Three major changes in WordPress 4.7 jump out as having the power to significantly transform how I do my work every day.

I’m building a client site, and I wanted to write a couple of CSS rules:

If you’ve been wanting to get your hands on WordPress 4.7, you can now get the Beta 1 version from wordpress.org. The feature list is looking really spicy. Standouts include:

If you need to line HTML elements up horizontally in CSS, display: inline-block is a great solution that comes with a lot less baggage than float.

Sometimes you need an outline around your text. A recent project required me to place white text on a multicolored image background, so giving that text a black outline was important for readability.

As it says at the top, “Performs a smooth page scroll to an anchor on the same page.” The beauty of this code snippet is that it just works, everywhere across the site: anywhere there’s a link to an anchor on the same page, that becomes a smooth JavaScript scroll rather than a choppy instantaneous jump.

Today we look at a real-world problem that CSS can’t easily solve, and examine the jQuery fix.

As they come up in my work, :before and :after are a sort of fire escape, letting you quickly route around problems that could otherwise be quite difficult.

CSS pseudoselectors become very helpful when you can’t touch a site’s underlying PHP.

I started this article in a reflective mood, looking back on 2014 and considering the state of WordPress. As I write the article itself, though, I’m pretty excited, and the way I’m writing it is a big part of that: