Unlike '08, economic impact now is tied to the pandemic and health, so it is far harder to estimate damage.

These are the most important oncology stories you need to know about today.
Medscape Medical News

WordPress is super versatile. You know that. I know that. But sometimes this can be an overwhelming prospect. How on earth will you get your site up and running? What platform will you use? Zurb Foundation and Bootstrap are two …

Mel Choyce explores how the new WordPress editor (also know as Gutenberg) can be used to create more carefully art directed posts. Like gifts carefully arranged beneath the Christmas tree, it’s the contents that matters but the presentation that sells.

The New York Times release of Snowfall in 2012 took the web industry by storm. Media-rich and captivating, its design evoked wonder, fear, and desperation in the face of an avalanche. Snowfall was one of the first great art directed digital experiences in this era of the modern web (Space Jam, obviously, being one of the great experiences of the era prior).

“Art direction combines art and design to evoke a cultural and emotional reaction. …Art direction is about evoking the right emotion, it’s about creating that connection to what you’re seeing and experiencing.”

Art Direction and Design by Dan Mall

Art direction isn’t a new concept. Pick up any magazine or print publication — designers have long been creating evocative media experiences. Then the web came and messed that up. Fonts and even colors were limited at first, especially if you wanted to create something using semantic HTML rather than Flash. Early HTML and CSS didn’t offer great ways to create dynamic layouts like you’d see in a magazine. Floats, am I right?

A lot’s changed in the past decade. We have reliable ways to serve fonts, opening up vast typographic possibilities. CSS features like Flexbox and Grid allow for complex layouts. Plus, our hardware is getting better and better. We live in exciting times.

Behind the curve

But not everyone’s kept up. For most of its history, the WordPress editor was a text-first writing experience, shining with simple blogs but falling flat in the face of a complex website. Want some columns on your page? Well, there’s a plugin for that, it lets you write some pseudo-code WordPress called shortcodes, and yeah you just need to wrap your columns in this code in your editor… Or, uh, maybe you could hand-code a template for your theme that offers three columns of widget areas and put everything in there? Or maybe…

You get the point.

The new WordPress editor (codenamed “Gutenberg”) introduces the concept of blocks, like building blocks or bricks or LEGO. Rather than needing to hand-code anything, you have an interface for editing all sorts of content, even the aforementioned former nightmare of columns. Blocks can come with placeholders, so you can fill-in-the-blanks rather than having to build from scratch.

The new WordPress block editor allows me to focus on the best way of presenting my content instead of focusing on how I’m going to technically enter the content. The block editor allows my designer brain to think more creatively. I can go about creating an appropriate emotional reaction for a site’s content, rather than focusing on implementation.

Block it to me

The building blocks of the new editor (text, media) are the same, but the new ways to combine and build upon those blocks makes for a better art direction experience.

New to the WordPress editor is the Media and Text block, which combines — you guessed it — media and text into a new way to approach layouts.

This is the foundation of the new WordPress editor. Take atomic pieces, and combine them to make whole sections and layouts. Best yet, no fumbling with floats if you want to put some text next to an image!

Do you want to build a website?

Let’s imagine I’m building a website for a non-profit that rescues black cats. They offer adoption services, run a fostering program, and take in abandoned, feral, or other cats in need. The primary goal of the site is to connect people to the rescue organization. Raising awareness and soliciting donations are secondary, but still important factors.

Because so much of a person’s experience with WordPress is contingent on their particular setup — themes, plugins, and admin customizations — I’ve decided to keep this site pretty light.

The Twenty Twenty Theme

WordPress releases a new default theme pretty much every year. This year’s theme, Twenty Twenty, was built with Gutenberg in mind. It supports optional features like color schemes and wider block alignments. The design is clean and modern, and offers some additional customization options. I think it’s a good choice for this website.

Columns

While there’s no internal grid system in WordPress (yet!), the Columns block comes close to allowing complex layouts within a post or page. With it, you can start to break out of one column and think more like a print designer.

The most straightforward layout we could do is a familiar pattern on the web — three feature columns consisting of a heading, some text, and a button.

To accomplish this, I loaded up the editor and started planning.

