Category Archives: 2017 Summer class

Project Management & Final Project Thoughts

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As far as web development goes, I’ve spent the last week mostly focused on preparing and gathering materials for my final project. I’ve already had to change some of my plans. For instance, instead of being about the process of making mead, it’s now going to be about the process of eighteenth century weaving. It turned out that the day I was in Williamsburg was much too hot to open or really approach my friend’s beehive. (Opening the hive on a dave that’s 95 degrees or above is really really bad for the hive apparently. Something to do with the queen and cooling.)

Of course, this same friend happens to be the weaver’s apprentice at Colonial Williamsburg. She offered to let me come in after the tourists were gone so I could get some photographs. I’m rather pleased with the outcome for the stills, but the videos are just okay. It was insanely hot and humid out, which both made for an impatient photographer and difficulty in effectively capturing good light. I did, however, get one good one of a spinning wheel spinning. It’s pretty cool, and I look forward to you seeing it. There’s some good negative space that I think would be good for a title bar.

Anyway! On to project management. (Thank you very much for recording the class and sending it to me. I greatly appreciate it.) Watching the Agile video really drives home the fact that project management is a delicate balance—especially in coding. I read that Jaclyn wrote that the Agile Manifesto reminded her a lot of the Zen of Python. I felt the exact same way. It had the same clear constructs that attempt to manage and define seemingly abstract ideas.

I also read the article on design thinking—I loved how Jared Spool compared design thinking and designers to the children’s book Stone Soup. It really helped it make sense to me. Also, since my final project is going to be fairly design-heavy, it was a helpful read. (I’m fairly self-conscious about designing things, but I’m also quite picky.) As long as I thoroughly research the issues I face and stay focused on the product, it should be okay.

FTP Sadness

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FTPs are the worst. They really are. FileZilla, after I spent 30 minutes trying to get from step one to step two, it kind of made sense. I understand why they exist, I understand (now) how to use them but I don’t like them. I did not understand how to use it until I watched the video. Also why are the instructions so complicated? There is no need for all of this!

Why did they make it so complicated? And, yes there are a lot of files but would it crash the system if I just transferred it directly into cPanel? There are just so many systems and so many new applications with unclear purposes that the actual joy (is there joy in this?) in the process.

Safe to say I did not like using FTPs. It was very frustrating, needlessly so. The instructions were very unclear and unspecific that it took so much longer than I thought is should have to actually get the program going. Really did not like this. And I transferred the entire folder into public_html in cPanel and it wouldn’t work. Apparently there was one folder too many for them. Again, very frustrating process.

Is there an easier way to do this or a more straight forward program to use for this? Would it be a good idea to use a different one for the next class?

At this point the site is coming along. I’ve been fighting with php for awhile to make my contact form work. I’m close to just finding a plugin and editing that but since most of what I want to do is front end, that might work.

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…

Final Project + Project Management Thoughts

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This week we discussed agile and waterfall as two different ways of tackling project management when it comes to working on various web design and coding tasks. So much of our class thus far has been centered around actually learning the material, and I had never really stopped to think how what we were learning in the classroom would be applied to real-life situations, in which we would hypothetically “work in teams” to complete a larger project. I had no clue that people took project management within coding so seriously (from our reading of the Agile Manifesto during class this past week), but I can certainly understand its importance and significance when trying to tackle such a difficult beast. I can also definitely see where GitHub would come into play in these cases, but working with/against GitHub has been one of the hardest parts of the class so far for me, but I value its ability to help people work together and even troubleshoot different pieces of code. I’m not totally sure which category I would fall into if I were a developer in the real world – or if I could even apply it to my own work style now as a PR professional – but I’m definitely interested in reading more and discussing the pros and cons that come with each style.

We have been instructed to work on our final projects this week, as we will continue to do for the rest of the semester, and I have found myself worrying about working against the clock. I’ve been so slow in putting different elements together, going into our WordPress content folders to tweak pieces of code, and testing out different stylistic themes/designs, and I worry that there just won’t be enough time at the end of the day to make my website what I truly want it to be. I’m definitely thankful that WordPress has so many built in style and layout pieces, but when I go in to make even tiny tweaks I’m not totally sure if I’m doing enough to show full customization of my final project.

Final project pitch post

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Goals: For my final project I plan to build a recipe site with rotating pictures, cooking instructions, and a Q&A section for recipe requests. Based on our in-class discussion, I think I will use a WordPress theme for the design, layout, fonts, colors, etc.

