This is a sample of one of our live talks with industry experts. For more, check out our Talk with the Experts compilation, available for SitePoint members.
Recapping CodePen
Last week we held our highly anticipated live webinar with Chris Coyier! For those of you who may not know him, he is the Co-Host of The Shop Talk Show podcast, Founder of CSS-Tricks and Co-Founder of CodePen. With CodePen being one of the most popular tools for web developers, we were really excited to have him join us and show us how we can make the most of CodePen, with many useful tricks that may have missed our radar.
If you’re not familiar with CodePen, it’s time you did. CodePen is a development playground which allows you to write HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in your preferred browser, without additional software. As CodePen is also a cloud service, you can share pens with your team, with other developers, or between your devices — convenient huh! With CodePen, you can build full applications or just demo a quick bug fix, or even just share snippets of code – it’s all up to you. With our webinar now over, you now have a new set of tricks at your CodePen disposal which means you can do even more than you probably realized!
We’ll be giving you a sample of the webinar with a small recap of some of the 24 questions asked. However, you can immerse yourself in the complete webinar experience by watching the recap below.
Q: Can you add other plugins and extensions to CodePen?
Chris: If you can do it on the client, you can do it on CodePen.
Q: Tell us about upcoming features?
Chris: There is lots of new stuff! We have most of our team just cranking away on a new feature! The hint: Let’s say you’re taking a web design 101 class, and the first thing they taught you is how to make a website for your aunt’s sewing business or, something like that, and you want an index page, a contact page, and a work page to show off all the photos of her work. How would you do that on CodePen? It would be a little hard, huh? That’s… kind of coming.
Q: Can you write PHP in CodePen?
Chris: No, you can’t, it’s all client side stuff entirely right now, no PHP or Ruby or Python or any background language.
Q: What’s the easiest way to browse/search existing pens by other users?
Chris: Our search is pretty darned good, and you can kinda get customized with it.
Q: Can we hotlink resources from CodePen in other apps?
Chris: I would say, I guess, feel free to hotlink stuff? I’m not overly worried about that kind of thing. Just be warned that there’s no versioning or anything, you can screw yourself up that way if the the thing you are hotlinking to changes, it’s just gonna change. There’s no guarantees for that kind of thing.
Q: How big is the CodePen team?
Chris: There’s nine of us now, so that’s about it? You can check out the team page at About CodePen.
Q: Tell me more about the pro plan on CodePen?
Chris: There is some pretty cool, compelling, interesting advantages of this. They can do some things that I think people are kinda interested in [such as live views in other browser windows, or even in mobile testing, like via Xcode].
Q: How can you pull up the pens you’ve just worked on?
Chris: We’ve tried to make that easier over the years. One of the things is, if you pull up the home page, if you’re kind of exploring and checking out cool stuff, there’s this “My Recent Pens” thing… so right on the homepage we put that there. Also in the User dropdown, there’s a link right to Pens.
Well that’s the end
There we have it, 8 out of the 24 questions. If that’s not enough for you, you don’t have to feel as if you had missed out. Watch the complete webinar whenever you like and once that’s done, show us what amazing thing(s) you’ve built on CodePen by tagging it “makingthemostofcodepen”.
Jeff SmithJeff works for a startup as a technical writer, does contract writing and web development, and loves tinkering with new projects and ideas. In addition to being glued to a computer for a good part of his day, Jeff is also a husband, father, tech nerd, book nerd, and gamer.
Chris CoyierChris is a web designer and developer. He writes about all thing web at CSS-Tricks, talks about all things web at conferences around the world and on his podcast ShopTalk, and co-founded the web coding playground CodePen.
