Tag Archives: week11

Final Project — Getting There

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So I really started working on my project last week when I set up a *real* child theme in class. It made life so much easier — all I had to do was inspect element and replace whatever I wanted in my child’s style sheet.

Right now I have even completed two customizations! (Fans hooplahing & cheering in the background.) I was able to add a contact form to the bottom of my site and social media icons at the top of my site. However, nothing really works. I added the PHP for my contact form, but when I hit submit it shows me a 404 error. My social media icons work, but they’re not styled right. I think that is due to a lag with my style.css because I added a new font the other day, but it never showed up so I left. I came back a few days later and it was updated, so maybe my social media icons will come around in a few hours.

Outside of my personal customizations, my FileZilla refuses to connect to the server. I didn’t do anything differently from class either. And the WordPress navigation bar when you “visit site” disappeared as well. Oh, and the menu I added through WordPress doesn’t work. But at least it’s there I guess.

So, this all goes to say. I am getting there. Kinda.

Final push

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It took a lot of work to get to the finish line, but we’re here!

After many additional calls with Filezilla and consulting two people I work with, Nick McEvoy and Jake Crump, I was able to convert my local site to my live site.

But, that didn’t mean everything was easy peasy. I lost things like the final project template and had to re-find the number that Word Press gave it. When looking to figure out how to isolate the pages, it took a lot of trial and error isolate the things that I wanted.

As I mentioned last week, the 404 page was really my saving grace in figuring out how to manipulate the rest of the items on my list. Once I saw how things could be changed I was able to move things around.

I’m really proud of what I was able to accomplish, and besides adding the 404 page to my final pitch I was able to do a lot of what I set out to do.

Now that we’re about to see presentations I’m very interested to see how people approached their finals. At some point I can’t imagine how other people did their projects, but that’s because I’m so in the weeds with mine. Very excited for Wednesday!

Oops I did it again

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Well, I didn’t realize I was supposed to write a post this week because I thought we only had to submit our final site. Whoops!

Ok, so this was truly a blood, sweat and tears process. I’ve learned that coding itself is really not that big of a deal, it’s the figuring out how it all strings together that’s the true challenge. I’m not going to lie, this was really hard for me, and I also had to put in hours upon hours of effort into figuring this out. For example, I spent about four hours just trying and failing to select the correct class to modify an element.

Honestly, in retrospect, I feel like I got hung up on your “don’t try and re-invent the wheel” comments, so if there was a plugin version to try, I would try that. But, I feel like I should’ve just started from scratch instead of wasting lots of time trying to figure out how to make tiny adjustments to the plugins and wading in horrible forums (why can’t everyone’s customer service be like Squarespace’s?). Master Slider is stupid and clunky.

But! The fact that I even got a website up in any capacity is sort of a miracle. This was such a maze of an experience. One step forward and fifteen steps back.

And, I am really looking forward to being able to putz around on my own time and make tweaks–and honestly just being able to do things without having to do anything in particular. Like, while this isn’t exactly what I pictured, it’s definitely closer than what I thought I’d end up with. It’s minimal, which I like. That’s definitely my style, and I love the idea of going to all the different tradesmen in Colonial Williamsburg and make slideshows for each of them. (Who knows what for, but I think it’d be fun.)

So. Whilst I plan to take a break from coding for a bit, I definitely want to continue working through projects and learning through that process.

This is the broccoli of classes.

A Life Surfeited

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A Life Surfeited

I chose the name of my blog with the intent to showcase the activity that fills my life with joy: travel. The past few weeks, however, it has applied more (unforgivingly) to the massive amount of work, homework, and just plain ole life on my plate. Juggling it all, but especially the creation of my final project, has been a lesson in patience and prioritizing. But like with most challenges, I have made it through and am now ready to start planning my next reprieve… a trip to SoCal!

I finally got my website up and running after way too many hours of googling fixes, installing, uninstalling, uploading, compressing, downloading, deleting, transferring, renaming, plugging in, unplugging, signing in, signing out, caching… you get the idea. I ended up having to add a plugin to my local WP site that copied everything and duplicated it on my live WP site (and somehow/somewhere saved it to a database.) I’m still unclear how to maintain the site, which I plan to do, but like everything else, will figure it out. I know we aren’t supposed to make changes to the live site, but just seems SO much easier for a personal blog (not a client site.) But I do want to follow best practices if I can figure out a relatively easy way to copy and duplicate going forward.

There are still many modifications I would like to make to my site, as well as content to be added – again, I plan to actually use and update my site going forward. But for now, I am happy with what I was able to accomplish.

