Milan Kačurák

Don’t you hate it when someone or something wastes your time? I guess everyone does – especially when it comes to websites. The longer it takes for your website to load, the higher the chances are that a visitor will leave before your page is displayed. Before you know it, you’ve lost a potential customer. Over the past several days, we’ve been optimizing CSS and JavaScript files with Grunt to improve the performance of the Kentico DevNet website. The final result is that the website is 33% faster than before. So far, so good. In this article, I will discuss how to speed up your website by integrating Grunt into your development process with Kentico.

"The future is ours to make—friendly.", says the Future Friendly manifesto, which points to the current and possible future state of the web and the quantity and diversity of connected devices. Of course, we are not able to test our websites on all possible devices, but we have workflows and techniques that help us to create future-friendlier websites.

I am always looking for tools that could make my work more effective. Even though CSS is a pretty straightforward yet powerful language, writing thousands of lines of code can get tiring sometimes. Fortunately I am not the only one who has such feelings. Alexis Sellier has developed a dynamic stylesheet language called LESS which extends CSS with dynamic behavior such as variables, mixins, nesting, operations and functions. I am really proud and happy that Jakub Oczko and his team integrated LESS into Kentico CMS. This is something Web Designers and Web Developers using Kentico CMS should celebrate. In honor of this occasion I would like to provide you with a little insight as to how LESS works.

When I joined Kentico Software as a little Web Developer in 2010, the Kentico.com web site redesign was the first project I worked on. To be honest, my CSS and HTML skills still had a way to go, so writing CSS stylesheets for Internet Explorer 6 was the darkest nightmare I've ever had. One day, my older colleague showed me a wonderful feature – Kentico CMS generates CSS classes recognizing web browser versions. There was an “IE6” class in the body element! I was overjoyed about that. Today I'm going to provide you with a list of special CSS classes you can find in the body element, and moreover, I'd like to show you how to enhance this feature using the Modernizr JavaScript library.

In the previous articles, "Introducing jQuery Mobile" and "jQuery Mobile – Pages and Dialogs", Thomas Robbins looked in detail at general usage of jQuery Mobile. I know from implementing the mobile version of our new E-commerce Sample Site, that when you have to integrate a framework like jQuery Mobile into a complex system like Kentico CMS, life is not quite as easy as writing the term “jQuery Mobile markup” on a blank piece of paper! But don't worry my friends – We have successfully integrated jQuery into our Kentico CMS project! And we’d like to share the lessons we learned in the process with you now, to help ease your own mobile website development.