This week I’m rambling about the potential of using react components to transform the DOM responsively to different display sizes. I think there’s some fun to be had there. Beagle and I are keeping warm and busy during this ridiculous cold that just blew in. Hope you enjoy!
Dat face tho…
Also I forgot to post last week’s vlog, so here it is!
Drop me a comment and let me know what new web dev/design stuff you’re thinking about, or anything really! Tatty-byes.
It’s hard to imagine a better time of year than around Christmas. Things have been going great for me and the beagle. Between starting the new job with Beaver Builder in November and enjoying my first true remote work experience, I really can’t complain.
I’ve managed to take a few decent photos here and there. I’ve been resurrecting my vlog lately as well so I figured it’s high time to post some new work here too. So here ya go.
Beagle being a total ham
Shake it off
The year is wrapping up pretty quickly and I’m excited about the spring. It’s time to get Whole30 going again in January and try to kick some of this holiday weight that I’ve been packing on since October.
Papa looking at photos of Papa. So Meta.
Christmas has really been great. Bentley and I spent Christmas Eve with the Jett side of the family and, apart from my Aunt and Uncle not being there, I think everyone really enjoyed it. Thankfully, I managed to get a few decent photos out of it as well.
The family photo book has become a bit of a tradition now. I believe I’ve done 5 of them and I’m pretty sure my grandparents would be a bit put out if I ever stopped. That presents a challenge this next year since I’m planning to relocate to Dallas and won’t have as many opportunities to get the family photos throughout the year. I’ll figure something out.
The year will be over soon but I know that the spring will be exciting too. I’m not too crazy about turning 32 but I can’t say my life didn’t improve during my thirty-first year. As usual, the beagle continues to keep me entertained. Check out our latest antics below. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to go beyond the default setup of WP and start thinking of the site as a experience for the people who will ultimately be managing it. I think I might do a pitch for a wordcamp session. Stay tuned.
I’m spending the evening working on that beaver project, you know the one. Beagle and I are watching it rain from the patio. Why is it so nice when it’s raining? I kinda wish I had room I could go to where it was always raining outside.
It’s been so long since I’ve published anything. I have high hopes of saying something again soon. Pray for me 🙂
This is not a new topic. People have been trying to understand the separate but equally necessary roles of style and layout since well before the internet. The advent of the web simply made the notion of reusable parts more achievable than it ever had been before. The first real worldwide attempt at this, to my knowledge, was the introduction of CSS as a presentation counterpart to the declarative role of HTML. In a sense, HTML was meant to control the layout and content of the page, and CSS was to control the style. But the lines quickly blurred. CSS was given control over dimensional properties like margin, padding, border (for the new kids, before border-box sizing, borders took up space-and broke layouts), and of course floats. So it became up to the developer to exercise their own sensibilities about which pieces of code should contain which decisions. Then grid libraries (bootstrap) came out. This paradigm said “This stylesheet will handle layout. Your stylesheet can handle styling” and that model continues to work for a lot of us today. But its still code and at some point you really have to stop and think “Why am I doing all this work for the machine? Shouldn’t it be working for me instead?” and from that seed is born a page builder, or at least the hope of one.
Builder themes and plugins are almost as old as WordPress’ notion of themes and people have been trying to figure out how to make them work together for quite a while. Themes have a history of deciding the layouts for our websites and the premium theme market has made a lot of money selling us “new looks” for our existing or new sites. But quite often these themes disappoint. Either they don’t quite look as good with our content as they did on the shiny demo site, or there’s some very small change to the layout you’d like to make which ultimately leaves you spending more money changing it than you did buying the theme, or if you’re a more seasoned developer, you make the mistake of looking under the hood and discover that this shiny new design was written by a complete idiot who is off counting his money now. We’ve been held hostage by disappointing themes for a long time, but as the various page builder projects have matured, things are starting to look up. I won’t beat around the bush: I think Beaver Builder is a killer plugin and by far the most usable of all the page builders I’ve tried (and I’ve tried them all). But once you begin defining layouts on a page-by-page basis, it forces you to once again, consider the separation of style and layout, and this brings us to a question: What is the role of a theme when using a page builder?
