Hey 👋
I missed last weeks reading list, because we visited Murten/Morat for this years WordCamp Switzerland. It was fun to meet everyone in person again and to get to know some new faces. I’ve written about my experience here, as well as on our company blog (in German), and Florian shared his (beautiful, as always) photo recap as well.
Frontend Development
🌒 Dark Mode with Style Queries
Stephanie Eckles writes about using Style Queries to style Dark Mode toggles. It’s not production ready yet, but could be something to consider as progressive enhancement pretty soon. To be able to query for the value of a custom property on a container should also open up a lot of other possibilities, besides dark mode.
Stephanie Eckles – Simplified Dark Mode With Style Queries
⚡️ Typescript vs JavaScript
I don’t work with Typescript that often, but when I (have to) do, it always felt unnecessarily complicated and like I was fighting with problems I wouldn’t have without it. I always thought that maybe I’m missing something or I just don’t understand it well enough. So I was relieved to read that people like Rich Harris or Chris Ferdinandi, for whom this is definitely not the problem, can feel the same way.
GoMakeThings – Ditching TypeScript for JavaScript
📖 Book Layout with CSS
Ian G McDowell decided to do it the hard way and create the print layout for his own book using CSS, and wrote about his experience. Love all the nerdy stuff in there.
Ian G McDowell – Laying Out a Print Book With CSS
🧐 Inaccessible CSS-only Widgets
I like techniques that work purely with CSS very much, but it’s a good thing to remember that sometimes, this can hurt accessibility. In this post, Adrian Roselli collects a few techniques for things like Hamburger or Dark Mode toggles that only use checkboxes and CSS, that are inaccessible. He also shows a few ways to make them more accessible. I learned a thing or two and I like the way he built the dark-mode toggle on his site, falling back to links with a URL-parameter, if JS is not available.
Adrian Roselli – CSS-only Widgets Are Inaccessible
WordPress
🇨🇭 WordCamp Switzerland 2023
Together with over 200 other attendees, we went to Murten/Morat last week for this years WordCamp Switzerland. It was great to see the striving Swiss WordPress Community in person again!
We came back with a lot of momentum and motivation for our own projects, and already made some long overdue progress this week.
Florian Ziegler – Photo Recap of WordCamp Switzerland 2023
Claudio Rimann – my own short recap
Haptiq Studio – blogpost (in German) on our company blog
🔥 Gutenberg: Phase 3
Matias Ventura shared the preliminary focus for phase 3 of the Gutenberg project. There are a few things on that list that won’t be that important for us or our clients, like a lot of the real-time collaboration stuff. But other things like streamlining the admin UI, editorial requirements or work on the media library, I very much look forward to. Definitely worth a read. He also mentions that this is not set in stone and feedback is welcomed.
WordPress.org – Phase 3: Collaboration
💸 What’s The Problem with Awesome Motive?
WP Minute took on the “hot topic” of Awesome Motive and their business behavior. I actually had a few discussions about this at the WordCamp last week, and let’s say opinions differ quite a bit. Some think that what they do is completely unethical or even borderline illegal, which was also the direction of my knee-jerk reaction. But others also reminded me that what they do is still quite “nice” compared to practices found in the broader marketing world, and that they also do a lot of good stuff, and a little bit more “data-drivenness” in Marketing would do good for many WordPress-businesses. I guess the truth is not black and white and lies somewhere in between.
WP Minute – What’s the problem with Awesome Motive?
Other
👩💻 Command Line Tricks
A huge collection of short commands worth checking out.
🥥 John Cleese on Creativity
A powerful explanation of what creativity means, by John Cleese.
🐰 Happy Easter