Content Management System
For my Content Management System assignment, I chose to use the Twenty Twenty-One theme created by WordPress. I created my child theme by following the instructional videos on Moodle, with the help of Atom and FileZilla along the way. First off, I changed the background colour of my WordPress site to a light pink colour, hex code #e2baba. I was able to do this customization in the Colors & Dark Mode tab in the child theme customizer section on WordPress. I decided not to add a background image as it would take over the entire background, and I personally liked the clean style of the site. I customised the menu section in my header to have four primary menus. These are Home, About, Blog, Contact. I will discuss these further below.
At the footer of my site, I have 3 widgets. These are Pages; i.e. the primary menu links, Latest Posts; with my 4 latest posts, and finally Socials; with a link to my Tumblr Blog, my LinkedIn and my email. I have one plugin running on my site, that is called Happy Forms and is located on my contact page.
I added additional CSS to have all h2 text white. I liked how this broke up the titles of the blog with the blog text. Additionally, I added CSS in the Additional CSS tab to have no text decoration, except for when the mouse is hovering over or it’s active. Unvisited and visited links are white, while hovering the mouse over a link will make it grey and selecting it will turn it black. I did not choose to change the font as I personally liked the Helvetica font that came with the twenty twenty-one theme.
In the home section, it is a static page. At the top sits my Name and Student number, which is also the title of my site and subtitle. To the right I have my custom menus situated to the right of the header. Beneath this I have the introduction to my site, “A Space for Web Authoring” in a white colour. Beneath this block I have placed a photo of myself with my name, student number and my location. This is enclosed by a black box.
Then, I have my latest blog posts in order from newest to oldest. Each blog is inside a black border box and they go from left to right, 3 across, from newest to oldest. I have cut them short, giving snippets of 50 words. If the blog post is over 50 words a white “Continue Reading” clickable link appears and this allows the reader to read the full blog post. I did not add feature images to the blocks as not all blog posts have images and I did not like the inconsistency of the feed if only some boxes had images.
In the about section, I have 2 short paragraphs about me in a white Helvetica typeface. Underneath, I have my favourite quote by B.J. Neblett. One difficulty I ran into was that although the block is a quote block, the block does not close the quote. It only has opening quotation marks, but does not add the closing quotation marks. Adding my own quotation marks does not match the opening quotation marks.
Moving onto the blog section, the blogs go from newest to oldest. The blogs have a h2 heading in white, with a short snippet of the blog post, followed by a “Continue Reading” link in white. Underneath, each blog post has a published date, as well as Categories, which are clickable and help in filtering content for readers of the blog. I did not add feature images as I did not like how some blog posts had images and some did not. I wanted a consistent feel to my blog section. In each blog post, readers can leave a comment on the blog article. Additionally, they can navigate to the next or previous blog post. I put all of my images in the blog posts in a black box to frame the images nicely. Finally, in the contact section, I have my HappyForms plug-in that asks the user for their name, email and what they would to send me.
In terms of challenges I encountered during this assignment, I had some difficulty in uploading images to my media library. I was continually receiving the following error message: “Unable to create directory wp-content/uploads/2021/01. Is its parent directory writable by the server?”
After some research, altering permissions and creating new folders in FileZilla, I finally was able to upload the images for my WordPress website. Other challenges were having
the correct password for my site, as my password was changed by Griffith College and I had to reach out to retrieve a new one. Overall, it was an extremely enjoyable assignment.
Check it out here: https://knuth.griffith.ie/~s3056916/wordpress/
