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Web Design and Development |OT| Pixel perfect is dead, long live responsive design
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I have been looking into React some for a personal project and Redux seems to be the go-to so here's the Redux guide for tests. I have nothing else to offer, sorry. 
PetriP-TNT
Member
Lately I have been doing them with Facebook's own suite Jest, which is built on top of Jasmine, mostly because of its mocking capabilities which makes testing the components much easier.
https://facebook.github.io/jest/
If you are not fan of the "mock everything" mantra, Mocha + Chai + JSDOM combination works well too.
The Albatross
Member
So I'm remaking a client's website. He made the current super-simple one using this CM4All website creator, which is not great. He's said I can use whatever I want and his webhost has some tools integrated.
I can write it from scratch, but should I consider using any of these? I'd think it might be nice to leave him with something he can maintain himself, but is that really my problem? Am thinking about wordpress, might be nice to learn.
The site's just a simple website for his store, no interactive shit. Should probably be responsive though.
Out of those, absolutely WordPress. WordPress powers about 25% of websites and is a very easy to learn CMS for non-technical people to take over when you're finished. WordPress has it's faults, but many of those faults are talked about because of its popularity. Plus, non-technical folks have usually heard of it, and for them to have heard of something that makes it sound like the 'latest and greatest' even though it's been around for ages.
WP has a straight forward templating system and tons and tons of support because it's so widely used. It's fair to say that any problem that has ever been encountered has been encountered in WP.
The software can also be extended to do just about anything that most clients would ask of you. Using hooks, filters, and custom content types, you can build a very powerful, intuitive CMS on top of the basic CMS that comes out of the box with WP.
For WP Store fronts, you'll probably want to use WooCommerce. There are others, but similarly, WooCommerce is very popular, initially it's free (freemium model, base store is free, but add-ons cost money). It uses a templating heirarchy virtually identical to WordPress' native templating heirarchy so you don't need to learn something new, or figure out a new template structure. It's also widely supported by all popular plugins.
As a developer, it's good to have some familiarity with WP because of the bulk of contract work that can come in on WordPress. I do freelance WP development and have a backlog of 4 clients with 2 active and another lined up for May when I finish these 4. I'm constantly getting emailed about support and WP development.
The Albatross
Member
Also I wish we could get OT2 and rename the title. Gets to me every time I'm in this thread
AquaticSquirrel
Member
So seeing as someone mention Angular 2.0 last page what is the general verdict on that now?
Last I checked everyone was hesitant to embrace it before release due to breaking backwards compatibility and typescript (which I'm not entirely sure is...some subset of JS?).
So is it worth jumping on the bandwagon now? Is React still the new hotness? Or is Ember where the stable big projects go?
I mean I guess I can learn any of them I just don't want to invest a ton of time in a "bad" one or one that will be gone in 2 years or something.
Last I checked everyone was hesitant to embrace it before release due to breaking backwards compatibility and typescript (which I'm not entirely sure is...some subset of JS?).
So is it worth jumping on the bandwagon now? Is React still the new hotness? Or is Ember where the stable big projects go?
I mean I guess I can learn any of them I just don't want to invest a ton of time in a "bad" one or one that will be gone in 2 years or something.
Anybody have experience building .Net dashboards?
Right now, I'm using Highcharts for the presentation. Any other presentation layer solutions that you'd recommend? I'm loving highcharts right now, but wanted to look for some other options just to be sure.
Side note: Eventually I'm going to be getting SAP data in xml or csv form from a pull request and I need to parse the data into SQL Server. I'm not that familiar with SAP and don't know exactly what the data will look like until the pull is setup. So far, I haven't found great/any documentation for official SAP xml parsing support.
Right now, I'm using Highcharts for the presentation. Any other presentation layer solutions that you'd recommend? I'm loving highcharts right now, but wanted to look for some other options just to be sure.
Side note: Eventually I'm going to be getting SAP data in xml or csv form from a pull request and I need to parse the data into SQL Server. I'm not that familiar with SAP and don't know exactly what the data will look like until the pull is setup. So far, I haven't found great/any documentation for official SAP xml parsing support.
High Charts is decent to work with but paying for js libraries is automatic lose. I don't think anybody uses it but flot.js sucks and there's this custom dashboard thing with a GUI I'ved used called Logi which is possibly the worst thing ever.
The Albatross
Member
Nothing wrong with it, but I feel like it's old fashioned... Like saying "Table-based layouts are dead, long live CSS."
Sounds like highcharts it is. So you won't pay for somebody's product just because it's JavaScript? I mean, what's the alternative? Build your own library, which costs dev time? The company I work for can afford the license. It wouldn't come out of my pocket.
I generally would avoid paying for anyone's library, period. Product yes, code, no. Highcharts is literally the only paid license library I've ever seen in javascript. Pretty much everything is open-source in the js community. If I need something it probably exists in github somewhere and even if not ideal I can modify it to my liking.
