I’ve recently switched from Sublime Text to Visual Studio Code as my primary code editor. As such, I’ve personalized it to feel like home. Here are the most important extensions I use as a front-end developer. Afterglow Remastered This is the color theme I’ve been rocking in Sublime Text for a while, so I was pretty happy to discover it had been ported over to Visual Studio Code. Auto Close Tag Because who doesn’t want...

Loading stylesheets in WordPress child themes is a pretty straightforward process. According to the Codex, you just add a wp_enqueue_scripts action that loads the parent theme’s stylesheet as well as the child theme’s stylesheet. Easy peasy. However, you know me and extra asset requests 😉 I hate to request multiple CSS or JS files if I can help it. Loading the parent stylesheet with WordPress’ recommended wp_enqueue_scripts is going to end up making two calls...

Over the past few years, I’ve found that the BEM CSS methodology falls closest in line with my preference for CSS authoring (although I do have a lot of respect for Enduring CSS). The block (parent), element (child/grandchild) and modifier work for nearly every scenario. However, there was always one thing with BEM that drove me nuts – the way it recommends writing modifiers. According to the official BEM website, the way to declare modifiers is .block__element--modifier....

I wrote an article nearly a year ago about building a front-end WordPress theme using Backbone. Since then, I’ve done a lot more research and experimenting and have come up with a pretty solid way of developing “single-page-esque” WordPress themes with Backbone (or React/Flux, Angular, Ember or any other front-end framework). My big hurdle earlier in the year was the concept of server-side vs. client-side rendering. I couldn’t think of a good way to serve...

Check out my second ever WordPress plugin, Smooth Directory, now live on WordPress.org! I’ve kind of been developing this business directory plugin alongside the Smooth Calendar plugin I launched yesterday, working on the same client project. Smooth Directory solved my needs for a simple business directory, so hopefully it can solve yours as well. Full details are available on the WordPress plugin page or on GitHub, but the quick rundown is that it’s a very...