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.