tylernnguyen5 / fictional-university

🎓 An imagined university website developed with WordPress

Fictional University

Most of the universities out there have a website. Therefore I took that as an inspiration to develop a non-existing university website with WordPress with a number of common features and information. For example:

• Home page with information about upcoming events and recent blogs
• Campus, Program and Professor pages
• Website live search that's aware of relationships
• Traditional non-JS search with WordPress
• Note-taking feature (private between users)
• Open registration

Live Demo

The website is hosted with SiteGround. Click here to visit.

My startup hosting plan is expired on Dec 9, 2020

Some of the things I learned from this project

• Converting static HTML to work with WordPress
• Creating custom post types, fields and plugins
• Limiting posts
• Establishing relationships between posts and pages
• Using WordPress REST API with Ajax and also building custom routes
• Working with JSON data and different request methods
• Dynamic logics for live search and frontend updates with JavaScript and PHP
• WP_Query targeting different types of data and relationships
• User-specific login feature
• Custom roles and permission for specific tasks and content
• Private user generated content
• Escaping input to prevent malicious code
• Using templates for less duplication
• Using Google Map API
• Setting up a continuous deployment with SiteGround and DeployHQ

Overall structure of the project

• Most of the important files lie in wp-content/themes/fictional-university-theme

• Inside inc directory are the files I wrote for custom route

• The js/scripts.js imports all the Javascript files located at js/modules. For the jQuery-free version of JavaScript files, visit modules/jquery-free and import them in js/scripts.js

• template-parts directory contains templates for displaying contents in different pages such as archive and front pages

• functions.php contains implementation for working with WordPress hooks and filters

• Beside the live search feature, search.php, page-search.php and searchform.php are provided for non-JS search feature if JavaScript is not enabled for some browsers

• wp-content/plugins/my-first-amazing-plugin.php is where I have my custom plugin

• For custom post type declarations, visit wp-content/mu-plugins/university-post-types.php

Languages, technologies and tools that I used

• PHP and JavaScript
• Nodejs
• jQuery (with Ajax)
• Google Maps API
• Local
• Postman
• SiteGround
• DeployHQ