Summary

Wordpress logo.

This series is not a WordPress tutorial but a demonstration of how I work in WordPress using this site as an example. There is nothing genius or amazing going on in this site, but it does what I intended and does it as efficiently as possible. Many developers will disagree with my methods, but this is how I work. Hopefully this gives you an insight as to how experience from diverse disciplines can enhance a WordPress project.

I’ve shared the basics of how this site was built, but I haven’t shared everything, and it is constantly in development so more features will be added. In my Scribblings ‘n Stuff art site, I started off much in the same way but it requires a lot more functionality than I have here. Some of the other customization items on createsource.com:

  • Contact Form Plugin. I detest CAPTCHA. My solution was to write a lightweight, customized plugin which I also use on my art site to reduce form spam. As mentioned many times, it does just what I need and no more. The only other two plugins on this site are Akismet and the Classic Theme Editor to avoid using the Gutenberg Block Editor.
    Rules of success:
    1. Don’t tell everything you know.
    2. See #1.
  • Theme File Mods. I haven’t done much to the stock template files other than reformat them as described and alter where and how the featured image displays. I’ve extracted some of the more confusing template code into their own functions, and moved the entry thumbnail display, that’s about it.
  • Comments. At this point I’ve disabled them entirely, I don’t have a lot of time to deal with comment management. I may implement them later, if you need to contact me drop me a line.
  • Code display shortcode. It became very obvious that marking up code directly in posts was going to be very tedious and time consuming, so I wrote a markup code class to display code both inline and from external directory files. You can see it in action wherever code is displayed or sample codes are run and I discuss how it is built in this blog post.
  • Lightweight Javascript. On my art site I use the prettyPhoto plugin to manage images, but it’s not needed here. For the front end I have a single Javascript file that attaches behaviors to images where they are needed, opens an overlay window for enlargements, and manages the mobile menu at smaller viewport sizes. There is some JS in the contact form plugin, but it’s not much.

It you’ve gotten this far, thank you for reading and hope you found something of value here.