In the summer semester, we will work with the Film Arts department to create websites for their Unlock The Vault graduating film festival.
In the Spring semester, that option is not possible, so this will instead serve as an alternative.
The main learning outcome of this course is that you learn how to use, set up, and manage a live-hosted Content Management System like WordPress.
To that end, then, the final assignment in this course is for you to make a small site on any topic—it could be a portfolio site, if you have enough content, or it could be a blog on a subject of your choice.
The theme must be a Full Site Editing Theme created by you.
This project is to be done individually.
It will serve as the final project for both WMDD 4835 & 4840.
If you are taking only 4835, you will have a different assignment. A link to that description is in Brightspace.
If you are taking only 4840, the assignment parameters are the same.
Hosting
Your site must be live, hosted on the WMDD Plesk environment Amandeep set up for us.
Your Site Must Have:
- All Plesk security features enabled
- Automated BackUp to cloud storage
- A working Contact Form. I will demonstrate how to use third-party SMTP services to enable this.
- A static front page—but with at least one query loop within that page content.
- Archives
- Search, including a message for Unsuccessful Search
- Akismet anti-spam service set up (free tier membership)
- Commenting on posts turned OFF
- Beautiful Feature Images
- Consistent spacing and alignments. No layout or typographic “sins” at any screen size.
- Semantic Markup: proper heading levels, ALT attributes on images, etc
- Reasonable image file sizes
- A unity of focus in design, typography, textual content, color, and image treatments.
- A suggested minimum of twelve posts and/or pages
- A logical and consistent navigation scheme
- An admin account for administration
- A second admin account for me to access the site (additional details described below).
- An author account for posting. All content posted in that account.
About the Theme
Your theme cannot be a variation on any other theme such as twenty-twenty-four.
Instead, you must build it starting from the blank theme you will create with the Create Block Theme plugin.
Note, however, that you may use patterns—from any source.
You theme should have all or most of the following template files:
- Front-Page
- Single
- Archive
- 404
- Page
- Search (so you must have search on the site, of course…)
Your theme.json file must enable in the site the following:
- A custom color palette of at least five colors.
- At least four gradients
- At least five font sizes.
- At least one non-system font (google or other hosted font)
Note: you do not actually need to use all the colors or gradients in your finished site.
Style Variations
In addition, you theme must have at least one style variation. You can make style variations with the Create Block Theme plugin.
Security
Your site must use Two-Factor Authentication for your admin account.
You will also make an admin account on the live site for me to login with. Use a complex user name and password. Make sure that TFA is enabled on this second admin account, but with a four-week grace period.
Plugin usage should be kept exceptionally minimal. Any installed plugin should have the following characteristics:
- it must come from the WP plugin directory
- at least a 4-star rating
- at least 50,000 active installations
- it must be tested with the current version of WordPress.
- it must be set to perform security updates automatically
The above information on a plugin can be found in the installation screen, or at https://wordpress.org/plugins. Automatic updates can be easily set in Plesk.
A security best practice is to delete any plugins that are not in continuous use: you can always reinstall a plugin if you need it for one-time or occasional use.
This means that I should not see plugins like the following in the site:
- Duplicator
- All In One WP Migration
- Create Block Theme: you won’t likely use this on a live site
- Gutenberg: this, too, is typically used only in development enviroment
- Content generators like Yoast Duplicate Posts
Server Quotas
Your server quota is 500 mb. It is very easy to go over that amount, if you are not careful.
When a quotas is exceeded, the offending Plesk account is automatically locked.
For this reason, make sure that you do the following to keep within your quota:
- Delete any previous sites you have put on the server
- Size your images appropriately before importing them into WordPress.
- Choose image formats with smaller file sizes. WordPress now supports WebP, which is typically 30 to 40 percent smaller than JPG, and even smaller compared to PNG-24.
- Before transferring your site to the server, delete unused images, plugins, themes.
- Make sure that your backups are stored in a remote cloud service, not on the WMDD server.
- Remember that a Duplicator package is initially stored on the server, so making the package will also increase your quota usage.
For that reason, you should delete any packages created on the server: you can do that from within the Duplicator interface
Sources of Content
Your content must be created by you or come from explicitly open-source resources like Wikipedia, Unsplash, or ChatGPT.
Any open source text must be “cleaned up”: don’t leave wikipedia footnote notations in the text, for example.
What To Hand In
- A txt file containing the live url of the site, and an admin account (not named admin, of course) & complex pw for me to access the live site. The admin account you make for me must have have two-factor authentication enabled, but with a four week grace period.
- A Duplicator archive of the live site
- This content must all be in a zipped folder called full-name-final-project
Hand in your project to the 4840 class.
Due Date
The project is due by midnight on the last day of classes for the term. This is not necessarily the last day of our course.
In Spring 2024, that date is Friday, April 05.