« Back to the Journal

PHP, Javascript & React

Interactions with SharpSpring

By:Nick Stewart on 3/29/2023

Integrating SharpSpring into a website is fairly simple with the SharpSpring API, which offers many methods/endpoints with a standard REST API. Learn more from VIA's Senior Developer.

Read More »
Using React and Redux to build the Kentucky Performing Arts ticketing experience

By: Mark Biek on 1/14/2022

When planning the KPA ticketing app, the first big decision was deciding which technology stack to use _______ Given the complex and highly-interactive design, we needed something that was going to be developer-friendly while letting us build an appl...

Read More »
Developing the New via.studio

By:Alec Robertson on 6/14/2021

A deep dive into creating a fast, user-focused experience on the latest web technology stack for the new via.studio website.

Read More »
What's the JAMstack?

By:Alec Robertson on 6/13/2021

An exploration of the latest trend in web development.

Read More »
Wordpress to Sanity Data Script

By:Nick Stewart on 3/11/2021

One of the biggest challenges of moving from one CMS to another is getting your existing data to the new platform. In our case, we were moving our existing WordPress platform, which had been around for years, over to the Sanity.io platform. At a high level...

Read More »
Building a Wordpress Theme with Timber

By:Alec Robertson on 10/6/2020

Timber is a plugin that allows Wordpress to render files written with Twig, a PHP template engine. We built a recent project with it and found that it greatly simplified the theme-building experience. Let's dig into why Timber is so useful for building Wordpress sites and how you can get started with it.

Read More »
Custom Dev
Pitfalls of Custom Development
Pitfalls of Custom Development

By: Mark Biek on 7/28/2020

There is a very well known concept in development circles called Not invented here syndrome or NIH. It describes a developer’s tendency to write something from scratch when there is an existing solution they could use instead. This is definitely something...

Read More »
A custom ecommerce experience with Shopify

By: Mark Biek on 6/15/2020

Why Shopify? Shopify is one of our favorite hosted ecommerce platforms. It does a great job of making it easy to manage products, product variants, coupons, refunds, etc etc etc. It also has a pretty decent theme system so you can customize your online st...

Read More »
Organizing Web Styling

By:Alec Robertson on 5/26/2020

An overview of different approaches to organizing CSS.

Read More »
Nativescript with Vue.js

By:Nick Stewart on 11/22/2019

At VIA, we’ve been experimenting with the many different solutions to creating mobile applications with web technologies. We’ve done simple applications that wrap a webview (FacePaint Peggy) to more advanced hybrid applications using libraries such as Cord...

Read More »
Handy Features of PHP 7.x

By: Mark Biek on 9/20/2019

New and interesting PHP features

Read More »
Nova

By:Nick Stewart on 6/28/2019

We are using Nova and loving it. Our developer discusses the uses and benefits of this CRUD admin layer, and how it's improved our process.

Read More »
SVG Morphing

By:Nick Stewart on 6/12/2019

Although SVG morphing is awesome, it's sometimes difficult to do. Thanks to MorphSVG and GreenSock, SVG morphing can be a much smoother process!

Read More »
An intro into the Javascript Notification API

By:Nick Stewart on 5/31/2019

A brief intro into the Javascript Notification API - what it is and how to use it.

Read More »
Hosting a ReactJS app (with routing) on AWS S3

By: Mark Biek on 4/8/2019

As you may or may not already know, it’s super simple to host a static website from an AWS S3 bucket. It’s fast, cheap, and you can even use a custom domain. This makes it a great candidate for hosting React single-page applications! One small issue is ...

Read More »
React Higher-Order Components (HOC)

By: Mark Biek on 3/11/2019

What is a higher-order component in React? The official definition is: A higher-order component is a function that takes a component and returns a new component. Whereas a component transforms props into UI, a higher-order component transforms a componen...

Read More »
A very basic intro to React redux-saga

By: Mark Biek on 1/14/2019

Today, we’re going to do a very brief introduction to Redux-Saga and why it makes React+Redux apps much easier. To save space, we’ll only be showing the important bits of our app code. Complete, working versions of the app are available on Github: Basic R...

Read More »
Sharing Is Caring: LESS Mixins Edition

By: Natalie Miller on 12/3/2018

Here are a few handy mixins to make your life LESS difficult.

Read More »
Powering up the WordPress Admin with React

By: Mark Biek on 11/6/2018

Custom post-types are part of the bread & butter of WordPress. We use them everywhere for things like products, events, or just about anything else needing special treatment. Sometimes, a custom post-type is simple enough that all you need is the normal p...

Read More »
Debugging a ReactJS Chrome Extension

By: Mark Biek on 3/5/2018

Simplify debugging your React-based Chrome Extension using the handy remote-redux-devtools library.

Read More »
Recursive asynchronous calls with JavaScript and ES6

By: Mark Biek on 1/30/2018

ES6 generator functions make recursive asynchronous calls (relatively) easy.

Read More »
Easy Responsive Featured Images In WordPress

By: Josie Flynn on 11/1/2016

Providing the best image for every situation.

Read More »
Better Partial Templates in WordPress

By: Josie Flynn on 10/19/2016

Make your theme modular and easy to debug

Read More »
Vue.js, jQuery & IE9

By: Jerrod Long on 10/6/2016

Regular readers of our blog might know that our development team has been digging into an emerging Javascript framework named Vue.js. Vue is similar to React and shares many of its features, such as single file components. However, you don’t need to know t...

Read More »
Getting creative with Act-On | Marketing Automation Software

By:Nick Stewart on 9/1/2016

How we crafted a creative solution within software constraints.

Read More »