Developing my new personal website with Eleventy.js 🤖 Preparing for Platform.org site launch 🏗️ Optimizing my WordPress workflow 💼 Starting development work on new Solidarity Knows No Borders website ✊

What I’ve been working on

This month I’ve been helping to finish off the Platform.org website ahead of its launch. This included fixing some CSS bugs and adding JavaScript features like a counter on the number of search filters selected. I’ve been working on optimizing my WordPress workflow in general by making sure I’m using all of the possible styling options in theme.json and using the create block theme plugin. I also took part in some user testing sessions with the Figma prototype of the Solidarity Knows No Borders website. I set up the repository for this new project and started some initial development work like creating the header, footer, and a custom post type. On my personal site, I’ve been designing and developing the landing page which you can view in progress on the staging site.

What I’ve been learning

This month I’ve been learning how to:

• Use the create block theme plugin to quickly generate a block-based WordPress theme
• Use eleventy collections to organize the content on my new website
• Integrate Google Sheets with gravity forms so that form entries are automatically added to a designated Google Sheet
• Add renovate to a repository to manage PHP composer dependencies
• Use the mapbox API and the carbon fields library to create a custom map component on a WordPress site

What’s next

Over the next month, I’m going to be the main developer building the Solidarity Knows No Borders website. The site will be a home for this community fighting for migrant justice & dignity, and I’m very excited to be involved. I’m looking forward to building on my existing knowledge of WordPress Full Site Editor to build a beautiful and easy-to-use site within a limited timeframe and budget. There are some components in the design such as the map of member organizations and resources that need to be translated into multiple languages that will be technically challenging. It will be interesting to see how I can implement them and hopefully what I’ve learned into future projects. On my personal website, I’m aiming to build my projects portfolio page which should display the best of my work over the last two years.

Interesting links

These are some interesting links that I’ve come across this month:

• Unicorn Club is a 5-minute weekly newsletter for front-end developers and code-savvy designers
• WordPress playground runs a full sandboxed WordPress site in the browser
• Sizzy is my favorite tool for testing websites on multiple devices and browsers
• Paweł Grzybek explains how Git worktrees mean the end of messy stashes and wip commits
• Frontendchecklist.io includes 88 points to keep in mind before you launch your website