Streetcar.org is the website for the Market Street Railway, a San Francisco non-profit that renovates antique Streetcars & Cable Cars used by SF Muni/MTA. Paul first migrated the website from blogging website to WordPress in 2013-2-2014. I reconnected in 2020 and completed 2 modernization projects after becoming the Blind Guy.
The Blind Guy put his long experience in the following facets of the project:
- Workflow, how new cars are entered, featured image added, categories selected, streamlining the entire process.
- Automation. Each detail page has a Prev/Next link. He worked out the logic for ordering cars, wrote software to build a table of cars with their previous/next cars automatically when an editor adds a car & selects a particular category. Then, when a viewer wants to read about a Streetcar, Cable Car or bus, that information is available to create the Previous/Next links.
- Taxonomy. 3 Subcategories added to Streetcars & Cable Cars, so Fleet pages show 3 tables instead of 1.
- Migration. A script was written to set new Featured Images for over 100 Streetcar & Cablecar. The Blind Guy assigned each published car to new categories.
- Coding. The code is updated, documented, structured to current standards. A new function is added that scales full-sized Featured images to the sizes needed when displaying miniatures in a Fleet table. Scaling is precise, since cars vary a few inches in height or length. It is a big challenge to present a table of things that vary in size in a harmonious way. And doing so while blind.
- Shortcodes. Previously, Streetcars & Cable Cars were based on WordPress Archive pages, in the new system, a variety of Fleet tables are added with Shortcodes, special commands the site owner can add to any page that is filled with a particular grid when viewed.
- Styling. The custom theme’s css for Fleet pages uses the new Grid element displaying 1-3 columns depending on whether the page is viewed by browser, on a table or Smartphone.
- Coordination. There were only 2 instances of a new Board Member changing a script to add a welcome message for people viewing QR codes. He made sure their work was included in the release.
