Community Reference Site
A WordPress + Elementor reference site built to learn the stack.
The problem
WordPress and Elementor are everywhere in agency and small-business work, and I had only used them as an occasional content editor. I wanted to actually build and maintain a site on the stack - theme structure, custom post types, Elementor's template system, the media library, backups - rather than claim familiarity with it. I picked a community-information topic because the content requirements are real and I would have to keep it actually accurate.
Stack
- WordPress
- Elementor
- PHP
- Custom post types
- MySQL
One decision, and why
Model the content as custom post types instead of building pages out of page-builder templates.
Elementor templates are quick to build and painful to maintain: the content ends up locked inside a template, so listing or filtering a set of entries means scraping layout JSON. Registering custom post types kept the data queryable and left the page builder responsible only for presentation. It cost more setup up front and meant the templates stayed reusable when the content set changed.