I recently needed to create a number of masonry layouts for a WooCommerce website I’m building for a friend. I didn’t want to resort to jQuery, and that’s how, at long last, I found CSS3’s columns property. It lets you do CSS-only layouts that look like this:

In the first of a few “Whaaaat I had no idea CSS3 did that” posts from me: You can set elements to be a percentage of the height of your browser window!

WordPress 4.7, which launched on December 6, 2106, makes customizing the CSS on your site a whole lot easier. Easier enough that I think it’s worth an explanation. So that’s the topic of this Quick Guide. If you want to know even more about the cool new developer-relevant features of 4.7, check out Fred’s post from Tuesday.

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.