My year with ClassicPress

General Discussion
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I joined the CP community at Christmas last year and looking back over 2019 I am astounded at how far I have progressed with my learning. Some time in 2018 I’d decided I really needed to know more about the inner workings of WordPress and I bought a book to study. Then Gutenberg hit and I realised that WP was moving away from me so fast I would probably never keep up. The book was thrown in the corner.

When I discovered CP it seemed like the perfect solution - a stable platform based on the “good old” WP, plus a friendly, helpful community that gave me encouragement and support to learn and try new things. In the past 12 months these are just some of my achievements.

  • Developed my own theme framework based on GeneratePress. This includes a child theme package that has lots of stuff I regularly use on sites - hero image, various layout options, a contact form, sliders, colorbox gallery, fork awesome, etc. I was already using GP on about half my sites, but this year I converted them all to use my own theme.

  • Wrote my first plugin. This is a utility plugin that is now installed on every site I manage. It primarily hides stuff the user doesn’t need to see, but I am regularly adding in other bits of code for extra small enhancements. I also recently made a personal fork of an email logging plugin to record every email sent by CP. Both of these can be updated via Code Potent’s Update Manager.

  • Cracked GitHub! (well, sort of :pensive: ) I can at least now submit a Pull Request and I’ve been regularly contributing to the Classic Commerce project. I was so pleased with this one that I wrote a tutorial: https://simplycomputing.work/github-desktop/

There’s a lot more smaller stuff I better understand - custom post types, functions and using hooks and filters, the template file structure and how to over-ride it, and so on.

So, to the entire CP community… here’s hoping 2020 is a successful year, both for the CP project and for each of you personally. And thank you, one and all.

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Thank you for being spending 2019 with us!

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Nice write-up. :slight_smile: Suggestion Re Git: Daniel Shiffman, a really cool faculty member – crazy guy – has a series of YouTube vids called The Coding Train. There is a group that takes you from an intro to Git to practical usage both local and syncing to GitHub. I kid you not – these are the best Git tutorials I have ever experienced in my life. All that is dense becomes clear, while you are also laughing with and at him.

Here’s a link to the first one: Introduction – Git and GitHub for Poets

Best watched when you are slightly tired. He’ll energize you like a darn jumping bunny. He has 6.1K likes for a good reason.

Anyway, that’s my endorsement of him and it still feels like it’s not enough. :slight_smile:

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Thanks! I’ll check those out. I really had trouble finding something that was down at my level (rock bottom).

Edit. Just watched the first one. That man has had way too much caffeine!

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Wishing you even more success and learning for 2020! And let’s keep chatting about GitHub, I still think your tutorial is a great starting point for explaining in more detail to others :wink:

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I know! He’s absolutely brilliant and nuts! He explains complex concepts in a way that awed me. He also speaks what most of us keep private… the chatter in our brain. It’s hilarious When I first encountered him, I thought he was simply cuckoo… lol… but the more you watch, the more you realize, this guy has articulation skills like no other. I wish he would do some React tutorials!!! Keep me posted on what you think…

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