I’ve been working pretty aggressively on my project this week and I still feel pretty far from a finished product. The struggles from last week continued onto this week. Depending on someone else for content is a little frustrating but these are struggles we’ll all face in the real world should be end up becoming account managers or project managers for a web design or advertising firm of some sort. I’ve come to the realization that not all the features you expect to have, fit for all projects.

I was keen on including a custom post type. In fact, I already built the thing and installed it onto my local server. I asked my mother/client to snap a few photos from her client’s homes and ask permission to post online. One by one they’ve either refused to allowed her to take photos of their home, or have only agreed to allow one photo of a specific room be used. After this discussion, I’ve come to the realization that my initial thought about creating a portfolio of homes cleaned — from townhomes, condos, and single-family homes — so potential clients could relate to the homes is not realistic. It also doesn’t make much sense to post that information on the web because there is a privacy concern for the home owners. No home is identical to another and the idea that someone could find comparisons between their home and a home in photos, I now realize is far fetched. I have to abandon this idea and replace it for another. Most homeowners make no qualms of posting a photo of a specific room as long as it cannot be traced back to their home. I’ve now decided to use the Instagram API in order to create a page of abstract photos of cleaning supplies or cleaned rooms in order to generate fresh content on the website.

A great lesson for this week is to try not to force something that isn’t natural to the industry you’re building a website for. It’s ok to go back on your initial ideas no matter how late in the game if it doesn’t make sense for your website. In this case a portfolio didn’t work for this industry and you have to learn to adapt and move on rather quickly. In my previous roles as a Social Media Strategist and now as a consultant, I’d get asked questions like “Can you make us a Pinterest?” from a wireless phone retailer. That industry just doesn’t fit in well with the Pinterest audience. I’ve also gotten questions about using Vine from a furniture company. Furniture doesn’t move so I didn’t see a connection between the platform and their industry. This same concept applies to web development. Don’t try to fit a square peg into a round hole.

As a secondary lesson – don’t apply for an affiliate program until AFTER you’ve uploaded your theme and exported your content to your live site. Argh!

I think I’m finally starting to get the hang of this.  After spending a few days fruitlessly searching Google for answers to poorly worded questions, I’m starting to figure some things out and make some real changes to my site.  Some are simpler than others; I’ve added plugins to let me rearrange my nav menu, add footnotes to my posts, and let me show off my twitter and contact information.  I’ve done a lot of things that help support the site, like feed my new Twitter account to the sidebar, made myself a self-hosted email address, and even added a favicon so you see my site’s logo next to the url.  I’ve even started written a few posts to test out my new formats, so it’s not just gibberish anymore.

The page of posts plugin that I wrote after consulting the codex is probably the most useful thing I’ve done so far.  I didn’t realize that WordPress wouldn’t automatically do this; I wanted to automatically post every post to the homepage, as well as a copy on a different page (almost a separate, more specific blog in addition to a “superblog”) based on the categories I choose.  This way I can have as many categories as I want, but only have three specific blogs that theoretically should have different content (although they could easily overlap). Although I’m still having problems getting my custom meta boxes to appear, and I’m still struggling a bit with the css and include functions (how do you get your header to be a solid color and go all the way across the top of the page?!?!), I’m encouraged by the progress I have made and hope it will lead to further breakthroughs.  For now I’m going to keep chipping away and hopefully figuring things out on my own until I can get some more pro tips in class. I’m not sure I’m going to get to do everything I originally wanted to do, but I’m discovering the power of plug-ins, and the fact that I’m probably not the first person to want to do certain things for my site.  A few searches for plug-ins and my site is starting to quickly be capable of functioning in the most efficient way.

Looking back on the list of things I wanted to do to my site, it couldn’t be any more evident that my planning is just completely off. I intended to have photos and videos from my upcoming New Mexico trip. The only problem is, I will be in New Mexico while the site is due. My hope is that after the first critiques, I will be able to add all of that content in. If that does not work out, I’ll be a little bummed because I’ll either be using seriously old work that I’ve done, or using dummy content to throw in the mix. I can’t imagine me being very proud of my site if majority of it isn’t what I really want to be on there though.

