2 min read
A few of my favourite resources for website development
Being a web developer is predominantly based around problem solving the designs and features that get passed our way. This is something that I and am sure other developers thrive off - bringing functionality and life to static designs is what is so special about web / digital design. Sometimes though, you need an extra helping hand to figure out. I have a number of go-to sites / resources that have got me out of many sticky situations - which I appreciate so much so that I thought I would share with you.
Stack Exchange is the king of Q&A on the web. With it’s feature accessibilities being based around a points system, it gives users an incentive to go onto their system and help other people out and solve their problems. It prides itself around a ‘Give a little, get a little’ process and it seems to be working a dream! A useful feature on their system is the ability for users to Up Vote and Down Vote answers, helping users find which answers have been most effective.
As we now build all of our sites with our bespoke Craft CMS framework, we are always looking for ways to improve our frameworks and therefore better our clients and users experience. The beauty of Craft CMS is that is has built up a wonderful community which is extremely active. Two fantastic things to check out if you use Craft is the Slack Group - get an invite here. So many developers including the creators of Craft are extremely active on this which is a massive help for debugging enhancing the CMS framework for everyone.
Something I am yet to experience is a Craft Meet Up. Jason has been to the Manchester meet up a couple of times now and has always reported back to us about it with exciting new discoveries about the already fantastic framework.
The majority of plugins that we use within / alongside our sites comes are stored on Github. This has become a huge central hub of resources for all things dev and there are a number of reasons why. One of the biggest contributors to its success is its ability to version control with the public. I have found a number of times that when I am having issues which a certain plugin which I have sourced from GitHub, there is no doubt that someone else has had similar issues. More often than not, simply visiting the resources issues section on their GitHub page is enough to help you out.
With GitHub being so community driven and very open to public access, many people post their issues but also post branches of the plugin with fixes they have come up with themselves. This is fantastic as it not only helps other people using the plugin out, but also gives the developers of the plugins vital feedback and bug fixes which they can then push to the core version.
At Shape we use GitHub to store our frameworks privately also so we can each add little features as and when we like so that the rest of us can benefit from it at a later date. Jason is pretty handy at creating plugins for Craft these days too and has been publishing them on ourGitHub so go take a look!
I'm Tom, a Web Developer at Shape - when I'm not making slick Craft CMS websites, I'm usually eating Peanut Butter or riding my bike.
