Tag Archives: wordpress

Busy as a bee, actually. Bee-like!

It’s been awhile since I last posted, but that’s because work was pretty boring: updating existing pages, going to countless meetings, i.e. nothing exciting or challenging. But that was then, and this is now, and now I’m swamped with WordPress and Foundation 5 and Javascript issues.

At the head of my priorities list is finding and testing WordPress plugins to be used for the redesign of our main blog, The Iris. Subscribing to posts, optimizing search results, reorganizing the homepage to encourage browsing and stretching out visitor stay times, figuring out CC licensing so restricted images don’t go out in subscription emails–all of these have been occupying my time and twisting my brain (especially that last one, which so far remains unsolved, without using the “excerpts only” option).

We also spent more time than expected converting the Art of Food mobile site content to be evergreen, now that the exhibition is closed. Originally the site was intended to be used only in the gallery, in front of the artworks, but now users can continue to engage in the game-like aspect of it from the comfort of their own homes/desks/commuter trains, and even download a hi-res postcard at the end–check it out!

And then there are the pages for the upcoming Cave Temples of Dunhuang exhibition. I’m building them in Foundation, but I’m familiar with Foundation 5, and these pages will be wrapped in our branded wrapper, which was coded in a heavily customized Foundation 4, a project I was not personally involved in. So, it’s been interesting. And slow. And yes, ok, frustrating as hell. It’s never fun working in someone else’s code base.

And these are just the most interesting of the projects currently on my plate. Our dev department is down by two positions that are still empty after over six months, and I’m feeling the crunch, most notably in the very high number of meetings I’ve been forced to attend in 2016. The only reason I’ve taken time to even write this post is because I need to test a feature of the subscribe function–with this post be emailed with the featured image, even though I’ve selected excerpt only? Only hitting “publish” can answer the question, so let’s see what happens….

Work work work!

This is a website I’ve been working on for a friend:

www.RoadMommy.com

Screencap of Maya's site

I’m insanely happy with it, and I hope she is too (I’m still waiting for feedback). I started with the Florance theme by Jinsona Designs, mostly for the rounded corners, which I hate creating myself. I had to hack the rest of it quite a bit, but I kept the slideshow (so far) and the boxy style on the post meta info (comments, tags, etc.). Of course, the hacking was the fun part.

I’m not terribly good at fading with Photoshop, so if the screen is too wide, you can see the outside edge on the left side of the background image. I’ve gotta hit up my designer friends to see if anyone can help me fix that. I think that’s the only thing I don’t like, though. The colors ended up coming together really well, which isn’t usually the case when I make a stab at designing (not really my forte).

WordPress owns me

I am totally obsessed with WordPress right now. We recently launched this website at work, which was built by a vendor instead of in-house, and yo, it’s amazing. They built it in WordPress, and it does stuff I had no idea WordPress could do, and it’s inspired me to LEARN ALL THE WORDPRESS THINGS. I’ve been reading [amazon_link id=”1119995965″ target=”_blank” ]Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog (Smashing Magazine Book Series)[/amazon_link], and WP tutorials and articles on Smashing Magazine; outlining plans for possible projects; and browsing through plugins for ideas. I fixed a couple of lingering problems on the blog at work yesterday, which was AWESOME.

Problem is, I need more blogs to experiment on. I had some cool ideas for one of my sites, but the stakeholder doesn’t want me making any changes right now because she doesn’t have time to review and approve for awhile, which makes me sad. I’m considering building a bug/ticket tracker for projects at work. There’s no guarantee I could get everyone to actually use it, but it’d be a fun and educational experience, and if I could figure out how to build it as a customizable theme to release to the public, that’d be even better.

Seriously, WordPress excites me like nothing work-related has for a long time. It feels good.

ETA: For some reason this link isn’t working above, so here it is again:
[amazon_link id=”1119995965″ target=”_blank” ]Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog (Smashing Magazine Book Series)[/amazon_link]