{"id":700,"date":"2019-04-09T14:13:00","date_gmt":"2019-04-09T12:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rob006.net\/en\/?p=700"},"modified":"2019-11-17T16:02:38","modified_gmt":"2019-11-17T15:02:38","slug":"refreshing-the-blog-layout","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rob006.net\/en\/blog\/refreshing-the-blog-layout\/","title":{"rendered":"Refreshing the blog layout"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s been almost 4 years<\/a> since I created the current layout of my blog. I finally have some free time, so I decided to refresh it and solve several problems that have been waiting for years. The release of WordPress 5.0 with its new revolutionary editor was another impulse to do this.<\/p>\n

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Backend<\/h2>\n

There are not many visual changes, most of the improvements are under the hood. After refactoring the PHP code, practically nothing remained from the default Sage<\/a> template – I reorganized hooks and classes used in the project. The Composer<\/a> took care of autoloading<\/a>. The Composer was also useful for managing dependencies that appeared unexpectedly (we have 2019, now even if you are doing a simple theme for WordPress, you end up with some dependencies \ud83d\ude1b).<\/p>\n

Thanks to Asset Packagist<\/a>, Composer also manages the frontend dependencies. 4 years is like a decade for the JavaScript world, in the meantime, Bower<\/a> has died, and npm finally got lock handling, so each installation does not give you different results. \ud83d\ude42 However, I’ve chosen Yarn<\/a> – it is now responsible for managing dependencies used for assets processing. I also updated Gulp and all dependencies – you can see some progress and CSS and JS files have become even smaller.<\/p>\n

Frontend<\/h2>\n

I’ve also changed the most annoying element on the website – buttons for sharing the post no longer load tons of JavaScript from Facebook and other social networks, from now they’re simple static links. I also improved the icons on the website – SVG images replaced the icons served by webfonts and raster flags. Post thumbnails should also better match their format to actual needs.<\/p>\n

There are also more visible changes – I added some new widgets to the sidebar to separate the regular blog entries from short notes about updates of libraries developed by me. I hope that longer and more interesting posts will be more visible thanks to this – the characteristics of content have changed over the last 4 years and longer posts have been flooded by short portfolio notes. Similarly, I split the widget with a list of projects to larger projects and smaller libraries and tools – also to promote the former. I also added a widget with tags – because, why not? \ud83d\ude00 Taxonomy views now supports description – short descriptions of some tags or tools should be helpful to figure out what it is about. In the end, I added icons in the footer with links to social media services – on most of them there is nothing interesting, but I planned it from the very beginning, so it’s time to finally do it. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

As you can see, there are not many visual changes. Nevertheless, I have improved some technical aspects of the blog, so overall it should work better. Small refactoring and updating coding standards should give it a few more years – I hope that when after the next 4 years I will return to the source code of the theme, it still will be manageable and does not hurt my eyes. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

Gallery<\/h2>\n