First, I added a group block to contain my columns, and provide a background color. (The columns block does not currently support background colors, but it might in the future.)

I want my columns to stand out from the white background of the page, so I opt for a light grey.

Within the group, I placed my Column block, which features a convenient placeholder to help me pick which layout I want:

I opt for the three column option.

From here, it’s easy to build out my section — headings, paragraphs, and buttons are all existing blocks I can plop right into my columns:

It looks really good on the front-end of my site, too:

This is all fairly straightforward, but by changing up a couple columns widths and some sizing, I can get something that looks more dynamic and draws attention to the adoption process, which is the most important feature:

I could even add an image, change up my background color to match, and nest “Foster” and “Save” into another set of columns beneath “Adopt”:

All of this from the same set of blocks, yet each variation strikes a different impact. …And, you know, feels a little less like this:

But if I wanted to start looking like that, uh, second example — I can!

Media and Text

The aforementioned Media and Text block is a great building block for some eye-catching, informational parts of my homepage.

Galleries

To break up all that text content and get my site looking less like it’s for a startup, how about adding even more cute cats in between? You can never have too many cat photos on the internet.

CoBlocks is a fantastic plugin that adds new blocks to WordPress, among them the icon block I used above, as well as a couple of different gallery layouts. I think carousels are terrible when they’re used for showcasing features or content, but I think they’re a good gallery format, and having something horizontal means my cats aren’t taking up too much space (unlike my own black cat, who likes to hog all my leg room in bed).

CoBlocks comes with Carousel, Collage, Masonry, Offest, and Stacked gallery blocks. The default Gallery block in WordPress is also pretty good — much better than it used to be.

Buttons

Alright, where am I? I have my intro columns featuring the primary information about site, some informational text, lots of cute cat photos, more informational text… I think my homepage is shaping up. I just need one final element: a donation section. Can’t take care of those kitties without some cash.

The only way to integrate payments into WordPress is to either link to a third party platform, or use a plugin. I’ve used ActBlue quite a bit when making candidate websites, so I’m going to pretend that this site uses a third party service that, like ActBlue, lets me link to specific donation increments off-site.

WordPress has a Buttons block underway that lets you add a row of buttons, without needing to rely on another block like Columns, but in the meantime, CoBlocks has an equivalent block I can use for now.

Great. It’s got a bold color, and I can link to a couple different donation increments.

But it could really use… something, you know, that draws the eye even more?

Shape Divider

CoBlocks has another great block, Shape Divider, which lets you add a decorative border that sits nicely above or below any container element, like the group block I’m using here. It comes with a variety of shape styles, like hills, rounded, and pointed. I settle on waves, which includes some overlapping transparencies along the top. It’s different from the rest of my page, but in a good way — it’s a subtle way for that section to stand out.

With that final block, my homepage is almost done. I just want to touch on two more blocks that can be used to improve the design: the Separator block, and the Spacer block.

Separator

Separator inserts an <hr /> into the page, with some minimal styles to make it look nice. Themes can then add new styles, or restyle the default to get some fancy alternatives, like this:

The Separator block is a great way to break up sections in a page.

Spacer

The Spacer block is an abomination, but I love it. It’s just an empty space. Think spacer gif, but spacer div. It’s terrible, but oh, oh so useful. I can increase space between elements without having to write any custom CSS. It empowers folks that are visual, but not technical. Combine it with Columns and you can almost pretend that you’re using a grid!

(It is, at the very least, hidden from screen readers.)

Okay but what does it look like?

With those in place, let’s check out my homepage.

Almost perfect. It’s bold, streamlined, and features plenty of cute cats. The only issue that caught my eye is the gap of white between the page content and the footer, which I can fix with some CSS added into WordPress’s Customizer tool:

.home .footer-nav-widgets-wrapper {
    margin-top: 0;
}

Not too bad, considering this is the first bit of CSS I’ve had to write for my homepage layout.

How about the old editor?

