An Honest Review on my January Plan

“Uhh ohh…”

I looked at my watch. I couldn’t believe it was already Sunday. Not just anytime on Sunday, but evening. That meant that the weekend was over and it was time to get back to the weekly projects at hand tomorrow (that is, today!). 

This isn’t a post about “a case of the Mondays”, and it’s not about how to use your weekends to get a few extra projects done (if you’re into that… I am!).

This is simply a post about my January Plan (see original plan here), the progress I’ve made, and what I still hope to accomplish in 13 days.

Let’s do this thing!…

Here’s a quick list of the things I said I’d do, and what I actually did:

Quick Learning on Lynda

  • What I said I’d do:
    • Debugging with Javascript
    • Up and Running with Sass
  • What I actually did:
    • Debugging with Javascript
    • Sass Essential Training
    • Web Workflows with Grunt.js
    • WordPress: Developing with Sass and Grunt.js
    • AngularJS and WordPress: Building a Single-Page Application

Ok, I might have gone a little overboard, but you know Lynda.com: one thing leads to another:-). Since my goal was to be building a theme that used Grunt.js. and Bower, I felt I needed to brush up on these tools. Also, since I’m trying to use (or overuse) Javascript in this theme, I wanted to see what using Angular and the REST API looked like. These were all fairly short courses, and especially the Angular/WordPress course gave me some great insight and an idea or two on how Angualr can be used with WordPress.

But that will be for another time…

Building a Theme

  • What I said I’d do: build a simple blogging theme (which I’d want to run on this site) that utilizes Sass, Bower and Grunt/Gulp for building the theme itself… I might be building it from the Underscores starter theme, but maybe from FoundationPress orSage (from Roots).
  • What I actually did: I got the Underscores theme installed, and tried configuring Grunt and Bower. I got tied up with Grunt (not able to compile Sass or do a live reload). I’m pretty sure I wasted about 3 hours trying to figure that out. Finally, I just scrapped the idea and started again with a non-Sass version of Underscores.

The plan now is to build the theme first with no Sass using Bootstrap as the Framework. Once I get that done, I’ll “Sass-ify” it, and install Grunt and Bower with it for development and production. That way I’m not getting tripped up with Grunt not working and I can get a theme built.

I’m currently working through this course on building a static Bootstrap theme and then porting it to WordPress. Very good for me to get this kind of overview and flow instead of just going into WordPress and trying to hack together a theme.

Maybe someday…

Develop Two Pluggins

  • What I said I’d do: Develop a Cc/Bcc plugin for WooCommerce and a MailPoet popup plugin for lead capture.
  • What I actually did: I’ve only done a little work on the Cc/Bcc plugin…

After working on the Metabox and Slider for a client, I re-did the metabox code for the plugin. However, I haven’t been able to extend and save the metabox to two fields. Currently, I have a Cc field and a Bcc field, and they’re both returning the value for the Cc field. I’ll get that figured out, I’m sure.

But not today…

Free Code Camp

  • What I said I’d do: complete five more front-end projects
  • What I actually did: I’ve completed one and a half projects.

This has also proven to be a little tricky. Actually, one of the reasons I started the Bootstrap to WordPress course was to get more familiar with Bootstrap markup and stylings so I could get through these front-end challenges more quickly. So far, I’ve learned a lot, and have been able to fix a few things on the layouts for the projects. However, I’m still have an issue with the jQuery UI Autocomplete element. I’m sure I’ll get that working and the FCC community is super helpful and responsive.

So, I’ve been making progress, just not as quickly as I wanted.

As these are all personal projects and I’m still doing some client work this month, I’m not too discouraged, but neither am I incredibly impressed with myself.

13 more days… What can I get done!?

###

Peace,

Nate