EpicWebs - WordPress, jQuery, HTML & CSS Tutorials

My Research: Learning ReactJS – Part Two – React Router + Searching

by Rob Mehew on 12/02/2018
Note: You may want to checkout My Research: Learning ReactJS - Part One first. Going into this I thought React was going to be awful if I am completely honest, but it turns out it's not so bad after all. All of the data types feel nice and easy to work with, being that it is Javascript and there are a decent amount of modules and tutorials... Read Full Article

My Research: Learning ReactJS – Part One

by Rob Mehew on 08/02/2018
I have been looking into updating my knowledge with a new technology (if that's what you can call it). I have always been fascinated with React and Angular but I have never actually set myself the task of learning one and getting something built with it. My end goal is to use ReactJS as a front end for WordPress, which I can use as a CMS. Using the... Read Full Article

Integrating LESS CSS with WordPress

by Rob Mehew on 17/03/2016
Recently I had the need to create a base theme to include multi environment config files, LESS CSS and a couple of security features into WordPress. I'm going to show you how I have integrated LESS with a WordPress theme, including caching for production sites and without pre-compiling the less files so that you can work on your styles without slowing... Read Full Article

How To Properly Include CSS & Javascript In WordPress

by Rob Mehew on 24/02/2015
One thing I see a lot in plugins and themes is incorrectly included scripts or CSS. The worst culprit is jQuery as if this is included twice it causes some frustrating javascript errors that are hard to spot. The usual problem is a plugin or theme including a google hosted jQuery and then another plugin which has correctly included it from the jQuery... Read Full Article

Beginners Guide For Wannabe WordPress Theme Developers

by Rob Mehew on 17/02/2015
Are you interested in Web Development and would like to start learning how to become a WordPress theme developer? Then this guide is for you. It's a large resource for everything you need to know to start creating your own WordPress themes. Including links to other articles that can help you along the way. This tutorial is aimed at beginners but... Read Full Article

How To Use WordPress Meta Queries Effectively

by Rob Mehew on 13/02/2015
One of the things that "outside developers" as I like to call them (developers who dislike WordPress), think WordPress struggles with is retrieving data in a structured manner, I have used quite a few different frameworks and content management systems and I disagree. WordPress has a great set of functions for retrieving data, dependant on meta, ... Read Full Article

Getting Started With The WordPress Theme Customizer

by Rob Mehew on 09/02/2015
The WordPress Theme Customizer was introduced in version 3.4 of WordPress, it provides the ability for a site owner to change colours, images, fonts and almost whatever you can think of, on the fly, so they can see if the change looks good. If the change they have made looks good in the live preview then they can save their changes and those settings... Read Full Article

WooCommerce – Get Products From Multiple Categories

by Rob Mehew on 05/02/2015
Using WooCommerce to create an eCommerce solution inside WordPress is great, although retrieving the correct products can sometimes be a little tricky, especially products from two or more categories. This is made easier using Taxonomy Queries for WordPress as WooCommerce has done an excellent job with their product categories taxonomy. This is a... Read Full Article

Learning To Wireframe With EpicWebs

by Rob Mehew on 04/02/2015
I really enjoy the process of extracting the details from a client to try and figure out what exactly the goal of them having a website is, sometimes they don't even know they just thought they needed a website because they didn't have one. Although I guess you could see it as a goal, wanting a website because you don't have one... I always like to... Read Full Article

Learning The Basics Of CSS

by Rob Mehew on 03/02/2015
Today i'm going to go through the basics of CSS, to understand what is happening with CSS you should first be familiar with HTML and be able to markup a website using it. If you do not then you can continue or you can take a look at my what is html article for a quick run through of what it is and how to use it. CSS stands for cascading style,... Read Full Article

How To Set AllowFieldTruncationHeader – Salesforce.com PHP Toolkit

by Rob Mehew on 29/01/2015
Recently I had to develop a pretty custom plugin for WordPress that would feed data into Salesforce.com. Using their PHP Toolkit this was relatively straight forward, although one thing that was not obvious from the start was the AllowFieldTruncationHeader you can pass to Salesforce.com, this helped massively in the plugin I built. This is a quick... Read Full Article
Categories: PHP

Sending WordPress Posts To Facebook, Twitter & Google Plus

by Rob Mehew on 24/01/2015
Writing a blog is a great way to provide your visitors with up to date information and to interact with them via comments or sharing your content on social networks. One of the difficult things with sharing your content is remembering to let your users know you have a new post. I'm going to help with three simple ways to quickly get your posts shared... Read Full Article

