Profiles

Music,Recording,Mixing,Programming,Bicycling

I made my way back to programming in 2012 when I volunteered to be the webmaster for my son’s school PTA web site. The site was in desperate need of a major overhaul, and I was looking for a solution that would allow the various PTA volunteers (i.e., other parents) the ability to easily update their own program pages, and do things like create volunteer sign-up sheets, without having to send requests to the webmaster and wait for them to find the time to make the changes. WordPress seemed like it would be the perfect platform for this with it’s easy page/post editing and the huge variety of themes and plugins available.

Unfortunately, after many weeks of searching, I couldn’t find any plugins that fit all of our needs exactly. So, I decided to brush off my programming skills and spent the summer learning all about the inner workings of WordPress and the PHP/MySQL code behind it. By the end of the summer, I had a pretty elaborate PTA Manager system ready to go. The 2013/2014 school year was the real world test for the code, which was refined with feedback and suggestions from other PTA volunteers during the year.

Two plugins were segregated from the system and made more generic to be useful to a larger range of people and released for free at WordPress.org as my way of helping out other volunteer organizations.