February 28, 2019 — Get ready for March with a fresh wallpaper. Today, Cosima Mielke brings you some designs for the community and available with and without a calendar. Please note that all images can be clicked on and lead to the preview of the wallpaper, and you can feature your work in our magazine by taking part in our Desktop Wallpaper Calendar series. We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists to be featured on Smashing Magazine. Are you one of them? Read more…

February 27, 2019 — Rachel Andrew has been digging around in the CSS Fragmentation spec, and finding browser support is somewhat fragmented. In this article, she explains what fragmentation is, why you might want to use it, and what the state of browser support is. She’ll also show you the current state of browser support and some of the things you can do to get it working as well as it can in your multicol and print projects. Read more…

February 26, 2019 — The popularity of Vue.js shows no signs of slowing down, with a huge amount of credit being due to the framework’s progressive approach. One of the key advantages of Vue.js is that it plays nicely with other code: it is easy to embed progressively into other applications, but it is also easy to wrap up non-Vue code into Vue. In this article, Kevin Ball explores this second advantage, covering three distinct types of third-party JavaScript and ways to embed each of them in Vue. Read more…

February 25, 2019 — Not everything that’s round and stands out is considered to be a button. In this article, Vadim explains how you can create a proper interactive button for your users — one that shouldn’t be confused for anything else. Read more…

February 22, 2019 — Due to backwards compatibility, WordPress hasn’t taken advantage of new PHP features released after PHP 5.2.4. Fortunately, WordPress will soon require PHP 5.6+ and even PHP 7.0+ not long after that. The recent release of Gutenberg could be a sign of the good times to come. In this article, Leonardo Losoviz makes a tour of the PHP features newly-available to WordPress, and attempts to suggest how these can be used to produce better software. Read more…

February 21, 2019 — It’s important to understand how animation can be used (or not used) in your design system. In this article, Val Head explains how you can help ensure that your brand is using animation consistently and effectively while also helping your team work faster. This is all about what to include in a set of motion guidelines for your design system and how to pull it off. Let’s get into it! Read more…

February 20, 2019 — What is Node in the first place? What is the meaning “event-driven” and “non-blocking” anyway, and how does Node fit into the bigger picture of applications, Internet networks, and servers? In this article, Jamie Corkhill will attempt to answer all of these questions and more throughout this series as he takes an in-depth look at the inner workings of Node, learn about the HyperText Transfer Protocol, APIs, and JSON, and more. An introduction to the backend web application development process. Read more…

February 19, 2019 — In this tutorial, Ahmed Bouchefra will use the latest versions of Bootstrap 4 and Angular 7 to build an Angular application and style the interface with Bootstrap. Let’s see how we can integrate Bootstrap CSS styles and JavaScript files with an Angular project generated using the Angular CLI, and how to use form controls and classes to create beautiful forms and how to style HTML tables using Table styles. Read more…

February 18, 2019 — In this Smashing TV webinar recording, join Léonie Watson (a blind screen reader user) as she explores the web, and find out about some unexpected properties of HTML elements that not only have a huge impact on accessibility, but also turn out to be pretty good for performance, too. We felt that the webinar was so valuable that we would open it up so that it’s free for everybody to use. Hopefully, it will serve as a resource for the whole web development community to understand how — and why — semantic markup matters. Read more…

February 16, 2019 — Web applications require maintenance just like any other type of software, but as an industry, it is not something that we highlight enough. As a result, we are exposing our clients to a tangible risk as well as leaving money on the table. but maintenance is the work we need to do on an application so it can safely stand still. It is a standard business cost. As professionals, we have a duty of care to be educating our clients about maintenance from the outset, and in this article, Darren Beale will tell you why Read more…