Out of curiosity, I tried to recreate my homepage using the Classic Editor plugin, which restores the old WordPress editing interface. Since I used some of my favorite plugins on my block editor site, I decided it was only fair to leverage plugins on my classic site. I installed
Shortcodes Ultimate, a plugin offering over 60 shortcodes to improve the WordPress editor. It has a good shortcode picking interface, great documentation, and in my opinion, is one of the best shortcode plugins the WordPress community has to offer.

This wasn’t fun. No shortcode interface will make the experience worth it to me, when I could use Gutenberg. One misplaced bracket, and I’ve borked my site. It takes a whole lot of time. And, I almost always need to write a bunch of custom styles to get it to work with my theme.

With our homepage complete, let’s move on to some interior pages. There are a couple other blocks, and combinations of blocks, that can help me build out the rest of my site.

Cover Block

One of the earliest complex blocks offered in the new WordPress editor was the “Cover” block, which can be used for banners and hero images:

Originally, it only allowed you to add an image or video, headings, and paragraphs, but the requirements have recently been loosened so you can add whatever blocks you like. This can lead to some unique layout possibilities.

Take, for example, a “Teams” section on our About page. We could use columns to make a simple layout, like this:

But if we have better images, we could explore using Cover to create more visual impact:

Let’s say we didn’t have any staff images, or they’re all poor quality and weirdly cropped, which is… not an usual occurrence! We can forego images altogether and instead, use the new gradient picker in Cover and use that to create visual impact:

Explore third-party blocks

Like CoBlocks’s gallery blocks, many third-party WordPress plugins can enhance your site and allow you to create a better experience for your visitors.

Accordions

Let’s say this rescue organization has some FAQs. Rather than creating a wall-of-text, we could use an accordion block to organize the content for easier browsing:

Grids

If columns aren’t adequate for achieving the layout you’re looking to build, you could try the Grids plugin by Evolve, which comes with a “build your own grid” feature:

I can use this block to make a more visually interesting landing page for the “Get Involved” section, which only exists to link out to its child pages:

Typography

You can also use plugins like CoBlocks and Kioken Blocks to customize your site’s typography, opening up the possibilities for a truly from-scratch site design. And I have to admit, as someone who makes web software, the idea of giving full typographic control to users terrifies me… but as a designer, I absolutely love this feature! ????

With these tools, it won’t take long to finish my website.

Tons of new possibilities

Mix and match to create beautiful, art-directed experiences using blocks. You can look for plugins that support and build on the new editor, or specifically download individual blocks in the new WordPress block directory (just beta launched!).

Unsure of how to combine blocks to make an impact? A couple of plugins like Atomic Blocks, Kioken Blocks, and Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg include pre-curated layouts you can quickly add to your own sites. These layouts are already art directed, so you can choose the one that creates the biggest impact on your own audience.

Explore, and share your results!

About the author

Mel Choyce is a wicked awesome product designer based in Boston, Massachusetts. Not only is Mel a WordPress Core Committer and former Release Lead, she is a regular core contributor and speaks frequently at WordCamps on design, typography, and user experience.

When Mel isn’t designing products at Automattic, she enjoys cold brew coffee, craft beer, and rocking out in her band. Say hi to her on Twitter at @melchoyce, and visit her site at choycedesign.com.

More articles by Mel

Naidu slammed the Congress saying it was treating the Telangana issue as an internal matter.

On today's JavaScript Jabber Show, Charles, Aimee, Joe, and Cory discuss Wordpress and Wordpress API for JavaScript Developers with Roy Sivan. Roy is a WordPress (WP) developer at Disney Interactive. He has long been a fan of JavaScript and WP. During a WordCamp, the WP Founder announced the need for WP developers to learn JavaScript. But, what's in WP that developers should be interested about? Tune in to learn!

Opperman, Jeffrey J., 1971- author

This site has been written in HTML5 and used to use WordPress to manage the content. I’ll explain why I used HTML5, describe the structure of the theme templates, and show some of the ways I tried to tame WordPress’s tendency to add mess to the source code.

