Throughout the past 5 months, I have learnt a lot that has helped prepare me for my future career. It has been a great experience working in a business and being involved in the work process.
WordPress
I have developed my WordPress skills significantly since I started, learning how to use appropriates themes and personalise them to suit my needs, and the functions of different plugins. Developing demo sites has massively helped me with experimenting what and what not to do when creating websites, and has given me confidence with creating my own website in the future.
These are a few of the demo sites I have worked on, which includes a construction placeholder website, a barber shop placeholder website which I worked on with Shahzaib, and my own personal coding course website.
3D Printer
Experimenting with the 3D Printer has been a fun learning experience, which we have built up our knowledge of it throughout the past 5 months. We have printed out different types of models, such as: cubes, flexible cats, phone holders, a dragon, and some models that are designed by us.
We have used different filament materials and colours throughout this placement. We have used colours such as: black, dark blue, pink, red, multi coloured gradients, and a shiny blue.
GitHub Websites
I have also developed HTML, CSS and JavaScript code during my time here for websites using Visual Studio Code and resources from the VWC GitHub. This involves ideas such as: a random website idea generator, website template downloader, and a WordPress helpful tips plugin.
I now feel much more confident with advancing my career in tech, as I have learnt a lot more of making websites and creating my own portfolio website. I have also seen how businesses run and how to manage and work with clients.
We have developed a plugin called Hello Worthy, which takes the idea of the Hello Dolly plugin, and turns it into a tips for beginners function.
This is a quote of text that is found at the top right of the dashboard, which shows helpful tips for users who are new to developing websites on WordPress.
The Hello Worthy plugin uses PHP and CSS as the coding language. The original code for Hello Dolly would display lyrics from a song as the quote on the top right of the dashboard. We have replaced these quotes with our beginner tips. A quote from the list is then randomly selected whenever the dashboard page is loaded.
This is helpful for new developers to WordPress as it can remind developers what is recommended for them to do, without needing to search for this information themselves.
Posted in VillageWebCo | Comments Off on Using our coding skills to develop a plugin for WordPress
We have decided to further advance our 3D prints into a more colourful variety of models.
We have tried different types of filament for 3DA. So far, we have tried a multi-coloured material, a shiny blue material, and recently a pink material that also has a shine to it.
We have also expanded on the different type of objects we are printing. This involves more complex and detailed models, and also larger models. The baby dragon is the most complex object that we have printed, and the cat bowl is the largest that has been printed.
To advance even further, we wanted to design our own model to print, so we decided to create a square that has our logo engraved on it. This was accomplished using the software Inkscape and FreeCAD.
Recently, I have developed my skills on WordPress through my own personal project of creating a portfolio website, and applying these skills to other websites.
This is a part of my homepage on my portfolio website. This makes use of the navigation bar, which provides links to the corresponding pages, and the get in touch button.
My website uses the plugins: Ninja Forms, Wordfence Security, and WPvivid Backup. The contact page for my website was created using the Ninja Forms plugin.
This contact page is fully functional. The user is required to fill every field, and when the user submits the message, it gets sent to the submissions page on the admin dashboard for Ninja Forms, and it also gets sent to my email address inbox. The user also gets confirmation of the message being sent through their email inbox.
How have I applied this skill?
Understanding Ninja Forms has allowed me to apply this skill to a clients website to help build their contact page.
This contact page does not have the requirements for the email field and the phone field being filled, so the user can choose which information they want to give.
One of our website projects ideas is to have a website where the user can generate a website idea, an then can use one of our template websites to help develop their website idea. A website coding development course will also be integrated into this website, and will help the user know how to use template an transform it into any idea.
This is what the website currently looks like. The user is able to generate ideas, with the option to generate multiple amounts at the same time. There is also the option to download the ideas on a text file. There is also a template website that the user can download, that provides the user with a good starting point for building their website.
What’s next for development?
Allowing the user to preview the template website will be a good quality-of-life feature, and will be especially helpful for when there is multiple different website templates that the user can choose between.
The course feature is yet to be integrated into this website. The courses will take a lot of time to build, as it needs to contain all of the information needed for the user to develop the website they want.
After making adjustments to the bed height of the printer, and the configuration settings of the media files, we have taken steps forward by being able to print more complex models.
We have so far 3D printed a model of a flexible cat which took 9 hours to print, and a hollow Easter egg that took 6 hours.
For future models, we are looking to print a cube that has the logo of our website engraved on the model. We are also looking to use more colours in future prints.
Learning how to use 3DA has been a challenging, yet fun experience. To start off with, we have printed out small cubes to help us learn how the machine actually works, and what can go wrong.
So far we have created a small Lego action figure, and a small kitten as our more advanced shaped objects.
A roadblock we keep on facing is an error that occurs with 3DA that makes the extruder bump into the object, which causes the shape of the object to be ruined. You can see an example of this with the far right object on the image above.
