A Little Vindication

Yesterday I chimed in on an exchange on Twitter about the constant CSS argument of whether or not to use IDs as selectors (I’m in the not camp, BTW):

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More Adventures in “Photoshop for Developers”

I’ve been using Adobe Photoshop for, I don’t know, something like sixty years now, or at least some days it seems like that long. But I’m not a designer, and my Photoshop skillz are still rather primitive. Almost everything I’ve ever learned about how to use Photoshop has come from seeing the comps that real designers give me to develop, and Googling the things I find in them.

Well, one thing that’s always vexed me as I do my art production has been how to perfectly align images in a sprite file I’m putting together. (I know, I know, why not just use Compass? Because it has its pitfalls. I’m going to keep doing it old-school, at least for now.) But after years and years of hand-crafting and nudging, pixel by pixel, my own sprite files in Photoshop, I only recently licked the whole alignment thing. I share this with you now…

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“Requiring” Plugins

I’ve started working on a redesign of this site (spoiler alert: it’ll be responsive! Eventually.), and one thing that’s kind of dogged theme developers (I think) is what to do about plugins that are pretty much required in order to make your theme go.

To this point, it hasn’t been an issue for me. Pretty much every theme I’ve developed has been unique for a particular client, and I have as yet attempt to release a theme to the WordPress theme repository. Ergo, if I required a plugin for the project, I installed it. Boom, done. However, in creating a theme for the general masses, I could totally see me needing to include something like a plugin that lets you add classes to widgets and that sort of thing.

So the question becomes, how best to go about this? I see three possible solutions:

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