That second time I became a WordPress … developer?
I believe I’ve mentioned in the past that I never wanted to learn much about WordPress other than how to use it effectively to write about the gadgets I’m interested in.
We had CG that was supposed to handle this, and when they didn’t any more I learned by launching theITbaby and trying to get them to make the changes over here.
TL;DR – some bumps I encountered in nearly two weeks pounding out a website that I could have probably done in notepad in a couple of days, but we needed other people to be able to modify things.
BTW, this may sound like I’m complaining, I’m not. It’s been a challenging puzzle with some fun things to still solve.
I like WordPress and all but it’s not something I’m particularly wanting to do anything but write within. Sort of like Word… I don’t want to make macros to do everything, I just want to type and slap a picture or two in and call it a day. Doesn’t help that I’m colorblind and design travesties of color.
Work contracted a WP developer to write something. He quoted what I considered was an absurd rate and it was settled. He then doubled it and said he didn’t want to do the project. With no other options and a WordPress site that had been done for us before as an example, I got the development project and a co-worker got the photo editing project for the site.
That’s been the last 11 days. It’s been a really interesting experience as I ran into things like the theme I was 3 days into writing custom CSS for couldn’t handle wall to wall pictures, which was given to me as a requirement later in the project, or that the popup contact page did not display correctly in the replacement theme, or that it wouldn’t pop-up on a link (but would on a timer,) if on mobile on Safari.
Or that we were going to have quotes and a quote rotator, and that they were going to be so long that on some of the quotes an entire mobile screen might be taken up, and they had to be up top, and the images below were not supposed to move.
I ran into a fun one of Contact Form 7 working on a Post, but not on a Page if the website was using HTTPS. Javascript just broke on the Page, so I just created a contact Post, named it about the same, and moved on although I have to remove sharing buttons and Posted by Paul King from the top.
Right now I’ve got the fun problem of one site with 3 different domain names. I can admin the site on one of the domain names, not on the others because the SiteBuilder plugin returns an error if you edit a text box widget on SiteX vs SiteY.
Contact Form 7 will complain about not being on the right server name, but it’ll send emails, and for some reason if I’m on Domain X the emails show in about 3 minutes but if it’s on Y or Z, 40 minutes. Every time. Guessing that has something to do with them getting stuck in the host’s outbox for verification/spam checking, or maybe I’m just lucky.
My current fun project still is embedding a top-bar style menu in a cell frame essentially in a page text. For this I think anyone who’s comfortable with CSS would look at me and laugh… and laugh… and laugh… I’m using class type buttons for a quick fix, but ah well. Seriously, blackish background bar, 3 items, done.
My time is coming to an end and a WordPress web dev. I get that menu done and the contact form looking better and the project’s done.
Probably a site that could have been pounded out in two hours by someone who knew what they were doing, but it’s been an interesting learning experience, and still at almost complete nowhere near the original quote.
