WordPress is amazing!

I spent a lot of time over the past few months trying to settle on a blogging platform. For me, it is not a trivial matter of looking up features and reading opinions. I try before I buy. On my local drive there are many prototype sites written in more than a few languages slash frameworks. Over at http://jameecreations.com I exercised my raw HTML and CSS skills. Now that I have a WordPress site going, I find that those skills are helping me customize my theme just as I like it.

But before I get lost in code logistics, let me say what I came here to say: WordPress is awesome because of the amazing community of feature contributors. Between the plugins and the themes you have everything you could ever want from a modern, responsive site. No longer do I search for “how to do cool animated transition XYZ”. Now I search for “plugin for cool animated transition XYZ”, and there it is. Install it, configure it, I’m done.

http://wordpress.org and https://wordpress.org/themes/hipwords/ have made this blog a pleasure to create, and I cannot thank their creators and the creative community around them enough.

Now for some minimal coding logistics : A Child Theme (see https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/how-to-create-wordpress-child-theme/ for great tutorials) enabled me to create a beautiful module loosely-coupled to WordPress and the parent theme. I was able to get a fun font from my name in the form of Lobster from Google Fonts. Another stylesheet resource, hooked into functions.php as with the previous, comes from Fontawesome. Using the :before pseudo-class along with the font-family: CSS property and the icon hex codes, I added cool icons to my menu for social links. This plus some other formatting choices in style.css make for a nice, modern looking software developer blog.

Finally(for now), I fixed a headshot on my page with minimal pain using an Image Widget (https://wordpress.org/plugins/image-widget/). Since the Hipwords theme comes with a widget-based sidebar, the process was easy and largely driven through the browser.

That’s it for now; more to come as I feature-up the site. I would include code, but I have yet to install that plugin. 🙂 Wait for a future post.

One thought on “The WordPress Ecosystem

  1. Well, not too terrible for a first post. Showed up some flaws in my formatting, though. Stay tuned for changes to header.php and footer.php. And then another blog post.

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