As my wife can attest, I’ve been lost in the world of code again. It‘s happened before. This time, I was working on a big project for an NPO for which I do part-time admin work. The project involved updating their WordPress theme. I had not selected the previous theme they were using; it was roughly 4-6 years old, so showing its age in a lot of ways.
The effort was very much a “start from scratch” job. Since web dev is not my day job, my skill set is somewhat limited in the world of PHP and CSS. So I knew that I had to start with a good foundation. In this case, I settled on the amazingly excellent Thematic Framework. The learning curve is non-trivial, but the rewards are huge. I’ve learned a lot about PHP filtering, action hooking, and good design principles in general.
The requirements for the project were really twofold:
- Freshen up the look. Make it modern, readable, clean, simple.
- Try to make the blog look as close as possible to the parent Drupal-based site. The blog subdomain existed long before the parent main site migrated its content to a full CMS, hence two different systems. Yeah, it’s not ideal, but not impossible to maintain.
So after about a month of work, I launched this morning… or should I say late, late, late last night? I’m very pleased and hope the authors and readers enjoy the new playground. I sure had fun rebuilding it.
I like the changes you made over there, Rob.
Good job!
Oh thanks, man. Took me about a month to learn a bunch of PHP. But so fun.