DOC – Almost All About website flexibility

What are the major things that contribute to the flexibility of the website:

Categories and Tags allow us to group Posts in flexible ways. Posts are assigned a category when they are created, the Category they are assigned to becomes one of the nodes in the Posts address (URL). Changing the Category should be discouraged since the address of the Post may change and a redirection will be created. The groupings created by the Categories

We can change what posts are selected by simply adding or removing a tag. Unlike changing the Category, making a change to a tag has no impact on the Post address. When we couple the use of tags with Post Tables we can easily change which Posts are selected for display.

A good example of this is that we recently decided to group Posts by Topic. We created a new Post Table (Topic) which selects Posts with this tag. We then added the Topic tag to Posts that we consider topics. Even easier, the Yoast plugin allows this operation to be done without even opening the Post through the Quick Edit function available on the Admin Post screen.

We have also implemented Cookies into the architecture. We currently only use cookies to identify the learning community the student is associated with and then use that information combined with the Redirection plugin to automatically route the student to the correct Community. This functionality positions us to customize the path taken through the system depending on the Community the student belongs to.

To implement these flexibilities, we also installed a Child Theme. This isolates many of our flexibilities from changes in the WordPress or many of the plugins by removing the need to modify distributed system code.

Taken together, these capablities provide us a solid foundation to change how the system works to allow us to react to Community needs with minimal work.