Abraham Lincoln University is an online law school offering live, interactive Juris doctor and other online law degrees and online law programs.
The goal of this project was to develop a WordPress website from scratch for the University based on design mockups from the client.
The challenge was to implement the complex structure for Schools, Degrees, and Programs. Each school has Degrees in it and each Degree has various Programs connected to it. All the content for each of the entities is editable from the Admin panel of the website.
Planning is an important part of the development process, especially when there is a lot of data points on the website. In our case, we had complex structure of Schools, Degrees and Programs.
Each of those had to be a dynamic type of post and required to be connected to each other.
In order to successfully implement the given structure, we made a technical specification document which outlined all the data points in the database and how they should be connected to each other. Besides it explained how the content management should work on each of the pages.
We had the design supplied from the client and there were parts of it, where the templates changed based on a School type and other variables, which was considered as well.
For the implementation we decided to utilize custom post types for the data points and use them as records in the database. The rest of the system was written as custom functions on top of them, since the connections between those types were required. The advantage of such solution is that we did not use any plugins and there is no need to keep an eye on updates. There is only core WordPress and custom coding involved, which makes the solution flexible.