Benchmarking Breakdance, Bricks Builder and Oxygen Builder

InfoDesign, speed, UILayout, WordPress / By / January 28, 2023

It is  interesting times in WordPress Frontend Development as UI vendors contend for developer loyalty by offering new Layout frameworks [Flexbox, CSS Grid, 3D Float, etc] , more templating features/flexibility,  novel plugin consolidations and better runtime performance both while editing and running in multiple display modes. Yes,  developers and agencies, you have a lot on …

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Why CSS Is So Busy

Coding, CSS, UILayout, WordPress / By / January 15, 2023

Inherently CSS, Cascading Style Sheets, do not have to be busy or complex. Classic CSS 1 & 2 commands like color, margin, text-size, and others are easy to understand. However, CSS commands have 3 inherent layers of potential complexity. The first is the fact that every HTML element can have many CSS commands styling the …

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Whipping up your own free WordPress Site

UILayout / By / January 10, 2023

There are the many reasons for Whipping up a WordPress Website. Because a free, full-service website can can meet immediate needs: 1 -Temporary testing site for trying out WordPress themes, plugins, styling and apps. Stay upwith new WordPress trends an technology by trying out the tools on a real temporary WordPress site; 2 -Staging site …

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WordPress ThemeBuilders Under Stress

1 Comment / Coding, InfoDesign, UILayout, Webapi, WordPress / By / January 4, 2023

Our MasterWP.guru blog recently posted WordPress Under Duress, a report underlining multiple signs of pressure impacting WordPress. The WP Tavern Posting acknowledged several signs of stress. The article cited intensive competition from other CMS systems  such as SquaresSpace and Shopify, increased complexity throughout the rapidly changing WP Core and profound shortcomings in both the Gutenberg Editor …

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Toronto WordPress Group Mobile Performance Meetup

speed, UILayout, WordPress / By / November 16, 2022

Normally Toronto WordPress Meetup Group has a monthly meeting designed to help fix any WordPress problems that attendees want to pose to the Meetup Organizers, Robin MacRae and Drew Mathers. But yesterday’s November 15th meetup featured a discussion of how to improve mobile performance  which lags the desktop speed for the same page.contents but different …

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WordPress AMP for Mobile Speed

1 Comment / speed, UILayout, WordPress / By / November 16, 2022

AMP-Accelerated Mobile Pages is mobile page speed up technology pioneered by Google. Web & WordPress users have had to come to grips with major mobile speed deficits in the light of changes in mobile usage: The Global use of the Web has shifted from desktops to mobile devices – desktop=44%  vs  mobile devices=56%. There are …

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Measuring Website Speed – State of the Art

UILayout / By / November 8, 2022

Performance tuning of WordPess sites is currently in the best of times and the worst times. Best of times because there is a consensus  about 6 key performance tuning methods which  should be  applied as a  set of triage steps while  doing performance tuning. These six standard steps are featured in the upcoming  WP Speed …

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WordPress Speed Matters – A Free Meetup

UILayout / By / November 3, 2022

TuesdayNov 8th   2022 evening at 6PM is the date for a free and very informative Zoom meetup about the  latest trends in WordPress Performance Tuning. Lets start with three basic points.  First WordPress is used on 43% of the top 10 million Websites worldwide. Therefore WP technology is an important factor across all web development. …

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EmbedPress Demo

UILayout / By / January 16, 2023

First a Google Docs proposal for WordPress Plugins checker Next, a YouTube |Next a Powerpoint And now a PDF, but only by using a 3dFlip book because the EmbedPress shortcode has failed to work – it delivers empty space no PDF

More Elementor Duress

UILayout / By / October 29, 2022

Having already done a review of Elementor Under Duress just 2 months ago, it hardly seemed timely  to do  another More Elementor Duress. But having tried to create a container with attached Motion Effects and then an Elementor Popup – both  using the new Elementor 3.72 with full Flexbox container implementation abruptly changed plans. There …

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The Elementor Briefing

UILayout / By / September 16, 2022

Elementor is such a pivotal player in WordPress Development starting with its 11 million actives users and the popularity of its namesake PageBuilder now become a  ThemeBuilder UX. If one does development work in WordPress you are very likely either using Elementor directly  or interacting with other Elementor based websites as W3Techs sees Elementor as …

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WordPress WebPage Performance Tuning

Coding, Webapi, WordPress / By / January 16, 2023

WebPage Performance Tuning WordPress Performance Tuning is like WordPress SEO, an anointed discipline akin to Alchemy – complex practices subject to many sub-disciplines. As a result, three WordPress performance experts agree [ Adam Connel at BloggingWizrds, TomDupuis at Online Media, and Staff at WPBuffs ] that there are a number of factors that can impact …

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Gallery Tests Elementor

UILayout / By / September 15, 2022

Elementor Pro Justified Gallery All New Gallery Masonry UAE Elementor Add-on Gallery These Elementor gallery widgets are very competitive with top Galley plugins like FooGallery or Envira Galley. Elementor’s gallery widgets have a host of features including popular layouts [masonry, justified, and grid], lighthbox display of full size images, captioning of images, display of all …

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Elementor Flexbox: A MVP Achilles Heal?

