms offer the possibility to enter an url.

HTML5 introduces a new type for the

element, designed specifically for entering urls:

<input name="url" type="url">

Although I didn’t test it myself, I heard that the W3C validator will raise an error if the value of a url field doesn’t match a proper url structure.

Date pickers

Many businesses are offering an appointment request through their website. In that case, the visitor has to specify the day they would like an appointment. HTML5 introduces the

type for the

element:

<input name="day" type="date">

When clicked, the

attribute will display a date picker so visitors will simply have to choose a date instead of entering it manually. Unfortunately, except in Opera, most browsers don’t have it implemented yet.

Note that a date picker can be implemented on your forms using the following types:

<input type="date">
<input type="datetime">
<input type="month">
<input type="week">
<input type="time">

Isn’t that user friendly? Personally, I can’t wait to implement this in my forms but as I said earlier this isn’t very well implemented in browsers at the time of writing this post. Of course, Javascript is always here to help. On this site I found a simple fallback implementation for the

HTML5 attribute:

var i = document.createElement("input");
i.setAttribute("type", "date");
if (i.type == "text") {
    // No HTML5 native date picker support, use jQuery or your favorite framework to create one.
}

Search boxes

To enhance ease of retrieving information, many websites have implemented their own search engine. HTML5 has created a new type for search fields.

<input name="q" type="search">

For now, the only difference with regular text inputs is that, if you use Safari, the search box will have rounded corners. But maybe interesting functionalities will be implemented in the future. Let’s hope, because right now I have to admit that I don’t really see why we should use this type.

Sliders type and step attribute

HTML5 is also introducing sliders: A new type for the input element, which allows visitors to easily select a number instead of entering it manually.

<input name="number" type="range" min="0" max="10">

The example above allows the visitor to choose a number between 0 and 10. If you want the slider to be incremented/decremented 2 by 2, you’ll have to use one more new attribute: step. Here is an example:

<input name="number" type="range" min="0" max="10" step="2" >

That way, visitors will only be able to select numbers like 0, 2, 4, and so on.

Like CatsWhoCode? If yes, don’t hesitate to check my other blog CatsWhoBlog: It’s all about blogging!

Enhance your web forms with new HTML5 features

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Microsoft Giving Up On Silverlight, Joining HTML5 Party

We now have further confirmation that Microsoft is giving up on its Silverlight rich Internet application platform. Bob Muglia, Microsoft’s president in charge of server and tools, told ZDNet that the company is “shifting away” from Silverlight as a cross-platform development framework, and pushing the HTML5 web standard instead.

There’s been plenty of evidence to suggest this was the case. After all, with the launch of Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft has fully embraced and touted many of HTML5′s features. But it doesn’t just stop there; Microsoft will be leveraging HTML5 for the latest version of its Bing search engine, and is using H.264-encoded HTML5 video in lieu of Silverlight Smooth Streaming for delivery of live video on its Xbox 360 game console.

Microsoft will continue to develop and lean on Silverlight, especially for application development on its recently launched Windows Phone 7 operating system for mobile devices. However, Muglia told ZDNet, “HTML is the only true cross-platform solution for everything, including (Apple’s) iOS platform.”

That Microsoft would align itself with Apple, especially in the embrace of a web standard, might seem peculiar to some. After all, the two software makers have been battling for decades in the PC space, and now are bumping heads in mobile as Microsoft tries to offer up a compelling alternative to Apple’s iPhone.

But it also makes sense that Microsoft would begin de-emphasizing Silverlight as a cross-platform development platform. Despite some of the advances Microsoft was able to push with its development, including HTTP and adaptive bit rate streaming, it wasn’t able to dethrone Flash as the de facto rich Internet application and video platform on the web. And with the emergence of HTML5, it was no longer a matter of playing second fiddle to Adobe, but lagging behind a web standard that was also being rapidly adopted.

To see what Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch has to say about adoption of HTML5 and its positioning against Flash, come see him speak at NewTeeVee Live on November 10 in San Francisco.

Related content on GigaOM Pro:

• HTML5’s a Game-Changer for Web Apps
• Three Reasons Over-The-Top TV Apps Will Beat Big-Cable
• How to Market Your iPhone App: A Developer’s Guide