Much of the excitement we’ve seen so far about HTML5 has been for the new APIs: local storage, application cache, Web workers, 2-D drawing and the like. But let’s not overlook that HTML5 brings us 30 new elements to mark up documents and applications, boosting the total number of elements available to us to over 100.
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Multisite is a powerful new feature that arrived with the release of WordPress 3.0. It allows website managers to host multiple independent websites with a single installation of WordPress.
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Today we are delighted to release another freebie for our design community. There are many free icon sets out there, and there are quite many commercial ones as well. Yet a good, consistently designed icon set is always a welcome addition to any designer’s toolbox.
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There comes a point in the career of many Web designers where the logical progression in that career is to take on a leadership position. A logical step or not, when a designer “assumes” this type of a position, there is often another “assumption” happening at the same — that wizard-like proficiency with HTML and CSS, coupled with a number of years in the industry, equips someone to take on a leadership role. This is, of course, not always the case.
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Forums have been around forever, so it should come as no surprise that several plugins for the popular publishing platform WordPress provide this feature, as well as support for integrating other forum software. One project, however, has a special place in the WordPress community, and that is bbPress. This is the software created by WordPress founder, Matt Mullenweg, as a lightweight system for the Wordpress.org support forums. In true open-source fashion, the bbPress project was born (at bbpress.org, of course) as a lightweight standalone alternative for forums.
The problem is that the project never really kept up the pace; and while the WordPress community wanted to use it, and bbPress saw some promising spurts of development, it never really caught up to the alternatives. Most of us who needed a forum went either with a plugin alternative that integrated perfectly or with forum software such as Vanilla.
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There are many ways to skin a redesign (I think that’s how the saying goes). On a philosophical level, I agree with those who advocate for realigning, not redesigning, but these are mere words when you’re staring a design problem in the face with no idea where to start.
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As Web developers, we have an affinity for developing with JavaScript. Whatever the language used in the back end, JavaScript and the browser are the primary language-platform combination available at the user’s end. It has many uses, ranging from silly to experience-enhancing.
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Update (November 12th 2011): Read a reply by Jeremy Keith to this article in which he strongly argues about the importance of pursuing semantic value and addresses issues discussed in the article as well as in the comments here on Smashing Magazine.
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