Looking back at my final pitch last night, I am happy to say that I was able to make pretty much all of the customizations I set out to in my final project. In addition to creating a site with sections for my resume, writing, and blog, I created a custom post type with custom fields and meta boxes, used one plugin to add a rotating gallery to my front page, and used another to add an interactive poll to my blog.

My most complicated customization was definitely my custom post type, i.e. the bane of my existence for the past two weeks. It took me a long while to figure out how to make the data in my custom meta boxes echo out in the post. I finally did it by creating separate single.php and archive.php files for my custom post type but had to spend several days Googling and searching the internet before a couple of forums pointed me in the right direction. Once I was able to get the data on the page, I hit another snag when it came to trying to style it. No matter what I did in CSS, my meta boxes wouldn’t change in appearance (and all I wanted was to move them down a few spaces) so I ended up adding spaces in the actual PHP code as a kind of work-around solution. Overall, my custom post type turned out pretty well, although I am still having trouble getting it to appear in the “archive” and “recent posts” section of my blog. I will look more into this to see if I can figure out a solution before Wednesday.

Because I used plugins, both the gallery and poll were fairly easy to implement – the most difficult part for each was figuring out what code I needed to insert in what document to get the features to show up where I wanted them to. Overall, both features look good and work well, except for the poll, which seems finicky for some reason. I tested it multiple times and sometimes it let me vote and sometimes it would just get stuck on showing me the results page, not letting me vote again. I plan to look into this as well.

I’m interested to see everyone else’s sites and customizations and to see what feedback I’ll get about my code. I definitely know it’s not perfect and am looking forward to making any changes that can make my site better.