site development – The Homebody Community

Work Has Begun

I have started working on the site this week, and I think the goal of February is realistic for me. I can’t overtax myself like I was doing on the previous iteration of the site.

We WILL make the launch date goal, but the service now is so much cheaper I’m not even worried if I run over the deadline. No more pressure! Yay!

Slow and steady this time, but without the constraints of prepaid time running out on our hosting. I am hosting the site on normal shared hosting this time, which is significantly cheaper, versus the dedicated WordPress hosting we were on. And I’m able to achieve the level of site performance we need to be ranked by Google even though it is ‘just’ shared hosting.

So expect lots of updates here as site functionality comes online. The forums are online and just need to be seeded. The wiki, chatrooms, and courses platform are next on my list.

Back to Phone

I have been setting up the site on my phone again, like I was previously doing. I started using AI alot to generate code, and it was easier to work with code on my laptop, so I fell out of that working mode for the last while. But right now I’m on an average-sized, budget-grade phone putting the site together. We’re back to validating the mobile version of the site as I build things.

I got some code and was able to fix the mobile version of the forums, and everything fits on a vertical phone now. No more squished nested replies that can’t even render, and no more editor that disappears off screen to the side.

I am SO glad I could go back to the old forums. The other forums solution wanted me to pay for every basic feature and function. I was using AI-generated code to override it, but it was work and I’m not sure it would have worked for everything.

Now I can seed the forums some more from my phone when I have a free moment. It really makes it easier to engage and do the work when I can do it from my phone. I’m under the weather but I can still lay down and stay comfy and still get the work done through my phone!

New Approach

I started with a single website hosted on WordPress-specific hosting. Decent performance, but there was no way to publish a page or web app independent of the WordPress site itself on the same domain easily. So, chat, forums, courses, interactive elements, and all the other functions that slow a site down, are all piled on top of a single set of finite resources. I couldn’t add all the functions I wanted us to enjoy.

What I’m doing now is adding sub-sites for the various functions. The forums, as an example, are actually on their own WordPress instance, so any impact to site performance is only felt in the forums and is not compounded by the impact of myriad other plugins and functionality.

The sub-sites are installed in folders within the root of the primary site, so they appear to be just a section of that site in the URL. The forums are on a separate WordPress instance installed in a folder called /forums.

The main site will host the blogs and use BuddyPress social/community plugin. People can register and log in there. When they log in on the site, a special plugin syncs their logged in state and roles to all the sub-sites. When they log in or out, or change roles, on the sub-sites, that gets synced up to the primary/root WordPress.

I have to test the sync performance when the full network is up, and it might require me going through a setup for every possible connection- a number which gets exponentially higher with each new sub-site. So there is work and validation to be done before I can declare victory, but I am confident.