InfoDesign, UILayout, WordPress / By / April 5, 2022

Elementor has reached the pinnacle of WordPress Frontend tools  – a PageBuilder become ThemeBuilder that has 10million active user websites, has just released a Elementor Cloud Hosting Service [to mixed reviews and runtime performance concerns], and is undertaking a massive shift to Flexbox CSS Framework as the core of  its UI Interface. It is the …

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CSS in WordPress – Sep 20th Meetup Review

UILayout, WordPress / By / September 20, 2022

This afternoon’s free WordPress CSS Style Editors Meetup is so crammed with helpful info  on WordPressDesign and Styling we will have to take the Trevor Noah  Daily Show approach to Headline News by telling you just the most useful  styling tricks and tips to help ease and expedite your WordPress layouts and designs.  For example, …

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WordPress Revolution: Elementor Cloud Website

UILayout, WordPress / By / March 27, 2022

Elementor Cloud Website is Elementor’s dramatic entry into the WordPress Cloud Hosting Service business. Here is what you get: $90US/year = 1 cloud website “No hidden costs, no  price hikes.What you see is what you get. Period.” Additional Elementor Cloud Websites require a  subscription costing $99/year/website A subscription delivers 1 full Elementor Pro powered WordPress …

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Cloudflare Performance Anomaly

UILayout / By / February 26, 2022

Cloudflare lately has been garnering interest and strategic WordPress alliances not just with its CDN_Content Delivery Network but also Domain Management, Security Services and Performance Optimization. For example, Elementor Pro Cloud new offering CloudFlare as part of the overall bundle. More recently Cloudflare acquired Area 1 to bolster its Secure Email services. But the crux …

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Are Gutenberg Editor’s Speed Results A Big Lie??

InfoDesign, UILayout, Webapi, WordPress / By / December 31, 2022

Within the past year there have been  many reviewers  claiming Gutenbrg Editor delivers faster web pages than popular PageBuilders – see Metabox*, WordPress.com[ is blind to theWYSWYG gap in the Block Editor], Jack in the Net*, Jack Cao Tests*[fails to use normal caching and media optimizations]. In sum, there is a common factor of limited information …

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Meetup-WordPress Backend Bustout

Coding, Database, UILayout, Webapi, WordPress / By / January 9, 2022

Most of the attention in the WordPress community  for the past five years has been about the effort to build a better WordPress frontend – a  Visual Editor using React JavaScript that becomes an integral part of the WordPress core and runs increasing portions of the WordPress “No Coding Knowledge Required” system. But the Gutenberg …

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Hiding Nuisance Notices in WordPress, etc

InfoDesign, UILayout, WordPress / By / December 16, 2021

Okay, Nuisance Notifications [aka Nags] are not exclusive to WordPress. You may also be plagued by unsolicited notices in the lower right-hand corner of your PC screen as Google and Facebook and Microsoft and just about every app you have bought now presume to have the right to popup unsolicited  PR notes at random moments …

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New Surge Performance Plugin

Database, Google, UILayout / By / January 9, 2022

This banner headline at WP Tavern recently caught my attention. Surge: A New Page Caching Plugin for WordPress with No Configuration Required Having just done a WordPress Meetup featuring WordPress performance plugins, one that delivered performance tuning without having to do any tinkering with performance settings – this was of keen interest. So the logical step …

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Gutenberg: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

UILayout / By / December 10, 2021

In honor of 3 years + 1 day after the Gutenberg editor was announced, The Toronto WordPress Meetup Group will have a free zoom Presentation at 4:PM Wednesday   discussing the virtues and shortcomings of the Gutenberg Editor. Here are the preliminary notes: In addition, here is another view on Gutenberg Editor – the newly appointed …

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The WordPress Editors

UILayout / By / October 1, 2021

WordPress has seen a relatively slow succession of editors in its 18 year history. But in the past 5 years the situation has changed dramatically as WordPress has experienced a rapid progression in what can be done beyond the Basic Editor. This review will look at this evolution in how WordPress users create and edit …

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Gutenberg vs the PageBuilders- Performance Speed Tests

UILayout, WordPress / By / May 22, 2022

Among the many WordPress PageBuilders, the conventional wisdom is that Gutenberg Builder is on the rise as long overdue features such as more styling options for blocks and use of block patterens as templates  begin to match long delivered PageBuilder capabilities. Perhaps the breakthrough feature is Gutenberg’s  delivery of  true drag and drop operations for …

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Gaslight Banner Ad from Microsoft

