Tag Archives: GoDaddy

Project Management and Creating My Child Theme

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The video about agile project management best practices was very timely as I begin working on my final project site. I completed a certificate in project management through the School of Continuing Studies back in 2015 and am familiar with most of the terminology and concepts that were covered in the video and in Greg’s lecture, but I found it helpful to revisit these concepts and think about how to apply project management principles to my final project site. I imagine that the ability to be agile and flexible will be important as I work on my site, knowing there will be some obstacles along the way that I’ll have to work to overcome. The concepts of sprints and iterations might be a good way to approach all of the code I’m going to be writing — breaking the work that needs to be done down into more manageable chunks and keeping to a defined schedule of coding over the next three weeks before the project due date. I’m hoping that devoting six or seven hours a week to working on my site will be enough! I also want to be careful not to try to do more than I had originally planned for and outlined in my pitch post, as this could result in me getting distracted from completing the customizations that are most important to me.

As I read through the Agile Manifesto, it reminded me of the Zen of Python, which was one of the first reading assignments for this class. Both the Agile Manifesto and the Zen of Python espouse the importance of simplicity when working on a project. In terms of my final project, a simple solution can make my site more accessible and user friendly for my readers, which is something that the article about design thinking suggests is critical to creating a well designed, customer-focused site. As that article explains, design isn’t just about making things look pretty, but is also about creating the best and most fluid user experience. Design is something that should be thought about from the beginning, and not simply as an afterthought at the end of the project.

I also started some early work on my final project site this weekend. I purchased my domain and hosting on GoDaddy last week, and after several attempts of uninstalling and reinstalling WordPress on my hosting, I think my site is officially up and running at The Running (G)lover. I followed these instructions to install WordPress on my hosting, and I’m hoping that I did it correctly. I had initially installed WordPress on the https:// version of my domain, but it was very easy to uninstall and then reinstall it to the http:// version instead.

I downloaded the Retina theme from WordPress and have been poking around in the code to see what it looks like and how I will alter it using CSS and my other modifications. My most exciting achievement this week was creating my child theme using the instructions on the WordPress Codex. The process was pretty straightforward due to WordPress kindly providing all of the code to use, but I was definitely confused when reading through some parts of the instructions. For example, the instructions mention that “if your child theme has more than one .css file (e.g., ie.css, style.css, main.css), then you will have to make sure to maintain all of the Parent Theme dependencies,” but it is unclear what this means. There are no follow-up instructions for what to do if your parent theme has multiple .css files. My chosen theme has a main style.css file, but also has a separate subfolder called CSS that contains .css files called bootstrap.css, editor-style.css, and font-awesome.css. I’m not sure if I am also supposed to enqueue these three files in addition to the main style.css file, and if so, I have no idea where to start with doing this. I enqueued only the main style.css file, and my child theme did indeed show up in my local site’s administration panel and I activated it, so I am praying that I did this correctly. Greg and fellow classmates, have any of you encountered a similar issue when creating your child theme, and if so, what did you do?

Now the real work (and fun, hopefully) begins…

Still confused, but less so.

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The weeks that we have been doing this have shown me that I can be getting better at coding, while constantly being confused about one thing or another. As soon as I get the answer to something I don’t understand, the next thing we do reinforces the idea that I am learning via the “trial by fire” method. (Lots of fire.)

The JavaScript course 3 and the jQuery courses 1 and 2 were actually easier than I had experienced the past two weeks. I am really pleased with how I am progressing through the Codecademy courses and I can see how much I have learned. Even though I still feel like I have jumped into the deep end of the pool, I am excited to put my (limited) experience into practical application and see how I do.

I really want to get into some actual web-based setup, so that we can see tangible results (including massive failures!). I want to attempt to make some things work on my website, realize that they don’t work, try to figure out how to make them work, give up and Google why it’s not working, and then laugh about how simple the mistake was that I made. This is how I learn best (hey, don’t judge me, haha!).

The only part I am confused about for this week was the web hosting and setup of our sites. I got the GoDaddy and installed WordPress on it, but I didn’t do anything that I remembered from class (I wasn’t able to do them in class because my laptop wasn’t able to handle the “newfangled” software, and so I wrote everything down). I’m not sure if we’re going to go over it again in class, or it was a “FYI” kind of thing, or if we will use it later?

I was a bit upset that GoDaddy couldn’t sell me the domain I wanted, and there’s nothing even on the domain, so I wanted to take it over, but alas, I think I will be able to move on from it.