As this is my personal site I wanted to experiment with using HTML5, CSS3, and WAI-ARIA. All these documents are currently working drafts and subject to change. However, the web documents and applications of the future are going to be written in HTML5 and I wanted to see the benefits of using it to markup static documents. Using CSS 2.1, let alone the CSS3 selectors and properties that some browser vendors have implemented, has many advantages for controlling the presentation of semantically coded documents. For this reason I am not going to avoid using basic CSS 2.1 selectors just to faithfully reproducing this site’s design in IE6. However, I have tried to accommodate IE 7 and IE 8 users by using an HTML5 enabling script so that the new HTML5 elements can be styled in those browsers if users have Javascript enabled.

HTML5 templates

I started with a static prototype of this site developed on my local server. WordPress makes it very easy to create your own templates and, therefore, it is no problem to use HTML5. This theme only has 3 main templates: index, single, and archive. There are of course templates for 404s, attachments, comments, etc., but I won’t discuss them as they are all based on the 3 main templates. All the templates include ARIA roles as an accessibility aide.

The single.php template has this rough structure:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8">
  <title></title>
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="default.css">
</head>

<body>
  <header role="banner"></header>
  <nav role="navigation"></nav>
  <article role="main">
    <header>
      <time datetime="YYYY-MM-DD"></time>
      <h1></h1>
    </header>
    <footer></footer>
  </article>
  <nav></nav>
  <aside role="complementary"></aside>
  <footer role="contentinfo">
    <small></small>
  </footer>
</body>
</html>

The first line of the document is the HTML5 DOCTYPE. The new <article> element contains the content of each post. The same structure is used for the index.php template except that there are several articles displayed on each page and the ARIA role value of main is not used. In contrast, the archive.php template houses all the article excerpts in a <section> element with the ARIA role of main because the list of archived posts is itself the main content of the document.

A clean theme

WordPress tends to add classes, elements, and other bits of code in certain places. I haven’t used any of the WordPress functions that add class names to the body and to elements wrapping a post and also wanted to avoid cluttering the source code with any other unnecessary markup. This required a bit of fiddling around with the theme’s functions.php file. I’m not a PHP developer so this might not be pretty!

Removing actions from wp_head()

WordPress has a hook called wp_head that sits in the header.php of most themes. To avoid it inserting unwanted code into the <head> of the document I used the remove_action function to disable the functions that were responsible. The following code was added to the functions.php file of my theme:

// Remove links to the extra feeds (e.g. category feeds)
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'feed_links_extra', 3 );
// Remove links to the general feeds (e.g. posts and comments)
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'feed_links', 2 );
// Remove link to the RSD service endpoint, EditURI link
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'rsd_link' );
// Remove link to the Windows Live Writer manifest file
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'wlwmanifest_link' );
// Remove index link
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'index_rel_link' );
// Remove prev link
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'parent_post_rel_link', 10, 0 );
// Remove start link
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'start_post_rel_link', 10, 0 );
// Display relational links for adjacent posts
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'adjacent_posts_rel_link', 10, 0 );
// Remove XHTML generator showing WP version
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'wp_generator' );

Source: WPEngineer.com: Cleanup WordPress Header

Removing an empty <span>

If you want to create excerpts you can either write them into the excerpt box or use the <--more--> quicktag in the WordPress editor. I just wanted the first paragraph of my posts to be used as the excerpt and so using the in-editor tag was the most practical approach I was aware of. However, when you do this WordPress will insert an empty <span> in the post’s content. This element has an id so that the area following the excerpt can be targeted by “more” or “continue reading” links. I removed both the empty <span> and the jump link by adding the following code to the functions.php file of the theme:

// removes empty span
function remove_empty_read_more_span($content) {
  return eregi_replace("(<p><span id="more-[0-9]{1,}"></span></p>)", "", $content);
}
add_filter('the_content', 'remove_empty_read_more_span');

Source: Ganda Manurung: Remove Empty Span Tag On WordPress

// removes url hash to avoid the jump link
function remove_more_jump_link($link) {
  $offset = strpos($link, '#more-');
  if ($offset) {
    $end = strpos($link, '"',$offset);
  }
  if ($end) {
    $link = substr_replace($link, '', $offset, $end-$offset);
  }
  return $link;
}
add_filter('the_content_more_link', 'remove_more_jump_link');

