I created HireCollin in 2013 as I was learning web development. Since then I’ve migrated the site to WordPress and iterated on it every 4-6 years. Born from era where everyone was trying this new thing called “blogging”, and sharing their stories and thoughts on nearly anything, for better or worse.

Problem

The last iteration of the was built in 2021, using Sage 9 as a base. At the time, Gutenberg was just forming and extremely experimental. Because of this, I opted to leveraged Advanced Custom Fields’ Flexible Content to handle a main portion of it’s template needs. As time went on, the edge cases of this system stared to show, and the tech debt started to pile up. To add to this, Sage 9 wasn’t originally built with PHP 8.1+ in mind, so I either update the vendors as far as I could, or leave my site vulnerable.

My site had a blog for nearly 10 years, but I never added sites that I had worked on. I never implemented a proper portfolio to showcase nearly a decade of web development and needed a way to showcase work outside of tutorials.

Solution

The new theme leverages Gutenberg’s theme.json to bring block styles for users, creating a much easier way to style and position blocks. Now that WordPress uses blocks and patterns to create custom layouts, instead of page templates, I needed to create a system that was modular and almost theme-agnostic.

Old SiteNew Site
Sage 9.0.9Sage 11.0.9
Tailwind 1.9Tailwind 4.0.9
WebpackVite
Font AwesomeBlade Icons
Challenge visualization
Solution screenshot 1
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