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Update on the new UI for this blog
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Loading ...About a month ago I wrote something on creating a new UI for this blog. One that would be lightweight and a lot quicker then the current one. It might seem that I’ve given up on this new UI, but the opposite is true.
It’s been a rather busy couple of weeks since my last update, but work is slowly progressing. So far I designed most of the UI elements, but I ended up in some trouble with the browser compatibility. As any web developer will know it’s a hell to make a website compatible with older browsers, especially the older Internet Explorer versions. And as this is supposed to be a lightweight theme it means I’ll have to rely on as much of CSS3 as possible. Which also means making separate sylesheets for the older browsers to display the content the same way.
So far I’ve built the following features in the new WordPress Theme:
- Support of the social networks
- Browser detection to better enable CSS2 / CSS3 features or mobile version
- Various hooks into the WordPress system to change behaviour of WordPress
- Design of the various elements of WordPress, being posts / pages and categories
Now I still have a long way to go before the new theme is ready for deployment, but I’m slowly continuing the work on the new theme. Just to give you some insight on how the final version of the theme will look I’ve included some screen-shots of the latest development release.
Screenshot of new layout
Even when all the design stuff is done I’ll still have to do some integration of analytics software and the capabilities to show ads. As well as hooking back in all the various plug-ins I’ve been using for WordPress for the past couple of years.
PHP and browser detection
One of the things you might encounter as a web developer is detection of the browser that a visitor is using. In my specific case this was needed since I wanted to use some CSS3 styling, but only if the browser was capable. In all other cases the visitor had to see the CSS2 optimized page.
So I started looking into a way to let my web application determine what browser was visiting and what capabilities it had. Since this was for the new WordPress theme I’m developing it had to be in PHP and be sorta light-weight.
First thing was to figure out the basic browser that was visiting. This can be done by doing a simple strpos call in PHP on the user agent property. Having a list of the various user agents helped, I found just such a list at UserAgentString. A brief summary for some common browsers is below.
$user_agent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']; $IE = strpos($this->_user_agent, 'MSIE') > -1; $IPad = strpos($this->_user_agent, 'iPad') > -1; $Firefox = strpos($this->_user_agent, 'Firefox/') > -1; $Chrome = strpos($this->_user_agent, 'Chrome/') > -1; $Opera = strpos($this->_user_agent, 'Opera/') > -1; $Android = strpos($this->_user_agent, 'Android') > -1;
As you can see determining the basic browser type is pretty simple. But to be able to determine if CSS3 is supported you will also need to locate the version of the browser. Keeping in mind that IE9+, Firefox 4+, Opera 10+ and Chrome are the only versions that support CSS3. The check for this is slightly different for each version. But you can do it easily with a regular expresion.
// For all non IE browsers
$locator;
if ($Firefox) $locator = "Firefox\/";
if ($Android) $locator = "Android\s";
if ($Chrome) $locator = "Chrome\/";
if ($Opera) $locator = "Version\/";
preg_match('/'.$locator.'([0-9]{1,4}(.[0-9]{1,3})+)/', $user_agent, $version);
// For IE
preg_match('/MSIE\s([0-9]{1,2}.[0-9]{1,2})/', $user_agent, $version);
if (count($version) > 1) $version = $version[1];
else $version = 0;
Having the version and the type of browser allows us to do all kinds of fancy browser specific stuff. Mostly introduce hacks for IE7 (yes many are needed), or add CSS3 support.
