I mentioned in a recent post that I rediscovered my camera collection when I was looking for a film camera to bring to Hocking Hills. That morphed into a side project to create a new version of the Cameras page I had in a previous iteration of my blog.
Thing is, my WordPress installation uses PHP as its programming language. I haven’t touched PHP since the last time I tried to customize my blog, which was many years ago. Granted, my job as a data nerd has meant I’ve gained some experience in other programming languages, but PHP is not one of them. Also, I haven’t had to touch CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for a Very Long Time, so I needed to refresh my knowledge of the possibilities there.
I managed to break my project into a bunch of bite-sized tasks that felt very Agile-esque.
- Create a custom tag page in WordPress.
- Retrieve the tag information.
(Shoutout to Mobilize Cloud for their helpful post from 2016.) - Display the tags as tiles, using an unordered list and some basic CSS.
- Link to each tag page.
- Display the number of posts for each tag.
- Display a photo of each camera (tag).
- Retrieve the date range a given tag was used.
(This was the hard part, and required doing some research and flexing my SQL skillz.) - Enter descriptions for each camera/tag in WordPress.
Next up is making sure my new page works as expected on mobile, uploading photos of all the cameras, and writing up descriptions. After that, I’m sure I’ll come up with some other bells and whistles I’d like to add….