The Project

Posted on by troy
Note: all WordPress plugins and themes mentioned in this case study are high-quality, widely used plugins. I used them quite often. Any clashes, incompatibilities and problems can be placed squarely on the inexperience of the developer.

The project began, as projects do, with a meeting between the internal client and our development people. Our client organizes a multi-day professional development event called Interculturalizing the Curriculum. They find the themes and conversations arising at the event both important and stimulating and want to continue the conversations online in the interspaces between events.

A discussion and resource-sharing website was a logical approach. The project was spear-headed by Kyra Garson who also had a work-study student, Santi Swain, who was to do much of the work on the site.

What they needed from the Innovations office was some initial consulting on approach, a WordPress website to build in and some custom development to support key site functionality.

Requirements

  • The site was to be organized around 6 themes for conversations and resources
  • There would be a primary page for each theme and on that page would be displayed a theme intro, recent discussions and recently posted resources.
  • Pagination for the discussion and resources areas of the pages.
  • Pages for viewing all discussions and all resources regardless of theme.
  • In the upper right admin bar, the word “Howdy” replaced with the word “Welcome”

Approach

  • The majority of the theme selection, site design, content population, etc. was to be undertaken by Santi.
  • I was to undertake the custom development to address the requirements (and any other sub-requirements lurking beneath the surface of the primary requirements).

On a normal project the development problems would have been solved prior to production, but due to an unforeseen temporary rechanneling of my time into Moodle support the project proceeded in exactly the opposite order.

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Initial plugins

I installed and recommended to Santi the use of two of my favourite plugins. (There were more than two plugins, but the others were unobtrusive and are not germane to the story.) They are widely used, solidly built and greatly simplify the construction of WordPress sites.

SiteOrigin Page Builder

sopagebuilderPage builder functionality is all the rage these days. There are lots of visual page builders out there. Some are provided in plugins and some in themes (blech, ask me why later). SO Page Builder has lots of qualities I like, but in particular:

  • in addition to make its own database entries, it also copies its pages back into the post. This means if the plugin is turned off or removed your stuff is not lost.
  • it is a plugin in rather than provided with a theme. This means that if you change themes you don’t lose your stuff. Also it keeps with the WordPress philosophy of providing function through plugins and visual design through themes.
  • Its pretty easy to use and helps you get your pages looking like you want.

SiteOrigin CSS

so cssThis plugin requires a bit more knowledge to use, specifically some minimal understanding of CSS and HTML, but not a lot. There is a visual mode that both helps you do get your site elements looking like you want and also helps you learn about CSS and HTML along the way.

It great simplifies the design (spacing, color, etc.) of your page and site elements, and stores that design in a CSS style sheet where it belongs.

There are many ways, plugins, dialog boxes, etc., to scatter and embed design and style hither and yon through your site. SO CSS keeps all of your custom CSS in a single style sheet and helps you avoid this:

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Site Origins CSS helps consolidate added custom CSS in much the same way building out a child theme CSS file would, and, in fact, the two approaches can be used in tandem.