LAUNCH
I was the backend developer for the Launch website, built with a couple different partners. I received static HTML, CSS, and Javascript files which I integrated into a custom, client-editable WordPress theme. I also built a smooth, interactive job board using vanilla Javascript and AJAX.
Industry
- Technology
Date
2019
Services
- UX Design
- Web Development
- WordPress
WordPress Integration
The integration portion of the project was incredibly straight forward. I received a static site from the front-end developer, which met certain requirements I provided for easier integration. I used Twig and ACF (paired with my WordPRess starter theme), which works really well when paired with existing HTML files.
I did refactor some of the content (primarily HTML structure and class names), to better support flexible blocks for some pages. In addition, I built out a couple of simple templates using existing styles from the frontend files. I also extended some of the Javascript to add CMS-related functionality like the ability to reorder news posts by date or title.
Job Board
While the integration was really easy, the job board wasn’t. The jobs are created and managed through a 3rd party system, which has a functioning but limited API. I used the API and a cron job to retrieve the jobs every 10 minutes. Jobs are stored as a CPT in the backend, with a variety of custom taxonomies corresponding to different data from the job board. The original plan for the frontend was to build it out with React, but after analyzing the requirements I decided that vanilla Javascript paired with AJAX (already available since WordPress uses jQuery) would work great and require a smaller JS file.