I made quite a few style changes to the parent theme using a child theme, but also through the WP customization tool. A few things I want to do but was unable, after several searches and failed attempts, include:

  • Making the header menu background color (black) run the full length of the page. Right now it is cut up with a gray background. It has something to do with the layers on the page… a site container under another site container, with a row and a banner and a menu in between or over. So if I change one that may fix the header problem, if affects other parts of the page.
  • Make the text in the site container in the banner image more opaque without making the entire page (site container) opaque. Same issue with layering above.

I also modified three plugins to suit my needs: a Google calendar, a world map, and custom comment fields.

  • I am still working on the Google calendar – I have done every step the plugin says, i.e. created the cal, linked to my public Google cal, accessed an API key, but it still won’t display the “events.”
  • I am happy with the world map, as it links to associated posts, but I would like to continue playing with it’s styling.
  • As for the comment fields, I was able to create 2 new fields. One thing I still can’t figure out though is how to remove the WP default field for “Website.” It only shows for users not signed in, but still… I don’t want or need it.

Another thing I’d like to do in the future is make the information/links I have on my Day Dreams page, under the calendar, look like a Pinterest page. I think I will be able to do this, just need to find the right plugin.

Two last thoughts: I didn’t utilize widgets for my final project but would be interested in learning more about them and how I could. Also, I may decide to make a custom post type for my travel posts that include dates of the trip and location (instead of me having to remember to write that in each time.)

So yea, I think that’s it! Way to go everyone! We did it! I look forward to seeing everyone’s blogs this week in class:)

Cheers,

Jane

Getting My Metadata to Save (FINALLY) and Finishing My Site

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This week, I spent entirely too much time time trying to get custom metabox data to save and echo to the body of my custom post type. We are talking hours and days here. On Wednesday night after class, I had a breakthrough, and found a block of code online that I modeled my custom post type plugin code after. I was able to get the data in my four custom fields (neighborhood, date, time, and distance) to save when I click publish on the post editor screen. However, I still can’t get the data to echo to my custom post despite playing around with the content.php, single.php, and content-single.php templates in my child theme. When playing around with these template files, I got the data to echo both above and below the post content, but not in the box that holds the post content itself. Very frustrating. I decided that simply saving this metadata is enough, since it’s more of a backend customization anyways and is used for my personal tracking purposes.

I also worked hard this week at creating content for my live site. The realization that I had to write several posts by Sunday was helpful in terms of holding me accountable to actually go running.

In last week’s blog post, Jane mentioned that she was using the projects feature in GitHub to track her progress, and I thought this was a great idea. I started using this feature and created a to-do list and completed modifications list, both of which I used to track my progress on my site customizations.

Speaking of site customizations, I updated my pitch post to remove the lightbox gallery modification that I had hoped to create, and I updated a few of my other modifications to reflect the fact that I ended up using existing WordPress plugins for those (Strava widget, contact form). I’m hoping that the modifications that I was able to complete — creating a child theme and customizing CSS styles (fonts, colors), creating a custom post type plugin with categories, rendering a custom meta box, and rendering four custom fields and saving the metadata — will be enough.

Overall, this was a productive week. I’m glad to be “done” with my site, and am looking forward to seeing everyone else’s projects on Wednesday.

The Final Stretch

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This week I found myself feeling satisfied and relieved to be taking a break from coding my final project. I went into the last class knowing that I wanted to complete a few tweaks to my WordPress site, wanted to collaborate with my classmates on figuring out the final pieces of code, and coming to terms that I don’t fully understand why my code doesn’t always work. I found myself Googling more than I had anticipated that I would be, and I relied heavily on a number of PHP and CSS code testers to be test my code. At times, I was confused as to if I was making updates to my local or live site…I have a case of “too many tabs open at one time” syndrome. In a way, it was good. It forced me restart my thinking from scratch and gave me a minute to walk away from the code.

Admittedly, I have grown frustrated with the Final Project. I had a feeling I would. I spent SOOOOO many hours trying to get all of the custom post types to work, then getting the meta boxes to work. The frustration quickly turned to anger. I’d be ecstatic if someone could look at my code and find how to improve it so it could echo the information correctly (or at all) the actual post.

Another major shout out to everyone in class the other day. Thanks for helping answer all of my questions!

I’m happy to be able to take a step back from the code. My plan is to quickly jump back into my WordPress site and continuously develop the site, content, and my coding skills. I hope to be able to go back to Code Academy and re-work on the lessons at a slower pace to allow me to soak in the information.

Onward and upward. I hope everyone enjoys the site.