How To Highlight Dates Using jQuery UI DatePicker

by Rob Mehew on 22/01/2015
The jQuery UI datepicker is used a lot across the web, primarily for... well picking dates. It provides the user with a small date display when they click inside an input field, the user can then select a date which is populated into the input field. This date can then be submitted to the server side and used for whatever purpose it is intended. ... Read Full Article

Simple jQuery Ajax Tutorial For WordPress

by Rob Mehew on 17/01/2015
Ajax requests inside WordPress are a little more complicated and a little easier than not using WordPress. There is a couple of actions you have to include inside your plugin or functions.php file and a couple of nice functions you can use to check for cross site script attacks. Before adding any of the code to your site you will need jQuery included... Read Full Article

My Top Tips For Managing Time As A Freelance Developer

by Rob Mehew on 24/09/2014
As a freelance developer, managing time can be very difficult, sometimes this can even become more difficult the longer you have been a freelance developer. As you start to get a few projects under your belt you will also start to acquire a few customers who want continual work on their website, this can cut into development times for other. ... Read Full Article

Advanced Custom Fields – WordPress Plugins For Developer Series

by Rob Mehew on 13/09/2014
Advanced Custom Fields is a great plugin for developers, it allows you to create extra fields in the post/page screen or inside the custom post type screen. This plugin unlocks a lot of potential to be able to achieve some great content management for editors or general users. There is an alternative but it requires writing up some code which can... Read Full Article

rebeccapurple added to the CSS specification.

by Rob Mehew on 25/06/2014
With comments like "this is the best proposal I have ever seen +1" the named color rebeccapurple was added to the CSS specification. Read the post from Eric Meyer http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/06/19/.... Read Full Article

How To Easily Create WordPress Theme Option Pages

by Rob Mehew on 17/06/2014
This article contains a simple and easy to use method for creating theme option pages. You can create as many pages as you like and even repeat the process to separate themes. This method does not use the new theme customiser but I will be writing a post for the new theme customiser to help with changing colours, fonts and other things that change... Read Full Article

Custom Metaboxes Made Easy – WordPress

by Rob Mehew on 13/06/2014
A lot of my recent builds have consisted of WordPress based websites. WordPress unfairly gets labeled as only being good for building a blog, I completely disagree. One thing I do believe every developer should have in their WordPress box of tricks is the ability to quickly and easily create extra fields that accompany posts or pages and are easily... Read Full Article

My Favourite WordPress Plugin for Email Marketing

by Rob Mehew on 16/05/2014
I have been working on a website recently that required an email autoresponder that users could subscribe to and then recieve a weekly email. The email contained information on a training course that the client was providing. The whole site was setup including the training course and the signup form. The signup form was working but for MailChimp and... Read Full Article

What is HTML?

by Rob Mehew on 18/03/2014
HTML is an acronym for a markup language called Hyper Text Mark Up Language. Hyper is the term used to mean that users can go anywhere in the "code" at any time. There is not the requirement to move sequentially (first this, then that, then third etc.). People on the Internet experience this "hyper" as being able to go anywhere on a web page they. ... Read Full Article

CKEditor Broken In IE + Unterminated String Literal in Ace.js

by Rob Mehew on 12/03/2014
This is a quick post to let people know about an issue with the CKEditor in drupal not displaying for internet explorer. I searched for a solution for a long time and could not find out why the CKEditor would not display in IE, very frustrating (but then I've never been a huge fan of drupal). It turns out that this is a conflict with the Fitvids... Read Full Article
Categories: PHP

Where & How To Comment Out HTML or PHP?

by Rob Mehew on 07/03/2014
If you have ever seen anything like <!-- I am a comment --> then you will know what an html comment is. This is a quick post to show how to do html comments and when you should use them. Here is an html comment. [html] <!-- I am an html comment. --> [/html] Notice the opening tag starts with an exclamation mark, but the... Read Full Article

How To Fix jQuery Masonry and Google Fonts

by Rob Mehew on 06/03/2014
This is a quick post just to let you know about the fix for jQuery Masonry and google fonts (this probably applies to all custom fonts). The problem with jQuery Masonry is that it can load and position all the items based on the height of the grid items. The grid items height changes depending on the font used. So if jQuery Masonry is laid out on... Read Full Article