UILayout / By / October 24, 2021

Wikipedia defines gaslighting as Gaslighting is a colloquialism that is loosely defined as making someone question their reality.. The term is also used informally to describe someone (a “gaslighter”) who persistently puts forth a false narrative which leads another person (or a group of people) to doubt their own perceptions… Some would argue that because gaslighting has …

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Cyberattacks By Software Vendors

UILayout / By / August 9, 2021

Cyberattacks are usually associated with data breaches where hackers steal valuable information for sale to a variety of “info merchants”. Or behind the scenes there are BDDoS=> Bot-based Direct Denial of Service  attacks designed to cripple competitive  websites. But as the Dark Web emerges with increasing malvolence there is an an increase of attacks on …

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WebP with WordPress

Google, InfoDesign, Webapi, WordPress / By / November 12, 2020

Controling your website’s image sizes has become a top priority among Web developers Here is the reason why: As of  2017 end , HTTPArchive.org reports that images comprised 54% of the total page download size. And since response  time is inversely related to page load, developers wanting to achieve 2 seconds or better response time …

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WordPress Popup PDFs

Coding, WordPress / By / September 18, 2020

This tutorial is based on the fact that PDFs have become the leading document integrators on the Web.  Note the distinction – PDF are multi-page containers for completed rich output like word documents, spreadsheet tables or Visio,  UML Object diagrams.  PDFs are not like web development containers like Docker, Kubernetes, and Envoy which encompass complete …

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Measuring your Website

Coding, Webapi, WordPress / By / October 9, 2020

Measuring the Web The Web is the20th Century’s Cauldron of Change. The Web  is spilling  out change that is innovative, widespread and intimidating. Innovative because with DIY- Do-It-yourself Web Development tools  it is possible for individuals and teams to create online presences and services that would have been improbable before the Internet. Widespread because in …

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What is the True Cost of Shared Hosting?

Architecting, InfoDesign, WordPress / By / July 21, 2020

CMS systems  for small and medium scale sites using  WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and others mostly use shared hosting. That is where your website shares a CPU & Supporting Software,  memory, diskspace and Internet bandwidth with 2-4 other websites on the same machine in which all  of these  assets are “time-shared”. This has been and currently …

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Editorx Beta Bolsters Wix?

Coding / By / July 26, 2020

Wix and Squarspace have to watch out, Shopify, a Canadian startup specializing in shopping sites, has taken over their runner-up position in the Content Management System sweepstakes  Both Wix and and Squarespace are saddled with same dynamic – low usage websites and comparatively a small number of website than their competitors. Wix appeared to have …

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Element Kits Free & Pro Elementor Widgets

Coding / By / September 15, 2022

At the Toronto WordPress Meetup Group we have been doing a series of presentations about the substantial  widgets and features  available in  Elementor. But in the process of doing the research  some Elementor add-on vendors offer freemium packages in which their free components and widgets are very attractive – such is the case with ElementKits …

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Happy Addon’s Free & Pro Elementor Widgets

Coding / By / July 17, 2020

At the Toronto WordPress Meetup Group we have been doing a series of presentations about the substantial  widgets and features  available in  Elementor. But in the process of doing the research  some Elementor add-on vendors offer freemium packages in which their free components and widgets are very attractive such is the case with Happy Add-ons. …

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ClassicPress: Why a WordPress Clone?

Architecting, Coding, WordPress / By / June 30, 2020

ClassicPress is a GPLv2[Free Software Foundation] clone of WordPress version 4.9.x – any theme, plugin or website that runs on WordPress 4.9 will run on ClassicPress. The ClassicPress FAQ page provides key insights into the reason for ClassicPress: ClassicPress is a community-led fork of the WordPress content management system that preserves the classic TinyMCE editor …

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Bulking-up WordPress Security

WordPress / By / July 1, 2020

WordPress hack attacks are becoming more prevalent – almost like a multi-headed gorgon, hackers have many more sinister attack vectors as seen in these reports from FossBytes and ThreatPress . These reports describe not just  one attack many different approaches to  hacking  which often involves 2 or 3 step before the main hack attack is …

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Thinking Styles and UI Widgets

Coding, InfoDesign, WordPress / By / December 22, 2021

There has been a revolution in thinking over the past 50 years. How rationalizations is colored. The dual nature of Decision making. And better processes for thinking in general. The following set of presentationa and talks highlight some of these thinking insights. But there is also a revolution in creating smart UI interfaces in WordPress. …

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Oxygen and the WordPress ThemeBuilders

Architecting, WordPress / By / November 1, 2019

WordPress has seen a wave of Themebuilders over the past few years and coming from two sources – themes with builtin PageBuilders and PageBuilders taking over many theme functions. On the theme side there are 7 popular themes which come with PageBuilders as part of the package  – Avada with Fusion Builder, X with Cornerstone, Monstroid2 with Power Page Builder, Strata with an included …

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