On the brighter side, progress is taking place, very slowly but surely. I feel like I have similar dilemas as other classmates, in being that WordPress allows for us to do so much, that it is difficult for me to think of codes that I want to add in. I have completed about half of the things I wanted to do for my site (although I did it through what WordPress already had available), so my main goal tonight and tomorrow night will be to add my gallery and create at least one button that can be hovered over and look snazzy. Because I feel like there is only so much for me to add to my site code-wise (that is realistic and what I actually want on there), I will try to make significant changes display content as well.

I’m starting to feel like I’m making my site more for grading purposes versus what I truly want my site to look like, but at the same time it gives me the opportunity to play around and see what I like, so all-in-all this is good for me.

This week, I tried uploading my content to my domain through the FTP for the first time, and epically failed. In my class notes, I’d confused “htdocs” with “wp-content,” so it didn’t work, and I Googled frantically for an answer and ended up deleting the entire WordPress install from my domain, leaving me with a completely blank site. Oops.

This led me to what I hope will be a helpful self-realization for the future: I am an impulsive troubleshooter. When something goes wrong, I tend to freak out and start clicking and typing and Googling until I’ve dug myself even further into a hole. It happened with MAMP, and it happened again with FTP. Next time, I think I should step away from the computer for a few hours before I try to fix it, and talk to someone who knows what they’re doing before I troubleshoot myself in the head.

Greg was nice enough to help out from afar, and I retrieved the WordPress install, but still haven’t successfully gotten my stuff up on the site (not just the content: all of my child theme, functionality changes, everything). I’m hoping someone (maybe you?) will be able to help me out in class on Tuesday.

In better news, I successfully designed a toolbar that will stay at the top of my page as folks scroll down, which will allow me to post anchor links (this week!) and keep all of my content on one page.  I feel so much more comfortable with the different PHP files now, that making small changes and additions like this doesn’t feel so daunting anymore. Tiny fist pump!

I spent a few late nights and most of Friday and Saturday trying to catch up from what seemed like a pretty big deficit, not having gone through the tutorial in class the day Greg explained CyberDuck, GitHub, etc. I was able to get a laptop computer with the appropriate software and hardware, and load everything that I needed on it. Unfortunately, I had to learn a few things on my own, such as how to use CyberDuck, how to use GitHub, and how to set up a child theme. Greg was able to help me a bit over e-mail, but he stood me up on Skype. Yes, Greg, I waited up most of the night staring at my screen waiting for you to call. It was pathetic.

The only thing I still need help with, as far as the initial setup is concerned, is how to get my real site to display my content. I transferred my entire wp-content folder to my domain and I am pretty sure it is all there. However, for some reason the actual site still displays just the regular old stock WordPress page … with none of my content. (I’ll need you to help me out with that one eventually, Greg.) In the meantime, I decided to just keep working on my site locally. And what I found seems to be a common theme (pun intended) amongst a few of my classmates. I wasn’t that familiar with WordPress, so I didn’t really know what options were available. It seems like most of what I know how to do, WordPress already has covered. So the challenge is finding a way to customize my site, that isn’t already a WordPress option. In order to accomplish that, I basically just started to go through the options and take notes of what I couldn’t do on my own. There were quite a few style options I wanted to see, that I couldn’t find. So those could be examples of things I could add. I also went to the Internet in search of some really good WordPress sites, and I found a few sort of “Top Ten” sites to peruse. I took a look at the code on those sites, and that generated some ideas. That’s what I’ll work on over the next week. Hopefully I’ll have something that looks presentable by next Tuesday. We’ll see.

The best part about this week was that I learned how to set up my own site. I liked that more than just about any other part of the course so far. It isn’t something I think I could have learned on my own, even though I did have to learn quite a bit on my own. It was really helpful to have the links and resources handed to me, and to have at least a general explanation. I think with a little more class time, I’ll feel more comfortable with the process of managing my own site.

As for now, my goal is to just get my content online.

As we near the final deadline for our web development project, I am growing increasingly worried about having done enough. This sounds silly even as I write it just because of the absurd amount of time I’ve dedicated to this project, but I have not taken many classes like this one where the grading rubric is on a project-by-project basis, and there are no clear-cut rules outlining what we need to do. Looking back at the  goals I had outlined for myself, I realized that I have pretty much met them all. I did some styles changes to the theme, I made a custom post type for Wine Bars with a custom taxonomy to sort them by neighborhood, and I created a custom page with a plugin to help me sort events!

