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Desktop wallpapers can serve as an excellent source of inspiration. However, if you use some specific wallpaper for a long period of time, it becomes harder to draw inspiration out of it. That’s why we have decided to supply you with smashing wallpapers over 12 months. And to make them a little bit more distinctive from the usual crowd, we’ve decided to embed calendars for the upcoming month. So if you need to look up some date, isn’t it better to show off a nice wallpaper with a nice calendar instead of launching some default time application?

This post features 40 free desktop wallpapers, created by designers across the globe. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free.

Please notice:

• all images can be clicked and lead to the preview of the wallpaper;
• you can feature your work in our magazine by taking part in our desktop wallpaper calendar series. We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists to be featured on Smashing Magazine. Are you one of them?

So what wallpapers have we received for May 2010? (more...)

WordPress’ popularity has grown exponentially as of late. This rise in popularity is due in part to WordPress’ custom fields. Custom fields allow you to add little bits of data to posts. They have changed the way people look at WordPress. A couple of years ago, WordPress was a blogging platform — a good one, but a blogging platform nonetheless. Now it’s widely considered to be an excellent simple content management system. How did it evolve so quickly? Custom fields, that’s how.

How exactly did these bits of data transform WordPress? The fields could initially include the weather — as the codex points out — the temperature and various other not-particularly-useful things. And that was the story for a while. Then people started to realize that they could use the custom fields to store URLs of images. They could then pull these images to the home page to create magazine-style layouts. These magazine themes, as they became known, evolved, and eventually you were able to pull images automatically from posts. You can draw a direct line from WordPress’ popularity to the magazine themes to custom fields.

[Offtopic: by the way, did you know that there is a Smashing eBook Series? Book #1 is Professional Web Design, 242 pages for just $9,90.]

The Custom Field Syntax

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CSS3 is probably the hottest trend in web design right now, allowing developers the opportunity to implement a number of solutions into their projects with some very straightforward CSS while avoiding having to resort to nonsemantic markup, extra images, and complex JavaScript. Unfortunately, it’s not a surprise that Internet Explorer, even in its most recent version, still does not support the majority of the properties and features introduced in CSS3.

Experienced developers understand that CSS3 can be added to new projects with progressive enhancement in mind. This ensures that content is accessible while non-supportive browsers fall back to a less-enhanced experience for the user.

But developers could face a situation where a client insists that the enhancements work cross-browser, demanding support even for IE6. In that case, I’ve collected together a number of options that developers can consider for those circumstances where support for a CSS3 feature is required for all versions of Internet Explorer (IE6, IE7, & IE8 — all of which are still currently in significant use).

[Offtopic: by the way, did you know that there is a Smashing eBook Series? Book #1 is Professional Web Design, 242 pages for just $9,90.]

Opacity / Transparency

I think all developers are baffled at why Internet Explorer still fails to support this very popular (albeit troublesome) property. It’s been around so long, that we often forget that it’s actually a CSS3 property. Although IE doesn’t offer support for the opacity property, it does offer similar transparency settings via the proprietary filter property: (more...)