More Interior Work on ds106 Assignment Bank Theme

It could be I am just out of coding shape or there is more to this reshaping of the ds106 Assignment Bank than it seems. I’d hedge money on the former, but not for ling.

This afternoon was spent doing more inside shuffling and some important theme adjustments. But now at least we have a front end where the menu of assignment types are generated dyanmically:

Nothing is pretty yet, but the boxes each represent a “term” or something like a category within the taxonomy of Assignment Types- this means, you can create your own list of categories for assignments like making categories in wordpress posts, and the front page will automatically update to reflect these. Ultimately you will be able to create / upload icons, and the theme will have options to have it sort by name, order added, and.or maybe the number of items within each one.

I am thunking you will be able to define upfront what you want to call these “Things to Do” – “Assignments” or “Challenges” or “Tasks” or “Fish Heads”.

And I have a start at generating the basics of the views of one of these

Once formatted and filled out with the other parts of information, it will do pretty much what you find on this kind of page at ds106.

Ok, there is not much there. But its important to work out a framework that will be flexible, trying to envision situations I am not expecting.

A few chunks of time was spent undoing what I said last time — on further thinking it becomes more important for the ds106 Banker Theme to be a full child theme, especially as I am adding overrides for a number of the template files. The way the parent Wp-Bootstrap themes is set up is not quite the same, it loads the style sheets via a function, but after some research on the dev site, I found they had fixed a situation that was making it hard for people to add their custom CSS on top– the parent theme is set to call the child theme styles after it loads it own, so there is no need in the child for an @import ../wp-bootstrap/style.css

For any developers out there, its useful to know the different between a function like:

get_stylesheet_directory()

which will return the directory path for the active theme or a child theme if it is a child theme. This is different from

get_template_directory()

which always gets the parent theme directory in a parent-child relationship.

The responsive Bootstrap theme will mean the content should flex itself to fill whatever screen size is there. I am planning to put any widgets in the footer and kill the sidebar ones. If this is done correctly, it can still be in a blog that has its own blog posts (can be used for news, etc, commentary).

I lost a good chunk of dev time this week with jury duty, but am hoping a few more solid days of code banging next week might have it close to be something ready to let some people try it on. The later phases will be moving the options out of being hard coded and into editable theme options. That is brand new territory, but conceptually it looks straight forward

If there are things you are hoping to see in this kind if site, now is a good time to lay down your requests.

Keep your eye on the dev site at http://bank.ds106.us and development notes here at http://cogdogblog.com/tag/building106

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