I am in the pre-medical society, Global Medical Brigades, and the club tennis team. This past year I was a campus tour guide, but next year I will be a Learning Assistant for Dr. Gierasch in CHEM 351!

Read his abstract here...

The latest version of WordPress named “Smith” was released yesterday which brings us another round of core changes. This time, the team worked mainly on the back-end editing and admin functions, such as a big TinyMCE (visual editor) update, gallery previews, media playlists, an improved widget UI and live theme previews (only to mention a few). Here’s what you need to know about the major changes in WordPress 3.9.

Improved Widget Interface

While the old widget interface set the standard for drag-and-drop UI when it was introduced, it was time for an overhaul. The developer team took the Widget Customizer plugin and essentially built it into the core.

The biggest changes that come with the new widget interface are live previews, among others:

• Editing existing widgets
• Adding a new widgets
• Widget reordering
• Entirely remove Widgets
• Adding a new widget

(See large preview)

Updated Visual Editor

The visual editor has received a major overhaul (both under the hood and on the UI end), adding a horizontal line button, updated Plupload, and an updated TinyMCE. Small visual changes seem to have been applied to many different button icons.

The new visual editor brings with it gallery previews, meaning no more place holder boxes for galleries! You’ll have a live preview of your gallery, just like you do with images and other media.

TinyMCE has also been updated to version 4.0 for WordPress 3.9. Plupload 2.x has made it’s way in, as well. It handles most of the file upload interfaces in WordPress.

(See large preview)

The updated visual editor also brings drag & drop functionality, allowing you to drag images from your desktop, and drop them right into the post. They’ll be automatically formatted to fit the post.

Here’s a quick preview of how it works:

Live Theme Preview Additions

Live theme preview gives you a way to see how your site would look using a different theme. This has been around for a while and WordPress is finally adding new features to the framework they’ve built.

Apart from the usual customizations options like color, title and whatever else is defined by the theme, you can now add widgets and rearrange them, seeing exactly how they will look once saved. In addition, the header image facility has received an overhaul and now provides even more flexibility.

Easier Theme Installation

The new theme installation interface is a vast improvement over the old. It will be blatantly obvious to anyone who’s ever seen the pre-WordPress 3.9 theme installation screen.

Installing new themes is even easier now, too. The theme installation interface has been totally redone. Some of the most popular themes are displayed immediately in the “Featured” tab, for quick installation.

(See large preview)

There are also tabs for popular themes and latest themes. The feature filter has been moved into it’s own tab, and has been generally cleaned up.

Audio & Video Playlists

Users are now able to create audio and video playlists with WordPress 3.9. They work as a shortcode, just like the image galleries do currently. Uploading audio and video is handled through the usual media uploader, with images and everything else. From there, you have the option to add them to a playlist.

A neat little feature is that WordPress 3.9 will try to automatically fetch album cover artwork using the ID3 tags in your media file.

Key Points For Developers

Plugin and theme developers need to know a few new and important things. Right when upgrading to WordPress 3.9, four new utility functions are mentioned. doing_action() and doing_filter() allow for identifying a hook in progress. The other two functions, has_image_size() and remove_image_size() allow manipulation of custom image sizes.

Various external libraries have been updated, including jQuery, the ever popular JavaScript framework. TinyMCE, which provides the text and visual editing components. Underscore, a utility-belt for functional JavaScript programming. Plupload, which drives most of the upload interfaces in WordPress. Backbone, which uses Underscore as it’s backbone, essentially provides models with key-value bindings and custom events. MediaElement is a well-crafted HTML5 audio and video player. Masonry 3 is a cascading grid layout library.

The database layer has also been improved, making it more fault-resistant and bringing improved compatibility with PHP 5.5 and MySQL 5.6. For example, PHP’s mysqli library is now used when PHP 5.5+ is available. Autosave functionality has been improved, as well.

Your themes can now make use of HTML5 galleries and captions. Adding add_theme_support( 'html5', array( 'gallery', 'caption' ) ); to your theme’s functions.php file will enable HTML5 galleries and captions. Symlinked plugins are a new thing to WordPress 3.9. While it was technically possible in the past, it’s now fully supported:

“One of the cool little features included with 3.9 is the ability to symlink plugin directories. While it has been possible to symlink plugins in the past, functions such as plugins_url() return the wrong URL, which causes breakage in most plugins.”

If you’re a theme or a plugin developer, don’t forget to update your repositories. For some items you may just need to change your “Tested Up To” strings, in other cases (especially if you utilize heavily modified editor or upload configurations) you may need to look at the core changes in more detail.

(Large preview)

So, What Are You Waiting For?

Keep in mind that upgrading your WordPress installation is the number one way to prevent malicious activity and exploits. As always, before any update, please do not forget to back up your database just in case anything goes pear shaped!

WordPress 3.9 is available for download at the usual location, http://wordpress.org/download/.

