During my sophomore year in high school, I developed a new website for my school's newspaper, The Anvil using a WordPress framework. However, even though the Wordpress framework provides a lot of the basic functionality of the website, I edited the code in many ways to meet the needs of The Anvil. I worked with The Anvil's faculty advisor to come up with a list of differences:
- Wordpress websites are intended for every person who is a part of the publication to create their own posts. For example, person A will have an account, and they will be cited as an author only on the articles that they publish. This system is great because it allows viewers to sort articles by author. But because The Anvil is a school newspaper, there is a high turnover rate and we would constantly have to create and delete new accounts, in addition to making sure everyone has the correct permissions. Instead, I developed a new workflow where each writer does not need to be an "Author" in the wordpress system, but instead a "category." This way, only one person is needed to post all the content, but they can attribute articles to the correct authors. There's no hassle with permissions, but viewers can still view articles by author. This involved changing some of wordpress's default settings, such as the one that automatically lists the name of the person posting.
- For various reasons, we decided that the website should be private, accessible only to our school community. The definition of the school community, however, is broad: it includes not only students and faculty, but also alumni and students' family. So, I worked with various Wordpress plugins to find the best solution. If you go to the website now, you'll see that there's a password prompt. Again, instead of making a set of credentials for each individual member of the community, we decided to have a single password. Though this isn't always the most secure, it works well for the purposes of The Anvil.
In large part, what I am most proud of with this project is not necessarily the code but the workflow that I implemented. The Anvil has had websites in the past, but they were often too complicated for students to understand when the creator graduated. However, this new system for the Anvil is pretty simple for anyone – even with a non-technical background – to understan, and Wordpress has plenty of online documentation. So far, it has held up strong!
Though I can't share the password to the website publicly, here are some images of what it looks like.
These 2 images show what the home page look like.
Here's an image of what an article would look like. I wrote this article, but did not post it – someone else was able to attribute it to me.
And this is what it looks like when a user filters by my name. They can see all the articles I wrote, even though a different person posted these articles on my behalf.
