Web address: GinaMcGalliard.com
Custom theme: Birch for Gina
Every time I build a WordPress website, I learn how to do something I previously thought was impossible. It was no different with GinaMcGalliard.com, a personal journalism portfolio.
Gina is a woman of many interests. She’s an Irish dancer, an animal lover, a wellness reporter and a feminist blogger. And naturally, she wanted her new website to be just as multitalented as she is. This meant making the portfolio do double duty as not one, but two different blogs. These two blogs, Formidable Feminism and the Wellness Writer, also needed their own unique looks.
Traditionally, one WordPress installation results in one blog. And internally, GinaMcGalliard.com is just one MySQL database in the back. However, I was able to add conditional rules to WordPress’s built-in category option in order to not only make different posts show up on separate pages, but even appear with different fonts and colors.
<?php if(in_category(get_category_by_slug('feminism')->term_id)):
the_title( '<h2 class="entry-title post-cat-feminism"><a href="' . esc_url( get_permalink() ) . '" rel="bookmark">', '</a></h2>' );
Above is the first part of the code influencing this condition. It’s a PHP if statement that applies a condition, a link, and CSS classes to posts that are in the “feminism” category. All Gina has to do is tag a post with “feminism” in order for it to show up on the Feminism blog only, with purple font.
To find out more about how to use conditionals, WordPress provides some excellent documentation on working with conditional tags. I used the Category section, obviously.
Even though the blogs each have their own flair, I maintained the bold green title bar on every page to lend consistency to the design. Just like Gina is a woman who can do many things, this website is a multitasker just like her, and I wanted visitors to be able to see that.