(dp, il)

The post What You Need To Know About WordPress 3.9 appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

We all know intuitively what makes a website look bad: overused bevel effects, corny clip art, overcrowded layouts. These annoyances are easily corrected by developing with design fundamentals in mind—the same principles used by professional designers and artists alike.

Great websites bring together form and function. In fact, well-designed websites are seen as more credible, according to a Stanford study and are actually easier to use (as studied by researcher Don Norman). So here are five fundamentals to help you keep quality design at the forefront of your practice.

1) Follow the rules…mostly

In design school, they’ll give you a list of principles to abide by that assign rules to beauty—elements like layout, order and symmetry. But as you advance, you’re then told to break the rules a bit to create places for a viewer’s eyes to look by employing elements like variety, tension or contrast.

Here’s an example of a page I did in Edge Reflow CC. Can you spot the different design elements being employed, then played with?

2) Use imagery and icons to communicate when possible

There are some universal icons that people are trained to respond to. The magnifying glass (search), the house (home page) and floppy disk (save) are ingrained into your users already. Take advantage of those visual shortcuts; all those road signs should be immediately recognizable to you.

3) Color as a design element, not as decoration

Color makes all the difference, especially as our screens get better on our phones and tablets. It’s a facet of design that can be a really key part of the story your website wants to tell. Just use color to support content, not decorate a page. And often if you’re using a photo, the colors in the design should be sampled from the photos used so your design has a nice unified feel.

I quite like pulling color examples with color swatches – and the Adobe Kuler Web app is a great way to play with different themes and then import them into your design tools. One of the best rules to go with is to use complimentary colors. Which is basically using warm colors and cool colors together to provide balance.

4) Choose fonts that support content

There are literally thousands of fonts to choose from.

It’s up to you to mix and match – but remember that it’s best practice to use only up to three fonts at a time—a nice headline font, one for the main body of text, then one for any sort of call-out you might need. Often, that means using a sans-serif for the body copy, and for headlines you can get more interesting with either serif or sans-serif.

5) Help from others

All right, you’ve got your basic design elements, with pretty icons and pictures, with a sound color scheme and fun fonts. What’s next?

Getting help from others, of course! And not just random people on the street, but constructive critique from people who really know their stuff, like other designers/developers. This can be instrumental to go from an OK website to one that really pops. If you’ve never used Behance to post a work-in-progess, I recommend giving it a try. The active community will do more than just tell you “to make the logo bigger” – but give you advice that can make the difference between a good website and a great one.

To dive deeper into how to apply design elements to web development, check out my presentation from SXSW:

Online course: How to Build Habit-Forming Technology – only $29!

In this article we’re going to look at ten different ways of building a responsive WordPress site. For some of you, nothing is more appealing than to build a site from scratch, but that’s not necessary unless you’re a hard-core programmer. Instead, we’ll look at tools and methods to make the process easier.

This article walks web developers through the basics of the battery status API which is available as part of HTML5 specification. Knowledge of this API will enable creating web applications aware of the battery status on devices.

In this article we look at ways of customizing the Moboom interface for the desktop, tablet, smart phone and special phones like the Blackberry.

Dr. Sherri Braxton-Lieber, Special Assistant to the Provost and Director of Course Redesign at Bowie State University (BSU), has accepted UMBC’s Director of Instructional Technology position in the Division of Information Technology. She will start full-time on Tuesday, May 27, and serve as the primary point of contact for DoIT’s instructional technology support efforts.

Piotr Gwiazda, Associate Professor of English, has published a review of Beautiful Twentysomethings by Polish writer Marek Hłasko (1934-1969) in the April 4, 2014 issue of The Times Literary Supplement.

Professor Gwiazda describes Beautiful Twentysomethings as “primarily a literary memoir. Hłasko adeptly recreates the world of his fellow writers, poets, critics, actors, film directors — the ‘beautiful twentysomethings’ of his title who, despite the repressive political climate of the 1950s, ‘kept faith that the moment would come when it would be possible to say: ‘No.’” He also notes that the book “shines a spotlight on emigration as a major theme in Polish literature.”

Today we're going to work more with Symfony 2 where we'll explore the basics of building web applications using this awesome framework. 

Symfony 2 Routing Introduction

In the last video, I said we'd take a look at controllers next, but I actually feel it may be easier to learn the framework in a slightly different order. Instead, we're going to learn about the basics of Symfony 2 routing, to give our applications clean and pretty URLs and make it easy to manage our applications URLs and links. 

We're not going to get too detailed, as Symfony's routing can do quite a bit, but we'll at least cover what we need to know by keeping it straight and to the point:

Conclusion

Hopefully you now have a better understanding of how the basic, default routes work within Symfony 2. It should make more sense once we go over a few more of the main components, such as the Controller and Templates. Thanks for watching.