Recently, a friend brought the new Wordless plugin to my attention. It’s a typical WordPress plugin that, using Ruby, enhances your toolset for creating themes by integrating some of those aforementioned technologies (Haml, Sass, Compass and Coffeescript), restructuring the theme’s organization and adding some great new helper functions.

Features

(taken from the Wordless’ Github)

• A structured and clean theme organization
• Haml views (with support to layouts and partials)
• Sass & Compass stylesheets
• Coffeescript-powered logic (optional)
• 50+ Rails-like helper functions
• Released under the MIT license

Requirements

(taken from the Wordless’ Github)

• WordPress .htaccess file present
• Ruby (any version, full RVM support)
• Compass and Sprockets gems installed

However, there are certain instances when it would just be easier to use specific formatting within the already existing TinyMCE content areas.  Fortunately, the team over at Smashing Magazine has written a wonderful tutorial that explains some of the various uses for custom content editor layouts and exactly how to enable these features.

Two column content layouts?  Tables in the content area?  Don’t fret, it’s got you covered.  There’s even support for using CSS to style it any way you want within the content editor.

Advanced Layout Templates In WordPress’ Content Editor

In desperation, I went through every guide I could find on rubyonrails.org and extensively searched Stock Overflow and every developer forum I could think of.  Fortunately, after numerous french words, hissy fits, and consolatory beers, I came across the easy-to-follow upgrade instructions posted on Ryan Bigg’s blog.

Mac OS X, Ruby, RVM, Rails and You helps you through every step of the upgrade, including installing RVM (Ruby Version Manager) and necessary database packages.  Do yourself a favor and let this guide be your first stop when trying to start with Ruby… so instead of exhausting all your time trying to get the damn thing to upgrade properly, you get to actually spend time learning a new language.

Check out his post here: Choose your web fonts wisely

The WP e-Commerce plugin by Instinct Entertainment is a WordPress plugin which incorporates rather robust e-commerce software into your newly created or pre-existing WordPress installation.  It’s easy to install, easy to configure and pretty much a breeze to write templates for–assuming you’re comfortable with writing WordPress templates.  Perhaps the best part, WP e-Commerce adds all the immediate sales info you need directly to your WordPress dashboard and is controlled from your regular WordPress admin section.

Don’t get me wrong, WP e-Commerce has it’s few limitations, such as a limited set of pre-written payment gateways or the limited variations of free product layouts.  Nonetheless, the restrictions can be overcome with a little programming know-how.

In the masses of e-commerce solutions out there, I’d definitely rank WP e-Commerce among the top, especially of the free solutions.  It’s an easy solution that perfectly integrates with one of the top content management systems of today.

Enter Adobe’s BrowserLab. Its been around for a few years, but here’s the skinny for the unaware…

BrowserLab is a paid service that runs in your browser of choice, keeping your resources free, and contains a large suite of browsers including multiple versions of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. It allows you to build a custom set of browsers to quickly and easily test your sites. Sadly, BrowserLab doesn’t allow actual interactivity with the site you’re viewing, so there’s no easy way to test your web apps. Nevertheless, it’s a great way to knock-out cross-browser testing on your typical website.

HTML5 Boilerplate claims to be, and in my opinion is, a rock-solid default template for the new(ish) HTML5 language.  While the website states that the package isn’t a “framework”, that’s probably the easiest way to think of it.  Along with a great HTML/CSS/JavaScript base, you get a custom boilerplate builder, site compression tools (yippee!) and excellent documentation.  There’s even a starter Apache .htaccess file to get you on your way with site caching, @font-face and HTML5 video!

Really, I can’t say enough about this wonderful package of tools and how easy to use it is.  Beginner and veteran (really, can you be a veteran yet?) HTML5ers alike can benefit from HTML5 Boilerplate.  Download it.  Use it.  Love it.

Oh yeah, and don’t forget the graceful degradation…
(top to bottom: Firefox 4, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 6)

Enter Modernizr.js!  From the modernizr.com website: “Modernizr is a small and simple JavaScript library that helps you take advantage of emerging web technologies (CSS3, HTML 5) while still maintaining a fine level of control over older browsers that may not yet support these new technologies.”

While the 10kb script does not add missing HTML5 features and functionality to older browsers, it does allow you to give multiple styles to single elements depending on the level of HTML5 support the end-user’s browser has.  Sadly, modernizr.js also won’t give you an immediate understanding of the new markup…

While the ability to do this, called “packet sniffing”, has been around for quite some time, Firesheep made it incredibly simple.  Seriously, 4 clicks and 2 minutes and you could be logging into Facebook as someone else.  Fortunately, the plugin became so mainstream that people either started protecting their connections or companies, such as Gmail, started creating secure connections.

Fast forward two months.  I’m sitting at my favorite coffee shop and look at the person’s computer next to me… What do I see?  Roughly 20 people’s information from various social networks popping up on the screen.  Damn.  I guess the general population is still just as uninformed as two months ago.

Thankfully, there are a couple of quick and easy ways you can browse the web without near as much vulnerability.  While none of these are a 100% surefire to keep your computer safe, they are definitely a great start.

HTTPS Everywhere
This is a simple extension for the Firefox browser that forces a secure connection on a handful of sites, including Google, Facebook, Twitter and WordPress.com.  It won’t make every site you visit secure, but it’s a great jumping off point nonetheless.

proXPN
proXPN is an application that uses VPN encryption while transferring your data.  This technology basically sends scrambled data to a reliable service, which then unscrambles the data before sending it to your intended recipient, e.g. Gmail, Facebook, etc.  The only downside to using this type of service is that your connection is slowed down a bit since a the VPN service become a data middleman.

BlackSheep
BlackSheep is another amazing add-on for the Firefox browser, and perhaps the best current (free) option.  In short, BlackSheep detects when users are trying to steal information with Firesheep and then in turn provides Firesheep with bogus information, thus returning nothing but errors on the malicious user’s end.

* to learn more about packet sniffing and/or Firesheep, check out the Wikipedia article.

What makes this project notable is how it reflects a series of emerging trends in client requests (and subsequently in the tasks we’ve been executing this year). The key elements requested by Forest Park include: graphic design, web development on an easy-to-use content management platform, search engine optimization, and social networking set up and strategy.

Of course, design and development have been part of our bailiwick for more than seven years now, but the emergence of the importance of a strong (yet simple) content management system, solid search engine optimization, and relevant social networking over the past few years now plays a significant role in the way we design and, subsequently, engineer a website. For example, when we create a design, we are always thinking about ways to incorporate as much text as we can, while still maintaining a strong sense of aesthetic. (We care about textual volume because the search engines tend to give more weight to pages with more content.) Likewise, we are always cognizant of how to incorporate social networking icons or “widgets” (badges that stream status updates into a page).

These days, many clients want as much control over their websites as they can have. An effective, manageable system for updating site content is paramount. We realize that clients want to do things quickly and easily.

Marrying great design with robust functionality, developing pages that will be indexed by search engines (and found by “googlers”), and sync’ing sites with social networking strategies… all are critical to contemporary web design and development.