There is no shortage of documentation on WordPress’ famous content-spewing structure, but I still feel like there is more confusion and mystery surrounding “The Loop” than there should be. In this screencast I try and explain what it is, how it works, related parts, and then demonstrate some alterations and various tricks. Things like running multiple loops, writing your own custom queries, and handling pagination with your own custom loops.

Links from Video:

• Codex: query_posts

TextMate is a mac-only code editor. Sorry to all the PC users this time around. If you’ve been watching these screencasts for a long time, you know I used to mostly use Coda. Since I’ve been working a lot more locally, I’ve been using much more TextMate, which I’ve always considered to be superior as a code editor but just wasn’t as convenient as Coda being all-in-one. I’ll cover some things I find cool and useful in TextMate, like vertical…

If you are like me, you are both guilty of seriously unorganized Photoshop documents and appreciate well organized ones. The disorganization isn’t intentional, it’s just born of (if you’ll pardon the likely-inaccurate cliché) being in right-brained creative mode and caring about what you are looking at not the left-brained organizational stuff. Then it compounds itself as you go in and out of the file for days on end. If you are handing this file off to someone else, or are…

Ask a bunch of designers what they wish CSS could do that it can’t now, and you’ll get a big list that reads much like the list of features for the Compass/Sass framework. If you are like me, you don’t have any trouble writing CSS, but the thought of being able to using things like variables, mixins, and nesting is rather enticing. I learned quite a bit in my first musings with Compass/Sass and answered a lot of my own…

Working locally with MAMP is awesome, but what about when you need to take that site live? Last time we got a version of WordPress installed locally, now we’ll take that local version and move it to a real live site. This entails moving files as well as moving the database, and changing a couple of values in that database.

Links from Video:

• MAMP
• Sequel Pro
• Transmit 4
• Moving WordPress in 10 steps

I’m way behind the times on this one, but until recently, I have never really developed locally. Everything I did was “going commando” and working directly on servers. The situation arose where I really needed to, so now I have MAMP (Mac, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) installed locally. It is an excellent program and works great. I go over what it’s like in the first few minutes of using it, and get a fresh copy of WordPress installed locally.

Links…

One of the articles I updated during “May is Maintenance Month” was an article about dynamic content. The idea was a simple website where clicking a link would fade out the existing content and fade in new content that it fetched via AJAX. The old article didn’t encompass what I now consider to be best practices for this kind of thing. 1) Works fine with JavaScript disabled. 2) It is possible to “deep link” to specific content. 3) The browsers…

I built a site for a musician friend of mine who is putting out a new album. Clearly having playable tracks is important, but the classic issue of having those tracks stop when a new page is loaded comes up (like Screencast #81). This time instead of using AJAX, all the content on the entire site exists on one page, and things are shuffled around through jQuery animations. The result is a somewhat Flash-like website, but without all the pitfalls…

Fair warning: more rambling than usual. Listen to my thoughts about SEO. What I think I know is that SEO is a series of fairly obvious best practices. A SEO service that helps you with those things can be good, a SEO service that claims to do anything else seems shady. However, there are plenty of examples where seemingly doing everything right doesn’t seem to work, and results that show up higher than your project look like pure garbage. SEO…

Roll over a link, watch the image above change. That’s what we build in this screencast, only we don’t use any JavaScript to do it. The trick is some simple z-index switching on hover and a bit of absolute positioning.

Links from Video:

• Demo
• Download