Completed Work: Simple Course Creator

Simple Course Creator was built to solve a specific problem on a past WordPress information website. The goal was to collect existing blog posts across time and taxonomy and group them for focused, chronological reading. The list of posts needed to be easily displayed inside all the included posts.

Before creating Simple Course Creator, this could be done manually. It was tedious and inefficient. This plugin was built to streamline the manual process. Options were added to allow customization without abandoning the original focus.

• Uses native WordPress functionality similar to categories and tags to create courses
• Automatically displays a list of all posts in a course within each post
• Includes options to customize the course list display, focusing on sort, order, and style
• Inherits archive template from the active theme for a dedicated course page and uses settings for sort and order
• Supports an ecosystem of add-on plugins that add additional functionality

• Why not just make use of categories? This was a valid question during the development of Simple Course Creator. Using a new "course" taxonomy needed to provide functionality that was not native to the category taxonomy.
• The system needed to allow advanced customization without overwhelming users with options and settings. To do so, a theme override system needed to be developed.
• A robust feature set may have been more than the average user needed. Deciding what to put in the core plugin and what would be reserved for add-ons was challenging.