I envision the layout of the site being relatively simple and clutter free. Given that this isn’t really a ‘personal site’ I don’t feel the need to have a homepage introducing myself, why I made the site, etc. Instead I would like the main page to get right into the heart of the content – food. I will have header tabs that break up the recipes by “breakfast” “lunch” and “dinner,” but the homepage will house the most recent recipes posted to the site. I will then have a fourth tab that allows for house the “Request a Recipe!” portion of the site.

Audience: This site would be intended for anyone that enjoys cooking and is searching for new, fun recipes. I have always enjoyed cooking and, although I don’t claim to be an expert, I have a ton of good recipes that family and friends are always asking for. I think this site will be a fun project for me and something I would be proud to share and continue working on once our class is finished.

Planned Modifications:

1. A customized slideshow for each recipe (jQuery plugin)

2. A customized “Request a Recipe!” section where visitors can submit questions or requested recipes that are emailed directly to my account and then I can either choose to respond, post the recipe, etc. (PHP plugin)

3. I will also use HTML and CSS to build out the cooking instructions, ingredients, tips and tricks, etc. although I think a lot of this will be done directly in the WordPress site. I would be curious to hear your feedback (Greg or fellow classmates) on whether there are certain HTML/CSS designs I should consider outside of WordPress, or if it’s best to add plugins that focus more on jQuery and PHP.

URL: victoriakinnealey.com

PHP and Final Projects

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It’s hard to believe that we’re already past the halfway point with this class. This week I was unable to be in class, but worked on adding PHP to my homepage and set up servers for the final project. Overall, it wasn’t a terrible week, but I definitely missed class time.

One thing that I’ve realized is how important class time is. While I was able to listen to the class after the fact, it didn’t make up for the personal time with our projects. I would have really benefited from class time this week, but it shows how quickly this class moves.

While this week wasn’t as stressful as others, I still felt a little lost. But that was easily because I wasn’t in class while everyone set up their servers. Otherwise I feel pretty good going into the final project and the rest of this semester.

I’m going to be interested in seeing how hard my final project plans are. It would be really cool to pull off a new template for the Fine Arts team, but I’m not sure how much time or manpower that will take. Looks like I’m about to find out.

Diving into WordPress Documentation and Using PHP

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This week’s readings about the various features of WordPress helped me think in more detail about how I want my final project site to look and what features and customizations I want to include. I spent a lot of time last week browsing through the many themes on WordPress.org, and am still deciding between two very similar themes — Retina and Wisteria. The “What is a Theme?” article was helpful in terms of thinking about the various parts that make up a theme and why plugins are important to use when adding functionality to a site.

The reading about plugins was interesting because I’m still going back and forth about whether or not I should create a new plugin to link my Strava profile to my site, or instead customize one of the existing Strava plugins available on WordPress. I need to do more research and take a closer look at the code on some of the existing plugins to see what exactly I would like to customize. I also will likely have to contact the creators of the original plugin and obtain their permission to customize their plugin.

After reading the documentation about custom fields, I decided that this was something I’d like to incorporate into my final project. I’m not sure, however, whether this would count as an actual customization, since it seems pretty straightforward and easy to do using the <?php the_meta(); ?> tag. Is this really all there is to it? If so, does this count as a customization?

After completing the readings, I had a better understanding of how WordPress uses multiple PHP files and templates to create themes and custom websites. Speaking of PHP, one of the other assignments for this week was to add PHP to our existing HTML homepage that we started building earlier in the semester. I created a contact form — modeled after the W3 Schools form — featuring four fields and labels (name, email, your website, and comment). After a lot of Googling and trial and error, I was able to figure out how to use the <textarea> function in HTML to make my comment box larger and able to accommodate multiple lines of text. For anyone interested in learning how to do this, this Stack Overflow thread might be useful. I’ll likely build my own PHP form as one of my customizations on my final project site.

I almost forgot to mention that I officially purchased my domain and hosting on GoDaddy! My site will be called The Running (G)lover (a not-so-clever play on both my last name and the topic of my site), and my domain is www.therunningglover.com. I ended up purchasing the economy hosting plan for three months, but have high hopes that my finished site will look amazing and that I’ll be motivated to keep it going after the semester ends.

I’m looking forward to working on my final project site this coming week!

Setting Up the PHP on my Web Page

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I was up late last night trying to set up the PHP on my web page. While the Codecademy assignments weren’t difficult, I found the PHP to be a little confusing. Luckily, we set up “local host” already in class, but I forgot that was the validator for PHP. I was making it difficult for myself to figure out how to run the PHP by googling it several times until I remembered later that the PHP server is how we do it.