Github: https://github.com/amaliaks/Final_Project_Amalia

Site: http://threecheersfourfood.com/

What a Relief

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After sacrificing many hours and most of my weekend, I think my site is finally in solid shape. If I feel the need, I might add some more modifications to my page but I am now confident I have done my best and finished all I need to do.

This was such a challenging assignment. I had no idea what to do most of the time since I have never been a computer science person. Looking back, it always feels rewarding to be finished because you know you have worked hard for something.

After completing the project bit-by-bit, I have made modifications that were different from my original pitch, which I need to go back and change. Here are some of the things I did for my website:

  • I coded in several images (our firm’s logo and our podcasting logo) and added the images to my WordPress admin.
  • I did some HTML and CSS.
  • I finished a JavaScript slideshow.
  • I embedded several SoundCloud codes.   

Overall, it was so cool to see the final product. Some things I forgot to do was constantly commit to GitHub as I made modifications, but all my code should now be on GitHub. If I make any more modifications, I’ll probably add some of our social media plugins and a contact form, but I wanted to make sure to focus on what I had so far and making it look as nice as possible.

It was tricky doing everything. A lot of blood, sweat and tears went into the project. More likely than not, my boss will have feedback for me as we continue growing our podcast division, but I’m proud of what I have done so far and know I did my absolute best.

I’m looking forward to seeing everyone’s projects and getting others’ feedback.

URL: http://wmgpodcasters.com

GitHub: https://github.com/ibasco/wmgpodcasters

Finished Final Project

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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.

Nearly There

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After weeks of trial and error and tears, the site actually looks like something! Well more than something, it looks pretty good. I never really thought I would get to this point but I am excited to be here.

This has been an experience. For the last few weeks I have been focused on the code and design. Ensuring that the everything works. I had a lot of trouble creating the child theme but found a plugin, Child Theme Configurator, that writes the necessary top code for you and allows you to make edits. It even saves the files in the appropriate folder.

Lots of Googling as always, to keep thing moving forward when I get stuck. I will be testing the site again today to ensure that I really have not broken all of WordPress. It is a terrifying though as I finalize the last few details. I’m not sure the API will be a part of the site, but if all goes as planned between today and tomorrow then it will be there.

On a completely different note, I an very excited to remove XAMPP from my computer. My system is seven years-old, basically on its last legs, and running the server is hasting my laptop’s death march. The freezing is getting pretty old and I need this computer to last a few more months. However, the class will be over soon and I can lighten my system’s burden. The GitHub app is not much help either.

Will I voluntarily do this again very soon? Probably not. But who knows? When I’m not in my last semester and go over everything we have learned this summer, I might find myself wanting to do this. The process was not completely unpleasant, and thankfully there are wonderful things like plugins and widgets that make life much easier.

Final Project Recap

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As the deadline for our final projects drew close I have to say I had mixed emotions about my site and the progress I had made. On the one hand, I did not complete one of the customizations I set out to achieve. No matter how many articles I read, plugins I studied, tutorials I followed, or videos I watched, I could not get my slideshow plugin to function properly. This caused frustration, disappointment, and left me feeling quite defeated.

On the flip-side, however, as I sat there wracking my brains for ways to fix the plugin, I realized I had learned more than I ever thought possible in a 10 week window as relates to web development and coding. I knew how to check the connection between my local files and FileZilla to ensure things were transferring properly; I figured out how to create a Site Manager connection that automatically logged me into my page each time I opened FileZilla; I learned to understand the error messages that popped up on both my local and live site – what do these messages actually mean and what do I need to do to solve the problems; I figured out how to create a child theme and get it to work properly; I created a functioning form that emailed data to my personal email; I knew how to download Plugins and get them working; I was comfortable with all aspects of WordPress and site layout, from posts, to pages, and categories, to media, and pretty much anything in between; I figured out when something wasn’t work how to check for bugs in my software and, although I have yet to fix the code, I have identified that my slideshow plugin is somehow impacting the ‘featured image’ section of my posts, making it impossible for me to link photographs to the slideshow; and lastly, although I did not fix the problem, I was able to read tutorials and understand the basics of what they were saying, whereas at the beginning of this class I truly felt as though I was reading a different language.

I think, in retrospect, I may have bitten off a bit more than I could chew with trying to create a customized slideshow plugin that would connect to each of my posts as this involves so many different and complex (at least complex for me) pieces of code. Nevertheless, I can say without a doubt I gave this project my all – I spent hours upon hours over the past month reading, practicing, researching, and occasionally screaming at my computer and I am proud of all that I have accomplished and learned through this course.