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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.

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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.

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What's the JAMstack?

By:Alec Robertson on 6/13/2021

As a front-end developer in 2020, it is time that I fulfill the FEDeral mandate that I publish words regarding the JAMStack. If you follow too many developers on Twitter, it’s likely you’ve heard about the Next Big Thing in web development, but I’d like to put this trend (fad? movement?) into context to better understand what’s truly new about this approach and whether it’s worth using.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Organizing Web Styling

By:Alec Robertson on 5/26/2020

An overview of different approaches to organizing CSS.

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

By: Mark Biek on 1/14/2020

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 application that was highly responsive to user interactions. Nothing’s more frustrating than a slow user interface! VIA has mostly standardized on ReactJS for smaller interactive user experiences as well as single-page web applications so it seemed like a great fit, even though the ticketing app is just a small (but critical!) piece of a much larger site.

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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 Cordova and Vuetify.js, and naive builds with React Native.

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Handy Features of PHP 7.x

By: Mark Biek on 9/20/2019

New and interesting PHP features

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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 component into another component.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Recursive asynchronous calls with JavaScript and ES6

By: Mark Biek on 1/30/2018

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

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Easy Responsive Featured Images In WordPress

By: Josie Flynn on 11/1/2016

Providing the best image for every situation.

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Better Partial Templates in WordPress

By: Josie Flynn on 10/19/2016

Make your theme modular and easy to debug

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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.

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Getting creative with Act-On | Marketing Automation Software

By: Nick Stewart on 9/1/2016

How we crafted a creative solution within software constraints.

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Optimizing your theme for WordPress 4.4’s responsive images

By: Natalie Miller on 2/23/2016

There are a few things theme developers will want to modify to get the most out of this new feature.

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Configure PHP CodeSniffer for Mac OS X

By: Joel Jacob on 3/3/2015

PHP CodeSniffer is a tool that checks code against a defined set of rules, covering anything from whitespace through doc comments to class naming conventions and beyond. We've been using it for about a year and it's worked out great. Our team now has a unified coding style and the CodeSniffer tool ensures that we're always following it.

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Building The Actors Theatre Humana Festival Mobile Site

By: Josie Flynn on 2/12/2015

Every year, the Actors Theatre of Louisville presents the Humana Festival of New American Plays, consisting of 7 shows all running concurrently for 3 weeks. Many attendees are in from out of town and only have access to their mobile devices, so mobile traffic tends to increase.

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Configuring WordPress for Multiple Environments

By: Jason McCreary on 2/8/2011

As a <em>production-ready</em> system WordPress can be difficult to setup in multiple environments. Take a look at how we setup our WordPress projects to in multiple environments and shared across our team. All with ease of migration and without plugins.

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