PetriP-TNT
Member
I agree with you fully. I am not a FOSS warrior by any means, I use (and love) proprietary software all the time. But I wouldn't really buy an license for a library I'd like to use (but I am totally open for donating towards libraries I heavily use). As an OSS contributor and creator I'd obviously prefer that all software was free to use and improve.
(That said, Highcharts is free for non-profit use)
When I used high charts it was an easy decision for the client. I told them what it would cost when I used a free charting library and build their requirement on top of it myself, or buy a highcharts license. 😉
I really like highcharts though, well documented, robust, tons of features. Very nice.
I really like highcharts though, well documented, robust, tons of features. Very nice.
SuperEpicMan
Banned
I have been learning how to develop over the last year or so, and I am beginning to feel quite comfortable with getting a site to look the way I want, however, I know that for many projects Wordpress may be a good option to use due to the customer being able to edit their own content, and also SEO plug ins etc.
I have wanted to learn how to use Wordpress, but I am not sure the best way to go about this. I have tried making my own wordpress site, but the custom features seem to be blocked behind a paywall. Also I would want to make all the styles myself, but there doesn't seem to be an option to start from scratch without a theme.
I do not want to commit to purchasing subscription, if I find out it does not really work for me.
I have wanted to learn how to use Wordpress, but I am not sure the best way to go about this. I have tried making my own wordpress site, but the custom features seem to be blocked behind a paywall. Also I would want to make all the styles myself, but there doesn't seem to be an option to start from scratch without a theme.
I do not want to commit to purchasing subscription, if I find out it does not really work for me.
You can download the standalone, open source (and of course, free) version of WP from https://wordpress.org/ and upload it wherever you want, then you're free to do whatever you want with it.
SuperEpicMan
Banned
I have just been having a play around with this, but I have no idea what I am doing lol.
Well, you have to know at least a bit of PHP to properly create a theme, or customize somebody else's.
I've never been a fan of the WP official documentation, but there are billions of tutorials around. Being the most used CMS around has some advantages!
Unrelated!
Something that never gets old: finding, everywhere in an app, promises followed by a 1 second long timeout to elaborate the promise response.
I thought the app was slow because it had a huge amount of data going on, turns out it's just written worse than imaginable.
(no, the promise thing isn't the worst offense)
The Albatross
Member
Check out this timely post by Tom McFarlin, who's a WP Developer for PressWare. It's a "getting started with WordPress" guide for setting up WP on your own server and getting into development with it. It's in 4 parts and should be a good guide to getting your feet wet:
https://tommcfarlin.com/how-to-get-started-with-wordpress/
This will all be free if you follow the tutorial... and best of all it was written yesterday
hamauzu kaito
Member
I have just recently started pursuing an interest my long held interest in coding. I started by looking at ruby, but then at the advice of a friend started freecodecamp. It is a great community, with lots of truly helpful people, but sometimes I wonder how people come up with some of the elegant solutions they try to explain to me. I means it seems like everyone is a coding wizard. Is this experience or talent?
Good luck ikuu.
I can't wait to get to this level. I can't fathom going for a job at my current skill level.
My confidence and competence is nowhere to be seen.
Don't worry. I pretty much had no idea what I was doing when I got my first Junior Web Dev position. As long as you know the basics, you'll be fine. Google is your friend.
The Albatross
Member
There's an ordered chaos to the universe when you're trying to vertically center something and someone suggests, "Oh, just display: table, display: table-cell, vertical-align: middle!"
PetriP-TNT
Member
Lately I have just started to go "fuck it" and use flexbox instead.
Too bad there's like 3 flexbox bugs that will screw you over on IE11 just related to vertical centering. Thank god for pre/post-processors
You're already a dev.
Thanks for the advice, especially that last bit. Guess I'll go with it then.
The site's for a small chain of physical stores and currently you can't buy anything through it, but just how much of a pain would it be to allow users to purchase a small selection of very specific products for in-store pickup? I'd use paypal, but even then, would it be worth the hassle to have to deal with that shit?
Check out WooCommerce, it's an ecommerce plugin that integrates seamlessly in virtually any theme.
The free version is powerful enough for a full fledged store, complete with an easy to setup PayPal integration (as in: you just write in your PayPal email address and you're good to go).
WooCommerce starts failing a bit when you have to manage to many items, all with their dozens of variations. Then you'll basically need to start purchasing premium plugins; most of them easily justify their prices, but still.
That's one of the things that drive me crazy, and I'm doing web development for a pretty long time now. Why haver there never been an easy way to vertically align things. You can go the table route that messes you up with, well, fucking tables, or transform/margin negative things into position, which also does not work in every case.
Now we have flex box which I can't use in most projects because: IE and other older browsers.
