I was tasked with developing and designing the new Act2Learn.ca website (previously the Action Learning Institute). The old program required a complete facelift. This included completely new branding that needed to be fun and colorful. With the new style guide complete, I then had to migrate the old ASP.NET site to a new WordPress install complete with a 100% custom theme.
We decided on WordPress for the CMS because the WordPress dashboard is pretty user-friendly and customizable, which was key to being able to hand off the finished site and have non-developers easily add content over time. I was also able to leverage some of the user features already in the WordPress API to build user profiles on the site (with a few tweaks). We also decided to use Bootstrap as a framework so that there was a good foundation to design upon.
Act2Learn was an enlightening project in many ways
The WordPress API and I became much closer friends by the time Act2Learn launched in 2015. This was also the project on which I lost my Git virginity. It was so nice to have an online repo keeping track of my commits. Being able to create a branch to work on specific functionality and then merge it back into master is an amazing feature, and one I can't believe I lived without on other projects. Transitioning content from the old website, which was built in 2001, also posed an interesting problem. In trying to export the lesson plan data from the old site's database (which was given to me as a single 1.4 GB file in a long-abandoned proprietary file format), I learned that at one point the site had a very simple forum built into it. Whoever built this forum didn't implement any kind of spam protection or admin capabilities, so the database ended up being a massive collection of early 2000s porn ads and all sorts of other nonsense. It was an interesting challenge writing a script that would output lesson data while skipping anything about penis enlargement.