Source: WordPress Codex: Customizing the Read More

Displaying images in the excerpt

For posts that display nothing but a photograph (yes, they will be shit but I’m hoping it gets me using my camera a bit more often) I wanted the image to show up in the archives. Equally, if the first paragraph of a post contained a link I wanted that to be preserved. The default the_excerpt() template tag doesn’t allow for this so it needed some modifying. I added a new function, which is just a modified version of the core excerpt function, to the functions.php file and then made sure that the template tag executed this function rather than the one contained in the core WordPress files.

function improved_trim_excerpt($text) {
   if ( '' == $text ) {
      $text = get_the_content('');
      $text = strip_shortcodes( $text );
      $text = apply_filters('the_content', $text);
      $text = str_replace(']]>', ']]>', $text);
      $text = strip_tags($text, '<p><img><a>');
      $excerpt_length = apply_filters('excerpt_length', 55);
      $words = explode(' ', $text, $excerpt_length + 1);
      if (count($words) > $excerpt_length) {
         array_pop($words);
         array_push($words, '[...]');
         $text = implode(' ', $words);
         $text = force_balance_tags($text);
      }
   }
   return $text;
}
remove_filter('get_the_excerpt', 'wp_trim_excerpt');
add_filter('get_the_excerpt', 'improved_trim_excerpt');

Source: Aaron Russell: Improving WordPress’ the_excerpt() template tag

Conditional next/prev links

I prefer not to have empty elements in the markup and so I needed a way to conditionally insert the “Older entries”, “Newer Entries”, etc., links into templates. The solution I’m using here, which isn’t perfect, is to add this to functions.php:

function show_posts_nav() {
  global $wp_query;
  return ($wp_query->max_num_pages > 1);
}

Source: Eric Martin: Conditional navigation links in WordPress

And then to wrap the navigation markup in the templates with the following:

<?php if (show_posts_nav()) : ?>
<nav>
   <ul>
      <li><?php next_posts_link('&#171; Older Entries') ?></li>
      <li><?php previous_posts_link('Newer Entries &#187;') ?></li>
   </ul>
</nav>
<?php endif; ?>

Summary

It’s fairly easy to create a simple site with HTML5 and to use WordPress to deliver it. At the moment there are issues with Internet Explorer because you cannot style HTML5 elements unless you use Javascript. However, HTML5 redefines the meaning of certain elements (such as <dl>, which has become a more versatile “description list”) and allows block elements to be wrapped in a link. Therefore, there is still benefit in using the HTML5 DOCTYPE even if you do not make use of the new elements.

Further reading

1. HTML5 working draft
2. HTML5 differences from HTML4
3. Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.0

Here are two ways to include HTML5 elements in your WordPress post content without WordPress’ wpautop function wrapping them in p tags or littering your code with line breaks.

HTML5 has several new elements that you may want to use in your post content to markup document sections, headers, footers, pullquotes, figures, or groups of headings. One way to safely include these elements in your posts is simple; the other way is a bit more complicated. Both ways rely on hand-coding the HTML5 markup in the WordPress editor’s HTML view.

If you are adding HTML5 elements to your post content then you should use an HTML5 doctype.

Disable wpautop for your theme

This is the simple way. Disable the wpautop function so that WordPress makes no attempt to correct your markup and leaves you to hand-code every line of your posts. If you want total control over every line of your HTML then this is the option for you.

To disable wpautop entirely add these lines to your theme’s functions.php:

remove_filter('the_excerpt', 'wpautop');
remove_filter('the_content', 'wpautop');

However, wpautop is generally quite useful if most of your posts are simple text content and you only occasionally want to include HTML5 elements. Therefore, modifying wpautop to recognise HTML5 elements might be more practical.

Modify wpautop to recognise HTML5 elements

WordPress’ wpautop is part of the core functions and can be found in this file within your WordPress installation: wp-includes/formatting.php. It controls how and where paragraphs and line breaks are inserted in excerpts and post content.

In order to create a modified version of WordPress’ core wpautop function I started off by duplicating it in my theme’s functions.php file.

What I’ve experimented with is disabling wpautop and adding a modified copy of it – which includes HTML5 elements in its arrayss – to my theme’s functions.php file.

