Gerard van Enk

View from any device with a browser (including tablets and smartphones). No downloads, installs, or sign ups. Best of all, it's FREE! - Gerard van Enk

There is a certain style of button on the latest YouTube design (most easily found in the footer) where the default state of the button has a very subtle bevel to it, but on :hover and :focus states the button pops up, eager to be clicked. - Gerard van Enk

If you don’t use permalinks structure for URL’s, you can skip this article. All this matters only when permalinks structure is on. And since most websites use them, it is useful to know how the pretty URL is resolved. When URL is parsed by WordPress, a long list of rewrite rules is used to match the URL (using regular expressions) to a query that WordPress can than understand and use to load and display data. If two rules are conflicted, the one with higher priority is used. If no rule is matched, WordPress will load 404 page. If the rule is matched, but the query returns no results, again 404 page will be displayed, this means that URL request was invalid. - Gerard van Enk

Theme authors come in two different shapes and sizes: those who integrate SEO "functionality" into their themes and those who don't. If you're in the camp of integrating SEO functionality into your theme, you've got yet another choice to make: do you "yield" for site owners that have an SEO plugin installed, disabling your own SEO functionality or do you deny them that choice. For those who do decide to yield and for those who do not integrate SEO functionality into their theme, this is the guide to follow on how to make sure your theme works with all the major SEO plugins and more in particular, my WordPress SEO plugin. - Gerard van Enk

Fortunately WordPress defines two constants which can help you to simplify things nonetheless: WP_PLUGIN_DIR and WP_PLUGIN_URL. These constants point to the plugin directory of the respective WordPress installation. They are defined since WordPress 2.6 and supporting older versions is most likely unnecessary - Gerard van Enk

Many WordPress users know the wp-config.php file as the key to the WordPress database. It is where you set the database name, username, password, and location. You know the one: - Gerard van Enk

In this tutorial, you will use and register a taxonomy called “Profession.” This is just an example, so feel free to experiment and create your own taxonomies for your uses. - Gerard van Enk

By now, we all know that we should be using HTML5 to build websites. The discussion now is moving on to how to use HTML5 correctly. One important part of HTML5 that is still not widely understood is sectioning content: section, article, aside and nav. To understand sectioning content, we need to grasp the document outlining algorithm. Understanding the document outlining algorithm can be a challenge, but the rewards are well worth it. No longer will you agonize over whether to use a section or div element — you will know straight away. Moreover, you will know why these elements are used, and this knowledge of semantics is the biggest benefit of learning how the algorithm works. - Gerard van Enk

One thing I love equally as much as WordPress is sharing (my) knowledge. If I’m asked to share my knowledge about WordPress then I’m most definitely winning. Big time. Recently I was asked to speak at WordCamp Sevilla in Spain, which I gladly did. WordCamp Sevilla was a two day event and I got to do a presentation on both days. Fun times for sure. - Gerard van Enk

This class provides an efficient way to allow theme authors to either include plugins within themes or automatically download them straight from the WordPress Plugin Repository and prompt users to install/activate them upon theme activation. — Read more - Gerard van Enk

Setting up WordPress sites can be a time-consuming process when you factor in installation, plus adding all the plugins you’ll need to be up and running. WP Install Profiles is a plugin that was created to save you time when creating new sites. It automatically downloads groups of plugins that you specify. When I first saw this plugin it reminded me of Drupal installation profiles, which provide a set group of modules for site features in a single download. I’ve used these quite a bit over the past few years and they always save so much time. That’s why I was excited to discover a way to create my own installation profiles for WordPress. - Gerard van Enk

parallel-flickr is a tool for backing up your Flickr photos and generating a database backed website that honours the viewing permissions you've chosen on Flickr. parallel-flickr is still a work in progress. It ain't pretty or classy yet but it works. - Gerard van Enk

There is a lot of math in the visual things we do, even if we don’t realize it. If you want to make something look natural and move naturally, you need to add a bit of physics and rounding to it. Nature doesn’t work in right angles or linear acceleration. This is why zombies in movies are so creepy. This was covered here before in relation to CSS animation, but today let’s go a bit deeper and look at the simple math behind the smooth looks. - Gerard van Enk

I’ve put together a proof-of-concept plugin that does exactly this with the data fields supported by our post formats UI plugin. - Gerard van Enk

Microsoft provides virtual machine disk images to facilitate website testing in multiple versions of IE, regardless of the host operating system. Unfortunately, setting these virtual machines up without Microsoft's VirtualPC can be extremely difficult. The ievms scripts aim to facilitate that process using VirtualBox on Linux or OS X. With a single command, you can have IE7, IE8 and IE9 running in separate virtual machines. - Gerard van Enk

A Modern, Lightweight Open-Source JavaScript Library for Interactive Maps by CloudMade - Gerard van Enk

Het verbindingsplatform voor alle Pop-Up Store initiatieven in Nederland. Leegstand is achteruit gaan, niemand wordt daar vrolijk van. Wij vinden dat het ook anders kan breng de bereidwillige ondernemer en pandeigenaar direct met elkaar in contact om zo invulling te geven aan leegstand. - Gerard van Enk

WordPress users are in luck, since WordPress already has easy-to-use and extendable functions to give you a lot of power and flexibility in handling your website’s emails. In order to create our own system, we will be doing four things. First, we will create a nice email template to use. We will then modify the mailer function so that it uses our new custom template. We will then modify the actual text of some of the built-in emails. Then we will proceed to hook our own emails into different events in order to send some custom emails. Let’s get started! - Gerard van Enk

manifestR is a bookmarklet, which you drag to your bookmarks bar. Then, when you visit any page, you can click the manifestR button, and it will create an HTML5 appcache manifest file for that page. For more on how you then use the manifest see our article. - Gerard van Enk

If you're developing a WordPress theme or plugin you may have had the problem that scripts or stylesheets are not reloaded from the source when you refresh the page because they are cached somewhere on the way from the server to the browser. There are various methods to suppress this behaviour like disabling the browser cache in the options or by using a web development add-on. Sometimes this simply does not work because it's not always apparent where the content is cached since there are so many possibilities and you may have missed to disable all of them. - Gerard van Enk

When building WordPress themes ( or any websites for that matter ) it helps to build up some resources that you can use over and over again to cut down on development time. The development process starts with the initial layout in a program like Photoshop or Fireworks and then on to the HTML / CSS coding. Once you have the required pages coded up, you can then start developing the theme itself and then finally testing the theme within WordPress. Today’s post is one for your bookmarks as I roundup lots of resources for each stage of the development process. - Gerard van Enk

A secure and easy way to reinitialize the WordPress database to its default settings. - Gerard van Enk

The 40 best WordPress plugins, ever. These are essential installations – but remember, Worpdress runs faster with fewer plugins, so don’t be tempted to install them all! - Gerard van Enk

Notificon is a BSD licensed javascript class for providing client-side favicon notifications. Instead of requiring a number of favicons be created and served up to the client, you can specify a label and a favicon (default being the current favicon) and it will generate a favicon notification. - Gerard van Enk