It’s always hard to not meet your goals.
Even harder to admit them to the public:-).
But, here it goes, and here’s the progress I’ve made…
The Theme
I started working on my very first custom theme built off of the _s starter theme from Automattic. It was an exercise in a few things:
- Can I create a theme, from scratch, using custom templates?
- Can I incorporate a framework like Bootstrap into the theme?
- Can I incorporate some Javascript bits into the theme as well.
- Can I get this theme in good enough shape to submit to the wordpress.org/themes repo?
I wanted a blogging style theme, with some fun modals and overlays. While I’m still in the process of finishing the theme, I think the hardest parts are behind of me. I was able to incorporate Bootstrap, masonry.js, parallax, custom areas in the customizer and some modals for this theme. So far, so good. The front page is basically done, and the other template parts should be done soon, as they won’t be too complicated.
Here is where it’s at currently:
I’m not a designer by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m pretty proud of how this is turning out.
The Plugin
I was going to produce two plugins for the wordpress.org/plugins, on for MailPoet and the other for WooCommerce. Well, the MailPoet plugin is going to take a back seat for now.
However I made some pretty decent headway on the WooCommerce CC/Bcc email plugin.
I was able to:
- Create a custom meta box with two fields, one for Cc, one for Bcc.
- These fields stored metadata in the database
- I could reference these metafields and put the data (email addresses) into the email headers
- I got a few test emails that the headers sent and everything worked well.
Well, everything worked well on my localhosted server. When I tried to move the plugin to a live WooCommerce install, I got a few errors about headers already being sent. So, I think I’ll need to work on some priority levels, but all in all, I’m pretty excited about where everything went.
The Code Camp
I’ve basically stalled on the Free Code Camp work I was going through. However, I had the realization over the weekend that I’m not interested in the certification so much as I am the projects. And the projects I think I’ll need for the jobs I’m looking to get are basically the JSON and API projects, as well as the layouts and click-to-tweet features, and all the jQuery goodness people can handle.
That was very refreshing and re-focusing. I also didn’t feel like I needed to be beating myself up over things.
However, FCC has turned me on to wanting to know more about about full-stack Javascript development. So, I’ve been looking more at Angular.js, as well as the rest of the components of the MEAN stack. Really excited about all the possibilities there.
The Learning
Most of all, I feel like I’ve been able to learn quite a bit from this past month. I’ve been digging in and writing out a lot of Javascript, getting my first theme underway, and actually reading through a ton of documentation and trying to reverse-engineer functionality.
And all of that was stuff I was never doing before. I’m pretty psyched I’ve been able to get this far. Let’s hope some other companies feel the same:-).
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Peace,
Nate