Previously

When we left off I had wrongly assumed that the Site Origins Page Builder was not playing nice with my custom post type.

Retooling

The Types plugin that I used to create my Custom Post Type is the free part of a larger paid suite of plugins called Toolset. My revised plan at this point was to use some of the additional features of the Toolset to achieve the site goals.

In particular I was keen on using the Views plugin to create my database queries, in this case teasing the custom post type back out of the database for display (replacing the job of the Post Loop widget in Round 1).

Also part of my revised plan was to make use of the Layouts plugin to create my page layouts in place of the Site Origins Page Builder plugin I had used in Round 1.

A Diversion

We divert from the current narrative arc to catch up with Santi. Some time had passed (2 or 3 months) since the original project meeting. I had been tied up with Moodle support, and this project slid down the priority list a little.

But in the meantime Santi had tucked in and done a pile of fantastic work on site structure, content and design (in a perfect world I would have got my bit done first, but alas my world is flawed). Santi had selected an excellent theme called Baskerville by Anders Noren, a designer who does excellent WordPress theme work.

This theme is what is called a “masonry” design. With items stacking up like bricks. (Pintrest, for example, uses a masonry design.

Part of what makes this theme magical is the responsive grid framework and animations that resettle the items following page load or page resize.

Now we return from the diversion, but as I headed into this next rounds of the project it was important to me to honour and preserve Santi’s choices and fine work even when I knew that some back-tracking and tearing down might be required.

Clash of the Titans

So I set about this new plan of mine. Used views to query the database, used layouts to create a parent>child set of layouts and got a first proof of concept page in place. (You will see as we go along that with my brand of decision-making, proof-of-concept work is important in keeping time from hemorrhaging completely away.)

Zoot Alors! The pages were no longer looking and responding with the magic and grace designed into the them by Anders Noren. There is a thing in the web world called a responsive layout grid. I’m not sure Anders uses one of the popular frameworks, he may well have coded his own, but it looks great and works well.

There is another more common responsive layout grid called Bootstrap which is the one favoured by Toolset. I don’t profess to be an expert on such things, but it seemed to me that pushing toolset bootstrap into the Baskerville theme was not working very well.

The Toolset help has information on theme integration steps, but my fear of code was still hanging on for dear life.