Add the following to your theme’s functions.php file and you’ll be able to use section, article, aside, header, footer, hgroup, figure, details, figcaption, and summary in your post content. (Probably best to try this in a testing environment first!)

/* -----------------------------
MODIFIED WPAUTOP - Allow HTML5 block elements in wordpress posts
----------------------------- */

function html5autop($pee, $br = 1) {
   if ( trim($pee) === '' )
      return '';
   $pee = $pee . "
"; // just to make things a little easier, pad the end
   $pee = preg_replace('|<br />s*<br />|', "

", $pee);
   // Space things out a little
    // *insertion* of section|article|aside|header|footer|hgroup|figure|details|figcaption|summary
   $allblocks = '(?:table|thead|tfoot|caption|col|colgroup|tbody|tr|td|th|div|dl|dd|dt|ul|ol|li|pre|select|form|map|area|blockquote|address|math|style|input|p|h[1-6]|hr|fieldset|legend|section|article|aside|header|footer|hgroup|figure|details|figcaption|summary)';
   $pee = preg_replace('!(<' . $allblocks . '[^>]*>)!', "
$1", $pee);
   $pee = preg_replace('!(</' . $allblocks . '>)!', "$1

", $pee);
   $pee = str_replace(array("
", "
"), "
", $pee); // cross-platform newlines
   if ( strpos($pee, '<object') !== false ) {
      $pee = preg_replace('|s*<param([^>]*)>s*|', "<param$1>", $pee); // no pee inside object/embed
      $pee = preg_replace('|s*</embed>s*|', '</embed>', $pee);
   }
   $pee = preg_replace("/

+/", "

", $pee); // take care of duplicates
// make paragraphs, including one at the end
   $pees = preg_split('/
s*
/', $pee, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
   $pee = '';
   foreach ( $pees as $tinkle )
      $pee .= '<p>' . trim($tinkle, "
") . "</p>
";
   $pee = preg_replace('|<p>s*</p>|', '', $pee); // under certain strange conditions it could create a P of entirely whitespace
// *insertion* of section|article|aside
   $pee = preg_replace('!<p>([^<]+)</(div|address|form|section|article|aside)>!', "<p>$1</p></$2>", $pee);
   $pee = preg_replace('!<p>s*(</?' . $allblocks . '[^>]*>)s*</p>!', "$1", $pee); // don't pee all over a tag
   $pee = preg_replace("|<p>(<li.+?)</p>|", "$1", $pee); // problem with nested lists
   $pee = preg_replace('|<p><blockquote([^>]*)>|i', "<blockquote$1><p>", $pee);
   $pee = str_replace('</blockquote></p>', '</p></blockquote>', $pee);
   $pee = preg_replace('!<p>s*(</?' . $allblocks . '[^>]*>)!', "$1", $pee);
   $pee = preg_replace('!(</?' . $allblocks . '[^>]*>)s*</p>!', "$1", $pee);
   if ($br) {
      $pee = preg_replace_callback('/<(script|style).*?</\1>/s', create_function('$matches', 'return str_replace("
", "<WPPreserveNewline />", $matches[0]);'), $pee);
      $pee = preg_replace('|(?<!<br />)s*
|', "<br />
", $pee); // optionally make line breaks
      $pee = str_replace('<WPPreserveNewline />', "
", $pee);
   }
   $pee = preg_replace('!(</?' . $allblocks . '[^>]*>)s*<br />!', "$1", $pee);
// *insertion* of img|figcaption|summary
   $pee = preg_replace('!<br />(s*</?(?:p|li|div|dl|dd|dt|th|pre|td|ul|ol|img|figcaption|summary)[^>]*>)!', '$1', $pee);
   if (strpos($pee, '<pre') !== false)
      $pee = preg_replace_callback('!(<pre[^>]*>)(.*?)</pre>!is', 'clean_pre', $pee );
   $pee = preg_replace( "|
</p>$|", '</p>', $pee );

   return $pee;
}

// remove the original wpautop function
remove_filter('the_excerpt', 'wpautop');
remove_filter('the_content', 'wpautop');

// add our new html5autop function
add_filter('the_excerpt', 'html5autop');
add_filter('the_content', 'html5autop');

The results are not absolutely perfect but then neither is the original wpautop function. Certain ways of formatting the code will result in unwanted trailing </p> tags or a missing opening <p> tags.

