Issue 3 May 2013
- Checks and balances
- by Destry Wion |
- We bring you an uncharacteristic issue this time; a few articles now, and a couple more later. Most articles this issue are written by the Editor-in-Chief. But don’t let that scare you off, Issue 3 is a solid issue. The Editor’s letter introduces some interesting ideas for the magazine that could involve you. We’ll have two Spotlight articles when all said and done; one on a girl and one a boy. Checks and balances. The Bloke delivers a two-fisted tutorial for getting you started with building Textpattern plugins. Destry muses over theoretical designs following the recent Wikipedia Redesigned hoo-ha. We have our first guest author contribution this issue. (You should think about contributing your own sometime.) And a mystery author will review our newest Exhibit entry, which will wrap Issue 3 when posted.
- Carla Lovato on Brazil, design, and Textpattern
- by Destry Wion |
- Brazil has always been a must-go destination for me, even if for a week on the beaten tourist paths. But bikinis and carnival say nothing of the greater cultural experiences to be had by mixing into the big melting pots of Rio de Jeneiro and São Paulo… So says Carla Lovato, who manages the interactive design side of Cadigital, a small web design shop in Brazil’s biggest city. In a huge country where WordPress and Drupal are the perfunctory choices, Carla dances the samba with Textpattern CMS and she’s looking to sway more of her countryfolk to the party.
- Divining David DeSandro
- by Destry Wion |
- David DeSandro is the kind of person Textpattern often draws to its community; people who are talented, genuine and friendly, and who like to create things from the canvas up. He’s also the kind of person that rolls good things back into the communities he belongs to, and the Textpattern community has benefited greatly from his contributions. David is passionate about the work that he does, shares his experiments for the benefit of others, never has a bad word for anyone … the man is going nowhere but up!
- How to create a Textpattern plugin
- by Stef Dawson |
- Love it or hate it, PHP is part of the core fabric of the web, driving blogs, services and corporate sites of all sizes. Textpattern is no exception. The CMS core code is deliberately kept as light and airy as possible, striving to keep out of the way of the process of creating and managing great content. Instead of piling features in, Textpattern prefers offering hooks so that other code can extend the core with PHP. If the thought of dirtying your hands in the squiggles and brackets of a programming language sends you running for the nearest shower, you might be surprised how easy it is. Thanks to Textpattern’s flexible tag system, site designers are already well versed in the concepts of conditional logic. The leap to writing a fragment of code to make you or your clients’ life easier is just a small step further.
- The folly and promise of theoretical (re)designs
- by Destry Wion |
- In early August, the Lithuanian design agency, New!, published a theoretical redesign of Wikipedia, The Wikipedia Redefined. Thanks to popular media like .net bringing attention to it, news of the project quickly spread through the industry grapevine. I watched as New! took quiet heat from prominent people, and criticism from members of the Wikimedia Foundation too. Even Happy Cog watched with interest and enquired of its followers whether or not theoretical designs hurt the design industry. In this article I’d like to rephrase the question: Do they hurt the agency or individual?
- Dissecting HTML5 Boilerplate 4.0
- by Pankaj Parashar |
- If you are looking for a perfect HTML5 template to kickstart your new project that should be fast, robust and cross-browser compatible, you do not have to look beyond the HTML5 Boilerplate. The world’s most popular frontend template is a result of the combined knowledge and effort of more than 100 developers, making it one of the most popular projects on GitHub. But before you skip this article to press the download button, you need to understand; what makes this framework so popular?