I'm not worried about the difficulty of implementing it as much as I am about the overhead cost of maintaining it and taking responsibility for customers' transactions. Is that prohibitive? We'd definitely like to avoid having an account system, is that even possible?
https://github.com/blog/2112-delivering-octicons-with-svg
So GitHub switched from icon font to svg icons. This is a debate a lot of people have been having and honestly Github's rational isn't especially compelling. The side-by-side comparison is kinda an eyebrow raiser (the right is the better one? Um okay), the proposed benefits of extra color and animation aren't being used (and probably won't), fonts can be controlled with CSS as well, and font-blocking can be solved with the all new css font-display property. Honestly if <use> worked correctly for external SVGs that would be the holy grail but it doesn't. So to me adding the extra markup is just page weight and not clean semantics (spans for icons aren't smart either, just do it in CSS with pseudo elements).
Anyone else have an opinion here? Quite frankly I haven't seen a good reason to not use icon fonts.
So GitHub switched from icon font to svg icons. This is a debate a lot of people have been having and honestly Github's rational isn't especially compelling. The side-by-side comparison is kinda an eyebrow raiser (the right is the better one? Um okay), the proposed benefits of extra color and animation aren't being used (and probably won't), fonts can be controlled with CSS as well, and font-blocking can be solved with the all new css font-display property. Honestly if <use> worked correctly for external SVGs that would be the holy grail but it doesn't. So to me adding the extra markup is just page weight and not clean semantics (spans for icons aren't smart either, just do it in CSS with pseudo elements).
Anyone else have an opinion here? Quite frankly I haven't seen a good reason to not use icon fonts.
A colleague did this lately and honestly, I don't like it. Font icons served me so well over the last years, and they are so incredibly easy to use and maintain, that I really have a hard time switching to svg for icons.
And the fact that you have to include all the markup in you html because IE will not be able to use it from external sources is a bummer, too.
Daffy Duck
Member
Does anybody know of another program that can maps for clickable areas on images/pages like Dreamweaver can?
I've moved on from DW a couple of years ago now but I have to keep going back to it to do these damn maps for some of our sites.
I've moved on from DW a couple of years ago now but I have to keep going back to it to do these damn maps for some of our sites.
WanderingWind
Mecklemore Is My Favorite Wrapper
Like, an image map? With an image and points on it you can click on to do whatever?
Daffy Duck
Member
Yeah that's the one. So you click over part a of the image it takes you to the contact page for example, part b and it takes you to the homepage.
I can obviously code it up (the map part) but I don't know how to plot the coordinates outside of DW....
I can obviously code it up (the map part) but I don't know how to plot the coordinates outside of DW....
The use of image maps is highly suspect in most cases so I'd wonder what it's for and if there isn't a better way to go about it (svg for instance).
Yessir, you can set it up to allow orders from unregistered people (even disabling the very possibility of account registration), letting PayPal handle everything for you - and in case you're wondering, PayPal allows payment without a PayPal account.
The only downside is of course PayPal's cut, but I guess any other payment gateway has a cost (last time I checked, several years ago, compared to some Italian banks, PayPal was actually the cheaper).
I don't have a WooCommerce store handy to check, but IIRC in a no-registration/PayPal-only case, you'll have a page in the WP dashboard listing all the orders, where you can easily check their status (but anyway you should receive an email when a payment happens) and modify it as needed to, like, product shipped and whatnot.
Users will just have to fill in a form with their shipping/invoicing info only (form should stay saved in the user's cookies, IIRC); all the credit card and payment thing will happen on PayPal site, so you'll never ever know anything about it and you won't be liable in case something bad happens there.
(of course check with some lawyer about how to properly write the terms and conditions page)
WanderingWind
Mecklemore Is My Favorite Wrapper
Finally. I am able to help somebody ITT. Just not tonight - on mobile. I have two jfiddles with two different solutions. SVG is the way to go. I got a template all set.
Daffy Duck
Member
It's on a legacy site I am updating that doesn't have svgs for the source images available (images were created 5+ years ago).
It's basically an image on a show logistics page that has two sets of instructions to download one is shipping the other is an enquiry form.
Sounds great for new stuff I will do but as above I don't have the files as an svg
WanderingWind
Mecklemore Is My Favorite Wrapper
Could you screenshot it?
Daffy Duck
Member
Yeah I can tomorrow at work.
Handsomejan
Member
hey guys, i hope i am in the right thread for my question. It is illustrator related. I am working on a logo for a company of my friend. I have my basic shape and want to have two strokes. I know how to that but there is a catch.
The first stroke, the one right outside the logo should be invisible or not there, dont know how to describe it so you can just see the second stroke which would well, float in the air. So you can see the color of his products in the first stroke. Is this understandable?
I already searched for a youtube vid but i could not find any that helped me out. Hopefully someone here can help. I am nearly crying because i can not get it done properley. More raging than crying but neither helped me yet
Thanks!
The first stroke, the one right outside the logo should be invisible or not there, dont know how to describe it so you can just see the second stroke which would well, float in the air. So you can see the color of his products in the first stroke. Is this understandable?
I already searched for a youtube vid but i could not find any that helped me out. Hopefully someone here can help. I am nearly crying because i can not get it done properley. More raging than crying but neither helped me yet
Thanks!
Daffy Duck
Member
I did Google a while ago and failed to find much that was helpful.
I didn't even know photoshop could do this.