Notes from May

The launch of the 2023 The World Transformed festival 🚀 Successful Bedrock deployment with 350org 🌎 Adapting an existing WordPress theme for the new SWARM website 🐝

What I’ve been working on

This month I’ve been helping get The World Transformed website ready for the launch of their 2023 festival. This included some site enhancements like allowing editors to customise background and text colours of streamfield blocks and adding a video player to the full width header image. I have continued supporting 350.org with their transition over to the Bedrock pattern for their WordPress sites. This month we successfully recreated and deployed a production 350 site with this new stack. Finally, I’ve been adapting the Schematic WordPress theme so that it can be reused for the SWARM website redesign.

What I’ve been learning

This month I’ve been learning how to:

• Programmatically fetch raw Shopify data using the ShopWP plugin and display it in a custom WordPress Gutenberg block
• Use the poster attribute in the video element to display an image until the video content is ready to be played
• Retrieve data from a WordPress post field based on the post ID with the get_post_field() function
• Create section layouts in JSON for a custom WordPress theme
• Add a color picker to the admin interface in a Django Wagtail project with the django-colorfield package

What’s next

In June I’ll be finishing my work on SWARM and preparing the site for launch. I am expecting to start a new project building a new site for indigenous communications network Awasqa. I’m taking a break towards the end of the month to work on personal projects including a new portfolio site that I hope to be porting this blog to soon.

Interesting links

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

• Guide to AI is a monthly newsletter that analyses the most important developments in AI
• Get a one minute CSS tip every day
• A Python library to draw beautiful maps from OpenStreetMap data
• Eleventy rocks is a collection of starters, plugins and resources for the static site generators
• The Vanilla JS toolkit is a collection of tools and snippets for JavaScript without frameworks