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Digital Strategist

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Mitch Canter

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Tutorial

Tired of Refreshing Your CSS Everytime You Make A Change?

CMDR Mitchcraft

Reading time: 1 minute

So am I.  I  make changes a lot live on the server (using the Web Dev Toolbar), and I have to hard-refresh every time I make a change.  Doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it cuts down on valuable time that could be done… well, not refreshing a page.  There is a way; versioning your CSS file.  The upside: it makes changes go live automatically without having to clear the cache.  The downside: it’s difficult to do, because the correct way to do it is by adding v=XXX manually every time you make changes.

Unless… you can find a way to do it automatically.  And Mark Jaquith has done just that.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/style.css?v=<?php echo filemtime(TEMPLATEPATH . '/style.css'); ?>" type="text/css" media="screen, projection" />

So what does the ‘filemtime’ function do?  From the PHP website:

This function returns the time when the data blocks of a file were being written to, that is, the time when the content of the file was changed.

So everytime you change the file, the new change time gets parsed in using PHP and you’re able to have a new version every time.

Thanks to Mark for this great (and really clever) tip!

css, PHP
  • Favorite Plugins–Yours, Mine, and Everyone’s

    Favorite Plugins–Yours, Mine, and Everyone’s

    Reading time: 1 minute

    OK – so I’ve tallied up the results from Tuesday and came up with some really interesting results.  So, I’m going to do something a little fun.  Here are your favorite plugins as determined by the comments, my favorite plugins, and the top 5 plugins from the WordPress repository; let’s see how they match up…

    WordPress
  • WordPress 3.9: An Early Overview

    WordPress 3.9: An Early Overview

    Reading time: 3 minutes

    With the release of WordPress 3.9 beta 1 on March 11, everyone is (or should be) ensuring their plugins and themes are ready for the update.  There’s a lot of exciting things coming from this update, and it’s easy to overlook some of the more technical (but still important) aspects being added into WordPress.  There’s…

    WordPress