Morten Rand-Hendriksen

@jeffnar I find Twenty Eleven to be stuffed full of bells and whistles that you have to work around or exclude to get something nice and clean. Most of the features in Twenty Eleven – like the Showcase Page Template with its slider – are features I rarely if ever have seen used, and a lot of the code is unnecessarily convoluted and complex.

As a stand-alone theme Twenty Eleven is great. And if you’re just making minor configuration or styling changes, its great as well. But if you want to make larger changes with more advanced inclusions it quickly gets heavy handed and clunky.

Twenty Twelve is a stripped down basic theme that has all the necessary features without any extra bling. That means it’s a great clean slate to start from if you want to experiment and build something more elaborate. It’s also coded in a much cleaner and more understandable way than Twenty Eleven making it an ideal learning tool for those just starting out.

This debate boils down to two simple questions: What is our job as developers, and what is the purpose of the sites we build.

Our job as web developers is to create websites that are accessible to the target audience and convey the message to those audiences in an easily digestible way. That means we have to make solutions that work for the end user. The purpose of the sites we build is to convey information.

We have no (nor should we have) control over what tools, devices, or browsers people use to access our websites. Our job is to make sure that the information gets where it’s supposed to go. Because WordPress is a CMS used to build websites for more than just Mac users in North America and Europe, we have to make solutions that work for the end users. That means graceful degradation within reason. IE8 is well within reason.

For reference, the main reason Twenty Twelve’s menu gets all messed up in IE8 is because the default menu is the mobile one while the ‘regular’ menu is in the media queries. A simple swap of the style code fixes this issue. The way it’s laid out now assumes only HTML5 – ready devices will access the site. This is an unnecessary restriction and as far as I’m concerned it’s non-standard. The best practice is to make the ‘regular’ menu the standard style set and place the mobile small-screen menu in the media queries.

@shapeshifter With IE8 we’re not talking about graceful degradation going on forever. As the world upgrades to Windows 7 and 8 this problem will disappear, and disappear fast. However, we have to address the current situation, and the current situation demands IE8 support. Google is dropping support for IE8, but they are not making their experience unusable for IE8 users. They just won’t get the latest features. This on the other hand is tantamount to punishing people for not buying new gear.

@otto and @emil I have to disagree with you. Though IE8 is an old and outdated browser, ignoring it and asking its users to upgrade is simply not a valid option. If you look at the statistics of who uses IE8 you’ll see that though the numbers are low in North America and Western Europe, they are quite high in the rest of the world. This is not because people are reluctant to upgrade but rather because of financial or institutional restraints. As someone else mentioned, IE9 and above requires an upgrade from Windows XP, an upgrade many people and many companies cannot afford.

If WordPress is to be a world wide solution, it has to provide solutions for a world wide audience.

I am not saying any theme should be dumbed down to work with all browsers. However the menu in Twenty Twelve ignores the principle of graceful degradation leaving those users who for whatever reason are stuck in the past with a more or less unusable solution.

Building in a simple fallback for IE8 users is not complicated or obstructive and will cause no issues for other users. Leaving it out is more a slap in the face than a nudge to get up to date with the latest technology.

This error keeps popping up. From what I can tell it’s Facebook timing out or timing out the access token. If you go into the settings for the plugin you’ll see that the post to page option gets reset pretty much once a day. The only way I’ve found around it so far is to check to make sure it’s set before I post something. Very annoying.

@david: Twenty Ten and Twenty Eleven both use filter hooks to define the header image height and width among other things. These are specifically created to let a child theme or plugin or other entity override the settings without having to ‘wait’ until the parent theme has been initiated.

The function as stated by esmi and reiterated by me uses the filter hooks to pass the new width and height. Because of this there is no need for the conditional function_exists(); call nor the add_action() call. They won’t do any damage, but they are redundant. The function works properly on its own.

The function posted by esmi towards the top does the trick (link).

Once applied, you have to re-upload your header images so WordPress can reconfigure them to the correct size.

We are working on updating the course to address this and other issues caused by the release of WordPress 3.4 and updates to the Twenty Ten theme. The reason you are encountering these issues is because some core functionalities of the Twenty Ten theme have been updated to work with new standards in WordPress 3.4.

UPDATE: I’ve figured out what’s causing the issue described above:

It seems something has been changed over at Facebook with regards to Open Graph tracking. Whereas before you could enter the ID of the Facebook page and use it to track Likes stats, you now have to enter the ID of the Administrator.

The issue described earlier arises when you enter a Page ID. This returns an error. When you enter an Admin ID, everything works fine. It also looks like you can enter an array or list of Admins though I’m not sure how that works or what format this should be in.

Mor10

I’ve found an interim solution that seems to work: On recurring events set the end date to the last day of the month and then go in and manually exclude whatever days spill over. This removes the error. Doesn’t explain why it’s there in the first place though.

I have the same problem and a quick search on Google shows it is very common.

The weird thing is this doesn’t happen on all events, just some of them, both repeating and singular.

The apostrophe must have gotten lost in one of my edits. I will roll out a new version with the apostrophe fixed tomorrow.

I have a long list of features I’m planning on adding in the future. These include manually changing the name, selecting where the box appears (above or below content), inserting custom info like Twitter handle, and a check box to turn the box on or off for individual posts or pages.

Genius! Thanks hellomatt!

Hah! I found an alternate solution: Just replace the entire drop-down menu with a simple text input field. True, I now have to manually find the ID for the target post, but it works perfectly.

So, for those of you playing along, in NextGen-gallery/admin/manage-images.php delete the following lines of code:

<select name="pageid" style="width:95%">
<option value="0" ><?php _e('Not linked', 'nggallery') ?></option>
<?php parent_dropdown($gallery->pageid); ?>
</select>

… and replace them with this:

<input name="pageid" type="text" />

Quod Erat Demonstrandum

*Big thanks to jageo for putting me on the right track*

@jageo Thanks, I actually found that myself too. Unfortunately it took me no closer to fixing the problem: As far as I can tell the drop-down list is created by this line of code:

<?php parent_dropdown($gallery->pageid); ?>

But I can’t figure out how to change it to make it show posts instead of pages. Simply switching the last part to “postid” for example just broke it. Anyone with more php skill than me (or a reference guide for NextGen) want to give this one a whirl?

Since the SaveTheDevelopers.org site is gone and the .com site points straight to the official IE8 site the JS call in the plug-in is now defunct. Do you have a copy of the script that can be modified or should I just build my own?

It shouldn’t. What browser are you using? Is it Internet Explorer 6 by any chance? I have run into a couple of people with the same problem but have yet to be able to reproduce it.

Please post your blog address and I’ll take a look.