For example, to insert a figure with caption into a post you should avoid adding the figcaption on a new line because an image or link appearing before the figcaption will end up with a trailing </p>.

<!-- this turns out ok -->
<figure>
  <a href="#"><img src="image.jpg" alt="" /></a><figcaption>A figure caption for your reading pleasure</figcaption>
</figure>

<!-- this turns out not so ok -->
<figure>
  <a href="#"><img src="image.jpg" alt="" /></a>
  <figcaption>A figure caption for your reading pleasure</figcaption>
</figure>

Another example would be when beginning the contents of an aside with a paragraph. You’ll have to leave a blank line between the opening aside tag and the first paragraph.

<aside>

This content could be a pullquote or information that is tangentially related to the surrounding content. But to get it wrapped in a paragraph you have to leave those blank lines either side of it before the tags.

</aside>

Room for improvement

Obviously there are still a few issues with this because if you format your post content in certain ways then you can end up with invalid HTML, even if it doesn’t actually affect the rendering of the page. But it seems to be pretty close!

Leave a comment or email me if you are using this function and find there that are instances where it breaks down. I ran numerous tests and formatting variations to try and iron out as many problems as possible but it’s unlikely that I tried or spotted everything.

Hopefully someone with more PHP and WordPress experience will be able to improve upon what I’ve been experimenting with, or find a simpler and more elegant solution that retains the useful wpautop functionality while allowing for the use of HTML5 elements in posts. Please share anything you find!

How to create a custom Tweet Button for WordPress using the bit.ly and Twitter APIs. The HTML and CSS is completely customisable and there is no need for JavaScript. PHP is used to automatically shorten and cache the URL of a post, fetch and cache the number of retweets, and populate the query string parameters in the link to Twitter.

The custom Tweet Button at the bottom of this post was created using this method. All the files are available on Github and released under MIT license. The PHP code was heavily influenced by the BackType Tweetcount plugin.

How to use

You’ll need your own bit.ly account and to be comfortable editing your theme’s functions.php, style.css, and template files. Be sure to make backups before you start making changes.

Step 1: Download the Custom Tweet Button for WordPress files from Github.

Step 2: Include the custom-tweet-button.php file in your theme’s functions.php file.

Step 3: Replace the bit.ly username, bit.ly API key, and Twitter username placeholders in the tweet_button function with your own. Your bit.ly credentials can be found on the “settings” page of your account.

Step 4: Add the custom Tweet Button CSS to your theme’s style.css file. Add the tweet.png image in your theme’s image folder. Make sure the image is correctly referenced in the CSS file.

Step 5: Call the function tweet_button in your template files (e.g. single.php) at the position(s) in the HTML you’d like the Tweet Button to appear:

if (function_exists('tweet_button')) {
   tweet_button(get_permalink());
}

Why make your own Tweet Button?

Making your own custom Tweet Button for WordPress has several additional advantages over using Twitter’s own offerings.

• Full control over the HTML and CSS.
  Having full control over the HTML and CSS means that you can choose how to present your Tweet Button. I decided to reproduce the horizontal and vertical styles of Twitter’s own button. But any appearance is possible.

• All click, traffic, and referrer data is stored in your bit.ly account.
  The URL for any published post is automatically shortened using the bit.ly service. The short URL is then passed to Twitter to ensure you can monitor the click and traffic data in your bit.ly account. The permalink is passed to Twitter in the counturl query string parameter to ensure that it counts the URL that your short URL resolves to.

• No need for JavaScript or embedded iframes.
  The Tweet Button works without JavaScript. You have full control over any custom JavaScript enhancements you may wish to include. If you’d prefer Twitter’s share page to open in a pop-up window you can write your own JavaScript handler.

• Faster page load.
  No external JavaScript or image files are loaded; both the short URL and retweet counts are cached.