My love/hate relationship with WordPress continues, but I have worked through most of my frustration with going live last week. I realized the source of the problem: CyberDuck was not actually processing the changes I was making unless I uploaded files and folders one at a time. Figuring this out was a huge relief because I was getting incredibly frustrated with my live site not matching the local one. I felt like a parent who loves one child more than another, favoring my local site and being afraid to look at the live site.

While sifting through old posts to figure out exactly what my objectives had been going into this project, I realized how far I have come. No, I will not be pursuing a life as a web developer any time soon, but I’ve gone from feeling overwhelmed by the thought of touching anything, to actually enjoying messing with parts of the code I can (sort of) understand and seeing what changes they cause. I am pretty much happy with where the site is at, although I will continue to mess around with meta boxes. They are fine, but I am still not completely comfortable working with them. Depending on how much time I have in the next week, I would like to do more with them in my custom post types. As Barney Stinson would say: challenge accepted meta boxes.

My website is coming along, but am finding that most of the foundational changes which I want to make to the site can be done from the admin screen.  All the other changes, seem to be to advance for what is asked for this class. As a result, I am having to find the delicate balance which requires that I change code without having to modify and/or write JavaScript. This means taking a progress hit as I aimed to have a registration screen and an animation specific to my subject matter. Reducing my scope was difficult to accept, but it ended up being helpful. I no longer feel as overwhelmed as when I first started.

Next steps for my site

Sticking to my keeping it simple theme, I will work on adding one custom post type, modifying the menu bar on the right side, changing fonts and tab colors and  creating the context which will be displayed on my tabs.

Agile

The agile training video came at a perfect time as I just joined a project which supports a client which works in agile. The term comes up several times a day and I always nod my head to relate to the client that I am familiar with Agile which I am, but not in-depth. The agile course validated some of which I knew, but also introduced new concepts such as product owner involvement. In the work environment there is definitely room to improve how agile is executed. I have never seen product owners be highly involved throughout the build of their products. Changes within a sprint are very common and lead to timeline extensions sprint cycles run for about one month to one month and a half.

Looking forward to the finish line, but as with all races, I find my self sprinting the last lap. Lessons learn: I need to improve my pace.

My goal this week was to finish the main coding aspects for my site, which consisted of creating a custom post type (CPT) for “wine” as well as custom taxonomies for “region” and “year.” For every wine post I add, I’d like to associate the region and year of that wine. Last week, I attempted to create the CPT as a plugin and also in my functions.php file – both attempts failed (the CPT would show up on my local site, but not my real site).

This week, I took another shot at creating a CPT plugin and also adding custom taxonomies. After doing a little bit more research in the Codex and reading the Smashing Magazine CPT article, I finally got it to work by dragging the plugin file I created into Cyberduck! I initially tried to upload the zipped plugin file through the WordPress Admin, but I got an error message. I’m always quick to use the Admin, but in this case, dragging the file into Cyberduck was the only way it worked. I’m very happy to finally have my CPT and taxonomies showing up on my live site. As Ice Cube would say, today was a good day.

The reason for adding custom taxonomies was not only so I could sort my wine posts, but so visitors of my site could also have an easy way to sort through various posts. For example, if someone is only interested in wine from Napa Valley that was produced in 2008, they could choose those custom taxonomies and the site would generate all posts relating to those specifications. (This is assuming I had a variety of posts that met the criteria.) Simply creating a CPT/custom taxonomy plugin, however, wouldn’t automatically display the taxonomies in each post – this required more coding changes. Thanks to a little guidance from Greg, I determined that I needed to write a simple conditional statement in my content-footer.php file so that the custom tags (region and year) would be visible in each post. Another small victory when this actually worked for me!

My overall tip is to take the time to understand what and why you are changing something in the code. The possibilities of what to change in the code is endless, so it can be very overwhelming. For this project, I decided to concentrate on one major change (create a custom post type/custom taxonomies plugin) and try to understand everything there is to know about that plugin…what the code is actually doing, etc. I’m still no expert, but I hope that by having a good idea about what my first custom plugin is doing will help me make future coding changes – faster, easier and with less headaches.