I’d love to simply say “Themes do styles and builders do layout” but while I do think that’s the correct conclusion, its not quite that simple. Themes have a lot of responsibilities, some of which require layouts that a page builder plugin like Beaver Builder can’t currently satisfy. Take the blog template (index.php) for example. You can’t build a WordPress theme without this. Beaver Builder itself has a few great modules for displaying posts in interesting ways, but since its designed to display “page” layouts and the blog isn’t technically a page, you can’t actually use a builder layout to display it. If you’re using a standard page for your front page and a page for your posts page, you can, but you have to trick WordPress by not specifying the posts page field so that it will still use page.php to display the blog inside of index.php (I know, stay with me here). Themes also are responsible for other layouts besides posts and pages like authors, categories, tags, search, 404 page, etc…all things that a “page” builder isn’t capable of reaching (yet). So what is the practical role of a theme?
I’ve been writing themes for a long time but introducing a page builder into the mix, I think, lessens the responsibilities of a theme by just a little bit in a very positive way. Themes get to be just that: Themes. Bundles of styling concepts to make sites look excellent. This means typography and color choices. Also, interpretations of WordPress concepts like aligning images (yes, you still need the generated css classes in your theme) as well as galleries. Pretty soon oembeds will be on the list of things a theme will need an opinion about. Templates are where things change. Yes, you need a blog template, a default page template (even if its a big open one-column), author, taxonomy, single, etc… But you DON’T need custom page templates. DON’T make a front-page template either. Let the builder take over the individual layout needs of pages. This gives the end user much more flexibility in the long run. On the flip side, don’t expect the builder to handle styling. Make sure your default type and color styles, even spacing between elements are all happening naturally regardless of whether a page is using a builder layout or not. Here’s my list of how this all breaks down:
Themes are responsible for:
Page builders are responsible for:
So all of this to say its time for a new breed of theme: The Builder-Friendly theme. I believe there is a really nice sweet spot that happens when themes and layout plugins cooperate. If you’re a Beaver Builder fan, its about raising some hype with people about why BB-compatible themes are better than the vast majority of the premium themes out there (looking at you, theme forest) and if you’re a themer, its about making themes that are transparent with what’s in them. Here’s a thought: take all those layouts that you were going to have to write as custom page templates and include them as BB Layouts that can be imported. If you’re looking for info on how to make a theme BB-friendly, check out this gist for how I like to go about it: https://gist.github.com/brentjett/b6354a7b682a16735e92
Over time, I hope that the Beaver Builder team will offer more and more hooks for themes to offer nice handshakes to the builder. In the meantime, its starting to be fun to make websites again 🙂
Video blogging is a new thing for me but it’s been a lot time coming. We’ve talked forever at work about showing our clients how to create and curate content online and develop a sustainable content marketing plan, but knowing that its kind of a “but what have you done?” kind of situation, its been a slow crawl to actually beginning it. After a few recent equipment purchases I’ve finally decided it’s time to make a go of it and try to wrap my head around the vastness that is YouTube. I confess I’ve begun watching a few star youtubers who will remain nameless although you know exactly who they are and if you don’t, you should really spend a weekend binging on youtube (hint: binge). For the record, Yes I have been watching Miranda Sings and yes, part of my soul died the moment I saw her but I’m convinced I won’t miss it. Anyway all this to say that I have officially started working on some videos of my own. I managed to pop out two today actually which will certainly not be a regular happening.
The first video is a screencast about my recent (but deeply serious) relationship with a WordPress plugin called Beaver Builder (go get yourself a copy). While the video turned out to be way too long and I swear I’ll never publish a screencast that long again, I feel like it was a good primer on what they layout tool is capable of. The second video was really an exercise in curation. Mark had sent me a Lifehack article a few weeks ago called 20 Things Only Highly Creative People Would Understand and it really was very good and also a little jarring. I took a few of the points out of it and made a talking head video discussing the points that hit me most.
All in all, not a bad Saturday’s work and I feel like this could be the start of something, assuming I’m able to keep coming up with video topics. I’ve still got so much to learn but I am getting more comfortable simply being in front of the camera without completely loathing myself. It’s also inspired me to start what I’m calling “The Youtube Diet” which is really just paleo with the added incentive of having to see yourself on camera every day (shame works!). Anyway, I hope this is the beginning of something great. Check out my YouTube channel and if you’re feeling generous, Like a video or perhaps even become my first subscriber! My self-esteem will be infinitely grateful. If you have any ideas for videos you’d like to see me create whether they be about creative tools and how to use them, or just life in general, feel free to comment below or tweet at me! Enjoy.
Brent Jett 