alistapart / alistapart

The A List Apart front end repo

A List Apart

We dipped our collective toes in the GitHub waters when we open-sourced our embeddable comments script last year. We’ve got much bigger things underway now: we’re open-sourcing the code that powers alistapart.com.

Contributing to an open-source project can be tough, and it can take time to get the hang of things. We want to help with that. If you’re inexperienced with GitHub, our goal is to provide you with a great place to send your first-ever pull requests—to help you get comfortable contributing to a large open-source effort, participating in issue threads, and reviewing code.

Contributing

We’re currently using ExpressionEngine, which makes it tricky to clone the repo and run the site locally—at least, with this first incarnation of the repo. We’re exploring ways to make that better.

For right now, we’d love to have your eyes on our dev site, which directly mirrors our dev branch. Don’t hesitate to file a new issue or join us in the issue tracker if anything catches your eye.

By joining our conversations as we weigh the pros and cons of certain approaches, you’ll be better armed to make the same decisions on your own projects. If you’re already well-versed in the ways of GitHub we’d love to have your eyes on how we’ll be doing things over the next few weeks, and your help building a welcoming, low-pressure place to learn the ins and outs of contributing to an open source project.

alistapart's Issues

"More from A List Apart" not showing correct authors for the blog

A bit odd, but on the current issue page (http://alistapart.com/issue/390) the "More from A List Apart" section is showing me as the author for both of the recent blog posts. On alistapart.com, the article pages and the column pages, these posts are correctly attributed to their respective authors though.

Review HTTP security headers

in re: http://ibuildings.nl/blog/2013/03/4-http-security-headers-you-should-always-be-using

Where do we talk about being able to clone the EE codebase?

I've done a lot of work with ExpressionEngine sites among distributed teams, and noted in the ALA article & README.md here that you're exploring ways to run the site locally. I'd be interested in contributing to that conversation. We got the workflow down to something really easy, but storing EE in a public repo would be a violation of the ToS, too.

RSS feed not giving author credit

I subscribe to A List Apart's RSS feed via feedly, and read it via gReader. The articles show 'A List Apart' as the author, not the actual authors of the piece.

Could the individual authors' names appear in the RSS feed please?

Thanks!

Blog headline width on smaller viewports

On smaller viewports, blog post headlines render in a very narrow column shifted to the right, with a big chunk of whitespace on the left. Screenshots attached from the inspector view in Chrome.

Logo needs more white space

The logo needs more padding to the top because at the moment it's being cut off.

Yeah… I just wanted to be the first to post that ;)

404 pages not always working correctly

When a link has a segment that doesn't exists, EE fails back to the index template of the parent template group, when instead it should show the 404 page.
Example: http://alistapart.com/topics/design/mqslhjgmlqhfg

Also, when we remove the slash after design (http://alistapart.com/topics/designmqslhjgmlqhfg), a blank page is rendered instead of a 404.

Search field non functional - Firefox 26 / 27

The search field in the upper right hand corner of the site is not functioning at all for me in Firefox 26 in Win 8.1- and also vs 27, which just happened to upgrade for me as I was checking the version number for this post.

I see the loupe icon but no search field. Hovering does nothing. Clicking on the icon gives the message 'Please fill out this field' - but nothing appears, no field, nothing appears at all.

Its a shame because I'd love to be able to search your site of just about any site online.

PHP in Blog Template

There's some PHP in /blog.group/index which is avoidable by using something like http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/math

iOS home icon not appearing

Unrestricted access to dev

Currently we need to be logged into EE to view dev.alistapart.com. Think we’re ready to switch that off for some late-game testing.

Embedded comments are down.

See: http://alistapart.com/blog/post/embeddable-comments-yes-please

Social media icons

It would be good to have the Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ links under the "Share this" panel use social media icons. Readers would be able to spot those more quickly for sharing purposes. I don't know if that would conflict with the ALA style guide.

Error with paragraphs in Pattern Library?

I was reviewing your Pattern Library located at

http://patterns.alistapart.com/

and noticed when you highlighted paragraph text in most of the content areas, it will fold on-top of itself. I don't know if that was intentional but figured you'd like to know.

Improved issue labels

The ones we have now are pretty default. At the very least, we should add a “good first commit” tag—Adobe’s Brackets repo is doing that, and it’s a great idea: https://github.com/adobe/brackets/issues

Weird logo animation

Not sure what just happened, but I had alistapart.com up in a tab and just watched the logo shift down really slowly about 40px. Looks like some transition might be getting misapplied somewhere?

Missing LICENSE file?

Thanks for open sourcing your project!

I was surprised not to see any "LICENSE" file… have you thought about adding one to the root of your project, or would everything be copyrighted by default?

.promo-holder within .global-footer needs updated from "2013 schedule" to "2014 schedule"

Happy New Year!

Currently it still reads "See the 2013 schedule"

Audit for Picturefill opportunities

We should sit down and look for places where we can do further optimizing via Picturefill.

