Profiles

Julie, My Kitties, Guitars, Motorcycles, Camping, WordPress, BuddyPress, BBPress, Php, Creating Custom Themes, finding new ways to make WordPress do old things, Ancient Aliens, Anunnaki, Ancient Egypt, History, Politics, Area 51, American and South American Indian Tribes, Wicca.

I started my wonderful journey with WordPress about 6 or 7 years ago. Since 1995, I had been developing and selling financial scripts and other things using mainly php, sql and java. At this point, I had never actually build a real web site.

One day a guy asked, “Hey, your good with all that “code” and stuff aren’t ya?” and without thinking about it, I was like “Yeah!”. The guy was in need of a quick and easy web site that he could log into and edit, add or delete content easily. He only had a couple pages of info and a picture or 2 for this project, I mean, how hard could it be right?. So we sat down and he began to explain what he was after, I listened carefully and eagerly wrote it all down.

I started on my way back home and while I was driving, I couldn’t get this project out of my head. I was breaking it all down, spinning it over and thinking about all the ways I could get in trouble with this. Well, as soon as I got back to my house, I began to ponder and scheme on this project even more. With a curious drive and an good idea, I hopped online to begin my research. I was looking for some simple guidance on how to build a login and was hoping to find a pre-made library or script that would allow me to introduce a ui as a backend feature. And then it just hit me like a bolt of lightning. I remembered someone telling me about C.M.S. setups and how cool and easy they were. I also remember a girl at work who was talking about WordPress for blogging because of how easy it was to use. So, I began to look up, download and load up installs of Joomla, Druple, WordPress and couple of other simpler scripts into my virtual stack. My goal was to pick them all apart, play with the features and come out a victor in this project that I had undertaken.

Well, I will be the first to say that I got my butt handed to me at nearly every corner I came to in this venture. I wanted to make things work the way I wanted but Joomla and Druple were just gut wrenching and vile to work with. I thought I was beat, That was until I hit up the Wp install and began playing with it. I loaded it up in my virtual stack and instantly began to play. I was really diggin the back end and the themes I could choose from, the easy access to plugins and features. I was loving it.
So after that project came to a close I found myself left with this desire, this need to go back and play with this a little bit more. And then a little bit more, and finally it became an obsession. When I found out about custom themeing and writing plugins, I was blown away! I immediately began to deploy my all of current knowledge and skills to figure out how to develop custom themes from scratch. And that’s what I have been doing ever since. I have now created over 150 fully functional WordPress themes from scratch or with _s’s as a base and have developed at least 6 plugins that I use for my own projects.

WordPress for me has been a deep and meaningful journey. It was a weird and heavy learning curve at first but worth it. I have spent many night banging my head into the key board, I have cried, laughed, had mental break downs and found love and friendship within the world of WordPress and I wouldn’t trade it for anything In the world. There are some things I would change about it, but its like a kid, it never does what you want unless you coax it and it will sometimes talk back to you. But hey, I love it anyways.