• Use the short URL and retweet count for other purposes.
  The short URLs and retweet counts are stored as post meta-data. This makes it easy to display this data anywhere else in a post. The retweet count data could be used for conditional template logic. For example, you could order posts based on the number of retweets, apply custom styles to your most retweeted posts, or display your most tweeted posts in a widget.

• Easy to add Google Analytics campaign and event tracking.
  The Tweet Button is simple HTML and you have control over all the information that is sent to Twitter. Therefore, it is possible to use Google Analytics to help answer questions like: are people sharing your posts from the homepage or the post itself? If the Tweet Button is displayed above and below your posts, which gets the most clicks? How long do people take to click the Tweet Button? How many people are visiting my site thanks to links posted on Twitter using the Tweet Button?

• Approximate the number of retweets for old posts.
  Before the release of the official Tweet Button, Twitter did not collect data on the number of times a URL was tweeted. This means your older posts may display far fewer retweets than actually occurred. However, there is a workaround. Use a service like Topsy, Backtype, or Tweetmeme to get the number of times your old post was retweeted. The difference between this and the number from Twitter’s APIs is the approximate number of retweets Twitter missed. To correct the retweet count for old posts add the number of missed retweets to a Custom Field called retweet_count_start.

How the custom Tweet Button works

Once a post is published its permalink URL is shortened using the bit.ly API.

The returned URL is permanently cached in the bitly_short_url Custom Field. The short URL is now part of the post’s general meta-data and can be used in contexts other than the Tweet Button.

The Twitter API is used to get the number of retweets for the post’s permalink URL. This number, along with the time at which it was requested, is cached in the retweet_cache Custom Field. When the cache interval has passed, an API call is made and the returned number of retweets is checked against the value stored in retweet_cache. If the returned number is greater, the value of retweet_cache is updated.

The content of the tweet is automatically created by setting several properties for the http://twitter.com/share URL. The post title makes up the message; the short URL is passed to Twitter as the URL to be displayed in the tweet; the permalink URL is passed to Twitter as the URL to be counted; and your username is declared.

$twitter_params =
'?text=' . urlencode($title) .
'&url=' . urlencode($short_url) .
'&counturl=' .urlencode($url).
'&via=' . $twitter_via;

The default HTML output is very simple and can be fully customised. To display the count number vertically, add the class vcount.

<div class="twitter-share vcount>
   <a class="twitter-button"
      rel="external nofollow"
      title="Share this on Twitter"
      href="http://twitter.com/share?query-string-params"
      target="_blank">Tweet</a>
   <a class="twitter-count" href="http://twitter.com/search?q=url>259</a>
</div>

Further enhancements

Please apply any improvements or enhancements for the script against the source repository.

Beck, Jessica Neuman

Peter Tasker on creating blocks right now:

It’s fairly straightforward these days to get set up with the WP CLI ‘scaffold’ command. This command will set up a WordPress theme or plugin with a ‘blocks’ folder that contains the PHP and base CSS and JavaScript required to create a custom block. The only drawback that I noticed is that the JavaScript uses the old ES5 syntax rather than modern ESNext. Modern JavaScript allows us to write more concise

… Read article “How to Create Custom WordPress Editor Blocks in 2020”

The post How to Create Custom WordPress Editor Blocks in 2020 appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

WordPress 5.4 was released not so long ago and, along with other improvements and bug fixes, it introduced a feature called Block Variations. I had a chance to use it on one of my recent projects and am so pleasantly surprised with how smart this feature is. I actually think it hasn’t received the attention it deserves, which is why I decided to write this article.

What is a Block Variation?

Block Variations allow developers to define instances of existing … Read article “How to Use Block Variations in WordPress”

The post How to Use Block Variations in WordPress appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

Supplies remained unaffected and no unusual spike in prices says Mandi Chairman; 15 confirmed cases registered so far

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Interview with Co-founder, DAKSH & Samvad Partners

Dewey Library - TL789.85.S85 S85 2019

Online Resource

Analysts at Goldman Sachs expect the Indian economy to contract 0.4 per cent in FY21 versus consensus median 2.7 per cent

The rapid and widening spread of the Covid-19, deteriorating global economic outlook, falling oil prices, and financial market turmoil are creating a severe and extensive economic and financial shock