Search Results, Topic right navigation is small

Looks like the Search Results right column navigation uses a smaller font-size than other pages of this type, such as Write for Us, Masthead, and so forth. Should we just make them uniform? The smaller nav seems a bit antiquated to me stylistically.

README.md

We need this too.

Should we change the class name on `.share-tools`?

This element currently gets AdBlocked/Ghostery’d into oblivion, which is arguably the point of having such things installed. We’re not using any gross third-party scripts for our “share” links either, though, so… What say we all?

Grunt it up

Add Grunt to handle at least some basic optimization tasks.

bottom menu sizing - Style Guide link

On my Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 (Chrome 33 Beta)

Upgrade to latest EECMS

I am in the wrong place :(

http://alistapart.com/authors

I'm listed under A for Anna rather than D for Debenham. I've had a quick check and think that's the only one.

Misc `,` in CSS

Misc , on Line1947.

.main-content > figure.quote > blockquote > p,,
.main-content > article.link-post > figure.quote > blockquote > p {
        margin-bottom: 18px;
}

Ideal for anybody who want to try out their first-ever pull requests.

Menu bar sizing issue on Nexus 7

I think we have this one addressed: @sallywhiting, can you confirm?

Drew McLellan has no head

Drew's author page is missing the document head, and therefore all styles: http://alistapart.com/author/drewmclellan

Poor Drew.

ALA needs a front-end styleguide

for realsies.

Redirection strategy for malformed URLs?

Malformed content URLs (e.g. /article/full-title-text, versus /article/full-title-tex) redirect visitors to the index page for whatever content type it is (e.g. that last URL would redirect you to /articles).

Is this the best strategy? Should we be 404-ing those URLs?

CONTRIBUTING.md

We need one.

Hovering vs clicking to expose search field

Clicking the search loupe icon exposes the search field with an error message as placeholder text, while hovering exposes the field with “Search” as the placeholder.

• If the search field is both invisible and empty when the user clicks the loupe, it’s probably safe to assume that they didn't intend to submit the form—so why chide them with “Oh come on…”? Better to leave the placeholder as “Search.”
• If, however, the search field is already exposed when the user clicks the loupe, you can guess they meant to submit the form. At that point it might be more helpful to point out the specific error/action: they need to enter a term to search for.

Comment box decoration missing in IE9

The triangle is missing at the top of the “Got Something to Say” box in IE9.

Admin nav box taking up space?

Why would a fixed position div be taking up vertical space?

As an admin user, view this page logged out, and then logged in:

http://alistapart.com/columns

The content below the logo shifts.

The style is broken

client environment: Mac OS 10.9.1
Chrome 32
China

Move "Share this" panel to bottom of article

Can the "Share this" panel be moved to the bottom of each ALA article? Readers might be more apt to share if they see the panel at the end of the the article instead of scrolling/swiping back to the top.

Need styles for `dl`, `dd`, `dt`

Quite a few very old articles use dl, dd, and dt, sometimes for very large swathes of an article—at the moment, they’re not styled very well. @murtaugh, you have any links to those articles kicking around?

Previous links exist even when there are no more previous entries.

Need to get rid of “previous” links when there are no previous entries:

Need a form for members to edit their info

I think, in the tools template group, there is something that does this already, I just haven't looked at it in ages, and it doesn't look very good.

Auto-expanding comment field

Currently, the textarea for commenting is a fixed height. I’ve done a few of these—while an expanding textarea is pretty simple, making one contract again when text is removed is actually a huge pain.

Rename "Tips & Tricks" to "Technical Style Guide"

You will take me seriously.

Author article links out of order

As seen on @zeldman's page, and as evidenced by the dates displayed:

http://alistapart.com/author/zeldman

Add link to technical style guide in the description for all content fields

Update RSS Sponsorships to Sponsorships in subnav

Subnav in the About section still shows "RSS Sponsorships." Should just say "Sponsorships" (page itself and footer are correct).

Switch to min-width media queries?

(Porting this over from the old tracker.)

Hey, guys—was just poring over the CSS, and I noticed the media queries are all max-width. Might I suggest switching this over to min-width queries at some point? It’d make for a more mobile-/progressive enhancement-friendly architecture, at least, and have a much broader reach.

Comments timing out?

Over a certain threshold, comments won’t load.

See: http://alistapart.com/comments/flashsatay

Styles on lists inside lists inside lists

Example: http://dev.alistapart.com/article/business3

Mis-placed issue badge

The issue badge on this page: http://alistapart.com/issue/169

Isn't behaving correctly at small sizes.

Logo as text with image background

Right now the logo is:

<header class="logo-holder">
        <h1 class="killer-logo"><a href="/"><img src="//d.alistapart.com/site_assets/img/ala-logo-big.png" alt="A List Apart"></a></h1>
        <a name="top"></a>
        <a class="go-to-nav" href="#main-nav" title="skip to nav">Menu</a>
    </header>

Would it be better for accessibility to do that as H1 text with a background image?