I took my final web dev project as an opportunity to bring a long-time brainchild of mine to life. I love zines as a concept, but I’ve always been interested in how you can take the concept to a digital format. I wanted to use WordPress for this so that I could easily update and maintain my zine, as it is a genuine passion project I was looking forward to using my skills for. I learned how to utilize plugins to make both minor styling changes, as well as to add key features for what I wanted to build. I was making something off the beaten path of web products I’ve delivered before, and I am overall proud of the result.

The simplest, but key, lesson I learned in this project was how to utilize WordPress blocks and work around templates to get them to move how I wanted them to. In my past projects, when the built-in theme templates didn’t display my content how I wanted, I just more or less gave up. There will always be compromises because of restraints when you’re developing, but I spent a lot of time learning to tweak the settings of each block. Using the default theme was nice because there wasn’t a lot of styling or functions to override. However, it sometimes made it less obvious how to fix things.

The other important lesson was my use of PlugIns. The first I downloaded was to hide built-in titles on pages- a very useful function. It, of course, was not compatible with my site, and I had to download another one, but that worked like a charm. I also used a shortcode plug-in to make a user post submission box, which I styled with custom CSS. I am proud of this because it is a key function of my site that makes it unique, and I think it ended up looking cute. 

The plug-in I never made work was the one to embed my post content onto my pages. I found one that I could make work, but you had to pay to be able to embed more than one post across your site. Unfortunately, by the time I figured that out, I didn’t have time to find a new plug-in. Instead, I used a combination of styled blocks from other pages and query loops to add variety to my site. As I continue to develop this project in the future, I will probably find a way to embed my posts.

This project was a fun challenge for me. I not only enjoyed using all of my skills from class, but I also got to use them to do something I am really passionate about. It was also a fun design and creation challenge. I’m most excited that this project is something I’ll be able to expand, especially as I move to Advanced Web Development in the Fall.