The Independent Study is a project that is meant to hone skills that students are building throughout their college careers. For me, these include historical writing, researching, and critical thinking. However, I am also learning new skills that have allowed me to share my historical research with others. As I am coming into the final month of the fall semester, I want to reflect on what technological skills I have developed and what I have learned about the different platforms that I have been able to work with. Of course, I want to give a huge shout-out to Dr. Breitenbucher in the Ed Tech department for his assistance. This may be a multi-week series, as I am currently adding new skills, such as StoryMaps, to my toolbelt.
Full Site Editor in WordPress
Everything you are currently seeing on the site right now has been built in WordPress. WordPress is a great web design option for developers who want a lot of customization, but the platform also does not require coding skills to work. Most of the site’s customization is done through either the full site editor or additional CSS. While I have worked with WordPress before, this version of WordPress (6.1) has a feature called the full site editor, which allows web builders to fully customize the layout of the site, from the structure of the headers and footers to the fonts, sizes of blocks, spacing, and more. The full site editor also allows you to make templates which then standardize how a page appears without having to make changes to each page. Additional CSS allows you to customize the site beyond the capabilities of the full site editor but requires coding.
Templates and Template Parts
The full site editor looks like the editor for any page, but it also includes the option to edit template parts or templates with the same blocks that are used to build pages and posts. Template parts include elements such as headers and footers, which will then look standard each time you add them to a template. The main template part that I added was a header that features a very faint image of the History of Wayne County Ohio cover page. This header then appears not only on the home page, but on my standard pages and my blog posts. I have used a couple templates to build my site, although I wanted my pages to be as varied as possible to suit the needs of my content. For example, the home page is its own template, because it was easier to see how the entire page would look with headers and footers if it was edited as its own template.
Then, the static pages that make up the On This Land exhibit are the “page” template, which only includes the header and a very basic “post content” block, which makes this template very customizable. Lastly, the blog posts and blog display page are their own templates, which are highly standardized to allow me to quickly produce and upload blog posts without having to worry about formatting.
Overall, the templates have allowed me to streamline the process of creating my site. Because many of the “background” pages, such as my blog, are pre-formatted, I have been able to dedicate my time to customizing my exhibit pages to look the way I want them to.
Theme Editor
Another cool feature that is included in the full site editor is the style editor. This allows you to not only customize the look of your site, but it also allows you to customize each block to be exactly how you want. This part of the full site editor ensures that blocks that you create will have a standardized look across your site unless you want a particular block to look different on a particular page. The full site editor is what allowed me to change the look of the site to have a more accessible font and a color palette that lasts throughout the site.
Additional CSS
Another part of the customizer in WordPress is the Additional CSS feature, which allows you to input your own code into the underlying code of your site. Most of the time, coding additional CSS can be avoided by using the customizer features in the full site editor. However, I had to use the full site editor to fix a bug in the Twenty Twenty Two theme.
At first, the main menu of my site was going behind my main cover block on my home page, which was very annoying. However, with the help of Dr. Breitenbucher and the below YouTube video, I was able to change the z-index (which directs how blocks are stacked on top of one another) to fix the issue.
Overall, these two features have been the main two WordPress skills that I have had to use to make my IS project the best it can be.