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Terrence Murray edited this page Apr 5, 2026 · 2 revisions

Project Overview

What is The Digital Front?

The Digital Front is a technology-focused online publication built as a WordPress website for the INFO 3602 Web Programming II course (Semester II, 2025/2026) at The University of the West Indies. The site serves as a curated platform for tech news articles, opinion pieces, and product reviews, presented in a modern magazine-style layout.

Project Summary

The project demonstrates proficiency in WordPress development through the creation of a fully custom child theme built on top of Twenty Twenty-Five. Rather than relying on page builders or pre-built themes, the team developed custom post types, Advanced Custom Fields configurations, shortcodes, and plugins from scratch to deliver a publication-grade content management experience.

Key Features

  • Custom Child Theme built on Twenty Twenty-Five with 37KB+ of hand-written CSS and modular PHP architecture
  • Three Custom Post Types (Article, Opinion, Review) each with tailored ACF field groups for structured content entry
  • Magazine-Style Home Page featuring a hero section with the latest article, a sidebar of recent posts, filterable article grid, and stats bar
  • Advanced Content Filtering via a custom shortcode providing category tabs, date range filtering, and paginated results
  • Breaking News Ticker implemented as a standalone WordPress plugin with admin settings for speed, headline count, and enable/disable control
  • User Registration and Comments with moderated discussion enabled site-wide
  • Breadcrumb Navigation powered by Yoast SEO for clear content hierarchy
  • Responsive Design with mobile hamburger menu, fluid grid layouts, and clamp-based spacing
  • Automated Site Setup that activates plugins, creates pages, seeds categories, and builds the navigation menu on first admin visit
  • Docker Deployment configuration for production hosting

Technology Stack

Layer Technology
CMS WordPress (latest)
Parent Theme Twenty Twenty-Five
Child Theme the-digital-front-child (custom)
Custom Fields Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) with JSON sync
SEO & Breadcrumbs Yoast SEO
Pagination WP-PageNavi
User Roles Members plugin
Forms WPForms Lite
Database Migration WP Migrate DB
Development Environment Local by Flywheel
Deployment Docker + Docker Compose
Version Control Git / GitHub

Development Approach

The project followed a phased development model:

  1. Phase 1 - Project setup, child theme scaffolding, Article CPT registration
  2. Phase 2 - Opinion CPT, ACF field groups, About/Team/Mission pages
  3. Phase 3 - User registration, comments, breadcrumb navigation
  4. Phase 4 - Custom queries, category + date filtering, pagination
  5. Phase 5 - Custom plugins (Breaking News Banner, AJAX Filter, Reading Progress Bar)

All custom code is version-controlled in Git, with WordPress core files excluded via .gitignore. The child theme uses a modular inc/ directory structure where each feature (CPTs, ACF config, shortcodes, setup) lives in its own file, loaded by a slim functions.php.

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