WordPress has become my central development matrix
Web Design and nomadism
It is needed to be wandering, to cross ideas as one crosses cities and streets
(Francis Picabia)
Strolling
Like a mercenary soul, armed with my laptop, a camera and a video camera. I engage myself in all kinds of mandates. I navigate from video to web through graphics and photography. My red threads are writing and image. My professional wanderings are between Brussels and Geneva with sometimes some gaps in other European cities. I create videos, develop websites, I also teach and I write films. I go from one job to another like I jump from one plane to another. I travel the globe as often as travel in my head.
I went through the visual art “box”. I keep this first experience, with a critical and open mind moving from one medium to another as required. Each project that I lead is both the borrowing of rigor and also carrying a certain poetry. This double movement convoys all my work processes. I oscillate between constraint and poetry. My work becomes natural and impetus and any type of mandate slowly incorporates itself in this process. When I’m no longer behind a camera, I’m behind a text editor to develop a WordPress theme or around a table with a notebook to write down my ideas or read a phenomenology book. The sets change but as a walker, I move one step at the time between dullness and stunning landscapes.
And as an adventurer, I travel light with a pair of shoes, some stuff in my backpack and a map. From one bank to the other, from one mandate to the next, I go where I grasp poetry, a challenge to overcome or some substantive quest to bring me further.
I glean my inspiration here and there: in contemporary art exhibitions, in silkscreens of the twentieth century, in electronic music concerts or simply at the corner of a street. I read philosophy, I browse books dealing with design and I willingly click a few hours on Youtube.
Web Development
I develop websites on my Ubuntu Gnome. If at the beginning, I created sites in PHP from scratch, I now create some functions in WordPress and to display things in the front-end.
I keep checking the WordPress Codex. It is an almost inexhaustible source of solutions and proposals. Sometimes I look for a function and I come across another that I did not know about. And many functions contain so many parameters … like texts of the ancient Greeks, the WordPress code can be interpreted to infinity … If the codex is at the beginning, the answer to a question, it is also a mine of inspirations, a multitude of possibilities …
WordPress has become my central development matrix. It allows me to benefit from solid foundations and a flexible structure that I can modify as I wish. With WordPress, we benefit from extensions of redirections, newsletters, image galleries, lots of stuff that would be much too long to code yourself. WordPress is like the painter’s canvas. It’s a starting point, a support, an interface. WordPress accompanies my work through development and teaching, but also in my life: I move willingly in WordCamps and discuss and share with members of the community.
I play around a bit with CSS and JS and I left on the side Bootstrap and JQuery. It was too heavy…
The evolution of CSS is exhilarating. Flexbox and CSS grid are revelations. There is finally a possibility to compose on the screen as one would compose on a canvas. Alignments, overflows, overlaps, slips, can be provided.
And when I cannot do CSS, I use JS. If this last language is difficult for me to implement, it allows to add small details that make the difference on a web page and increases user’s comfort.
I work with as few WordPress extensions as possible. I often use ACF which I manipulate in every way to get what I want. My created extensions are often bits of codes that I find according to my research on the web.
We can do a lot with little …
Developing sites is like walking. We can go very far with a light sack. One must arm with patience and rigor and carry a poetic impulse.
The landscapes will always be surprising.