Opera Developer News

A new Dev.Opera

By Andreas Bovensandreasbovens. Friday, November 25, 2011 2:11:43 PM

labs, articles, dev.opera, redesign, update

Yesterday, we released a major update to Dev.Opera. The most obvious change is of course the visual refresh, but we've also rewritten the whole back-end from scratch, so as to make it more flexible and robust.

A quick tour around some of the bigger changes:

We've simplified the categorization to just 5 sections, each with their own featured content: Web, Add-ons (which has 4 parts), Mobile, TV and Labs. Tags and search let you dive deeper into topics of interest, and you can use the new pagination feature to browse through everything we've published.
The Opera Labs page, which was living outside of Dev.Opera before, will be discontinued in its current form, and it is now integrated as a separate Dev.Opera section. This makes sense, as Labs releases often go together with a technical article, so you have everything in one place.
Articles now have real comments: a real improvement over the previous system where comments were actually forum threads.
Color highlighting for code blocks to improve readability of code samples included in the articles.
Handy sidebar navigation for e.g. our Opera Extensions documentation, so you keep a clear overview and don't get lost between articles.
A fresh, adaptive design, based on viewport and media query goodness. One Web FTW!
And much more!

Over the next couple of days and weeks, we'll be ironing out some of the remaining bugs and further tweak the existing content — if you find any issues, let us know on @ODevRel. If you want to submit new articles, you can do so as well of course!

And to celebrate the release, we've published two new articles:

Love your devices: adaptive web design with media queries, viewport and more by Chris Mills, in which he explains how to use a combination of those handy media queries, viewport, but also object-fit and the video media attribute to prepare your content for different screens.
Porting 3D graphics to the web — WebGL intro part 2 by Luz Caballero. In the second installment of her WebGL article series, Luz explains how to convert 3D models created in graphical packages like SketchUp, Blender or Shade to WebGL for inclusion in your website.

So, roll up those sleeves, and get coding!

'The Developer Briefcase' and other neat Opera extensions for developersWhat’s new in Opera development snapshots: 28 November 2011 edition

Comments

MaximSailorMax # Friday, November 25, 2011 3:36:21 PM

link to the forums too hidden

I looked for it few minutes...
It should to be in the main top menu.

BLOBO # Friday, November 25, 2011 7:47:47 PM

yes saw it yesterday looks really nice

QuHno # Friday, November 25, 2011 8:34:36 PM

Looks nice and now the search works (that was a real PITA before). Now we just need a little bit more content with examples for the steps between beginner and expert and everybody is happy

Wish:
Now that it is possible to comment the articles directly at the same page, could you split the API overviews into several parts, please? That way the Opera developers and advanced users could post their usage examples below so that people like me can learn how the pros do it, just like it is done i.e. at php.net (example).

Andreas Bovensandreasbovens # Friday, November 25, 2011 9:03:28 PM

QuHno: that's the plan :-)

grafio # Saturday, November 26, 2011 12:45:47 PM

section.campaign {display: none !important;}

There, now it's perfect.
I don't think anyone goes there to look at huge photos and to read slogans.

metude # Saturday, November 26, 2011 8:34:57 PM

Can we write articles just in our local language?
And do you have any plans multilanguage web interface?

QuHno # Saturday, November 26, 2011 8:54:53 PM

I'd still prefer English only - or, if someone wants or needs to write in her|his language, to write at least a short description or overview in English.

I don't think that most of the readers would understand if I write an article German and I fear that if someone would write an article in i.e. Maltese, about 99.9% of all Opera users wouldn't understand it.

If an article can't be indexed in English it is almost the same as if it is not there at all for all people who don't understand the language.

PS: Automated translations like those from Google or Microsoft suck too when it comes to technical terms.

Cutting Spoonhellspork # Sunday, November 27, 2011 5:27:42 AM

This is a most fascinating development. But what does it mean for the previous tradition of Labs builds? Will they now be published in the Labs subsection of dev.opera? Should I be updating any of my RSS feed subscriptions?

FataL # Monday, November 28, 2011 7:37:10 PM

Questions:

Where are useful article categories, tags, labels, whatever? (Update: found it, they are on top now -- not sure if it's a good place for categories)
Where are latest comments?
Why on information resource this huge top banner is needed? I need to scroll to see actual content, because only part of newest article is visible.

A fresh, adaptive design, based on viewport and media query goodness. One Web FTW!

Constantine Vesnac69 # Thursday, December 1, 2011 5:32:42 PM

Visually its great.. functionally, dunno.. forum was better than comments, yet it wasn't very populated - so probably the change was inevitable.

metude # Saturday, December 3, 2011 7:13:56 PM

Originally posted by QuHno:

I'd still prefer English only - or, if someone wants or needs to write in her|his language, to write at least a short description or overview in English.

I don't think that most of the readers would understand if I write an article German and I fear that if someone would write an article in i.e. Maltese, about 99.9% of all Opera users wouldn't understand it.

You're right at this point.