Themes & plugins Practical
Decide the editable regions before you design them
A design the CMS cannot express stays up for negotiation long after it ships. Deciding what editors may change, first, removes the negotiation entirely.
Technote
Themes & plugins
Choosing themes and plugins, vetting them, finding alternatives, and understanding their performance cost — what a wrong choice charges you later.
49 articles· Themes & plugins
Themes & plugins Advanced
Interactions without JavaScript, and the rule that makes them safe
details, :target, :focus-within, :has() and scroll timelines cover a surprising amount of interaction. One rule keeps them safe: the default state must be the finished state.
Themes & plugins Practical
Template parts: give shared markup a single owner
Duplicated markup always drifts. You fix one copy, the other stays wrong, and nobody notices until the two screens disagree.
Themes & plugins Practical
Icon fonts, SVG sprites or inline SVG?
All three draw the same picture on screen. What differs is how many colours you can use, what assistive technology hears, and how many icons actually ship to…
Themes & plugins Practical
Dark mode should be a decision, not a default
Dark mode is not one feature; it doubles the surface you must maintain and verify. Some sites have a clear reason for it, and some do not.
Themes & plugins Intro
Load order: declare a dependency instead of reaching for !important
Most "my CSS does not apply" cases are a child stylesheet loading before the parent. Declaring a dependency guarantees the order and removes the need to force anything.
Themes & plugins Intro
Template hierarchy: finding the file that renders this screen
Every child theme task starts with the same question: which file is drawing this screen? There is a way to confirm it instead of guessing.
Themes & plugins Advanced
Why sticky quietly dies — one overflow line on an ancestor
position: sticky throws no error when it fails. Check three things in order — a threshold, room in the parent, an ancestor's overflow — and the cause is…
Themes & plugins Advanced
Measure and vertical rhythm: body text that gets read
How many characters sit on a line, and how the gaps between elements stack, decide whether a long article gets finished. Hangul is wider, so the Latin character-count…
Themes & plugins Practical
Mobile navigation beyond the hamburger
The hamburger is the answer when there are many destinations. If three or four carry the traffic, showing them always beats hiding them.
Themes & plugins Advanced
Vendor tokens, your tokens, and one bridge file
Modern themes arrive with hundreds of their own tokens. Edit them and updates erase your work; ignore them and the screen splits into two systems. The answer is…
Themes & plugins Practical
What a page builder costs: convenience against portability
A builder does one thing very well, and in exchange your layout moves into the database. Where you draw the line decides whether that trade is bearable.