I went on W3Schools to look at how I could set up some PHP on my web page and didn’t know what to choose. I didn’t want to make anything too complicated, so what I did was make an array of my age and some of my favorite activities like styling, skiing and reading. I find coding to be fun once I actually know what to do, but it’s figuring out the minute details that can be tricky. Luckily, it did not take me too long to figure out what I did wrong, but I did get some minor coding details wrong at first. I kept replicating the <br> tag and the <html> and <body> tags. I also forgot to make my quotes consistent.

Running it through the PHP server was easy once I figured out my problems. I uploaded it to GitHub and my PHP should now be on my index.html file.

The readings were interesting. After updating my pitch post, it makes me excited to develop my website and add audio embed files, images and video files. I also cannot wait to dive into front-end stack. I am a creative at heart: I love color, artistic things and diving into what makes things pretty. Albert Einstein once said that “creativity is intelligence having fun” and I couldn’t agree more. I LOVE to create and it’s cool to see how technology and user experience combine the best of arts and sciences. Who knows? Maybe I’ll become a UX designer.

Entering the World of WordPress

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All Coming Together

Through a series of unfortunate events, I was unable to call into our class this past week. I did, however, listen to a recording of the class which was helpful, but it was pretty difficult to follow along with the more technical “setup” things we were working through. By some miracle (a.k.a. Google search), I was able to fill in gaps by googling how to do certain things. I am almost positive I am now caught up and successfully created my local development stage in MAMP and phpMyAdmin. AND, I was able to launch my WordPress.org site and play around with all the offerings. WOOT!

*As a side note, I am unclear as to what the phpMyAdmin database is for exactly, but will be sure to ask Greg in class this week.

Setting up my server, signing into my WordPress site, and seeing everything we have talked about in class allowed this week’s readings, and really a lot of what we have done so far this semester, to all come together. I searched through the theme, widget, and plugin directories, and took a look at the different post formats and types. A few questions come to mind:

  1. Can a meta box be anything or is there a directory?
  2. What is the benefit of using a child theme vs. just creating a new plug-in?
  3. If I wanted to add an About section or Menu, is that a widget or am I just adding it to the HTML or JavaScript file for the theme?
  4. I’m still a little confused on the difference between a post and a page. Is a post an individual post, and a page would have many posts and pictures and other functionality?

This exercise also really got me excited to dive deeper into our final project. Just selecting a theme is going to be hard for me, so I am going to spend more time this week looking through what is available. And I have a feeling that as I get more familiar with WordPress.org, new ideas for my final project will present themselves.

And finally, I found adding PHP to my homepage to be trickier than expected. Mostly because I’m not sure if it works or that I uploaded the right files to GitHub. I added a new repository and included what I think are all relevant files, including my index.php file which now echos “The time in my current timezone is ___.” GitHub wouldn’t let me upload my entire WP_content file or the file I created when I downloaded WP — said it was too large? Hopefully what I did works though.

Cheers,

Jane

Creating a Poll out of PHP – So Close But Still So Far

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For this week’s readings, going through the articles definitely helped clear up some questions I had regarding WordPress, and I am excited to use some of the tools we read about — i.e. custom post types and meta boxes — to create my personal site and have included them as modification options in my final pitch.

For this week’s PHP exercise, I used the W3School’s tutorial on how to make a poll to try and create a basic poll for my homepage. The tutorial talked about AJAX — Asynchronous JavaScript and XML — and was a little more advanced then what we’ve covered so far in the Codecademy lessons and in class. However, I really wanted to try this example because I would like to, if possible, create a poll for the blog I want to build for my final project. I want to create a book review blog and have people vote on the next book I should read, and I tried to make a basic example of this this week.

However, I wasn’t completely successful. I was able to modify the HTML and most of the PHP correctly and got the poll to display and be clickable. The major hurdle I’ve come across is that I cannot get the site to accurately show the updated results of the poll on the page after the click, the way the tutorial intends. I think the issue lies somewhere in the way my PHP file is interacting with the text file I am using to store my poll data, but, to be honest, I’m not entirely sure where I’m going wrong. I will keep working on the code to see if I can get the outcome to show up the way it’s supposed to before class on Wednesday.

In terms of creating a poll for my final project, I am still really interested in the idea and have found a plug-in I think I may be able to use that will help make the process easier, since other tutorials I looked at for creating polls seemed to suggest you need to create a database and I think that may be too challenging, especially after my struggle this week.

GitHub link: https://github.com/tatyanaberdan/phpassignment