benmiles-wp

Adds several new features, numerous bug fixes, and lots of little improvements here and there. Most importantly, this Release...

• Adds Isotope JS filtering back to the Portfolio page -- Filter by Category without leaving the page!
• Adds a fully-featured lightbox, courtesy of biati-digital/glightbox .
• Adds a proper README.md file, with a media guide for creating new content for the Portfolio, and other helpful info.
• Adds a proper .gitignore file, to keep my wp-config.php file out of Git (yes, I've regenerated passwords and hashes!).
• Adds tons of new media for Portfolio Items, including better-optimized video assets, more aesthetically-pleasing featured images, and lots of sketches, roughs, and other in-progress images for existing Items, as well as a few entirely new Items.
• Fixes the broken implementation of Google ReCAPTCHA v3 in Contact Form 7.
• Updates WordPress core (6.1.1) and all plugins.
• Improves and/or optimizes numerous functions in functions.php and custom.js, and style rules in custom.css.
• Improves accessibility by increasing color contrast of links, plus better-looking indicators for external links.
• Improves CTA Buttons, and makes it a little clearer that they'll take you either further down the page, or to another internal page.
• Removes more of the built-in WordPress content that I wasn't using, like Emoji.
• Removes old and unused media for Portfolio Items, and improves some of WordPress' default handling of new media, like removing the 2560 pixel limitation.

This release addresses some urgent bugs that became apparent after deploying v1.0.0:

• Fixed an issue where Contact Form 7 is not sending emails, by adding the WP Mail SMTP plugin to designate SendGrid as the default outbound email service
• Fixed an issue where Google reCaptcha v3 was failing to load due to CORS policy violation, by removing it (for now, until I can figure out a workaround)
• Fixed a JavaScript console error stemming from my custom lightbox code, by isolating the code to only the pages where it is needed

I also made some miscellaneous improvements at this time, including:

• Updated WordPress core and default themes
• Removed unused Portfolio Item images
• Updated visual styles for the Contact Form 7's response area, and for the dedicated Contact page
• Updated the representative screenshot image for my custom theme

This is the first public release of my newly renovated portfolio site, finally realizing six months of behind-the-scenes work in my local environment. The design is largely based on my 2017 portfolio site, which can be found here: https://github.com/ben-miles/benmiles

Significant changes made since the 2017 version:

• Introduced WordPress (plus a custom theme, custom post types, and custom fields) as a backend, for managing pages, portfolio items and their meta-data, and media
• Took a step away from the single-page approach, by adding additional pages for more verbose versions of the content shown on the home page
• Replaced Bootstrap, FontAwesome, jQuery, and all implementations of each, with vanilla HTML / CSS / JS / SVG counterparts
• Numerous steps to improve performance, accessibility, and adherence to best practices

Full Changelog: https://github.com/ben-miles/benmiles-wp/commits/v1.0.0