Dan Napoleoni
Frontend Developer

Similar to the DUSA project - I was tasked with regular updates, new elements and bug fixes on the Lifestyle Communities website, which luckily was developed on the same Craft CMS, Twig, Docker, DDEV and SQL stack - but with a little Vue.js mixed in.

Unlike DUSA, this one was a much larger and more complex site, and the main tasks I was assigned were more along the lines of a self-contained modular component-style build than the more BAU style of the Student Association project.

The main functionality that I took charge of and upgraded was a media gallery block that had been built in a very hard coded and not-quite-extensible way, with the client wanting to duplicate a swiper gallery element, add on a whole new set of functionality and combine it with a bunch of other media elements ... all while not breaking the absolute ton of pages that were already using this component in different ways.

There were also a lot of smaller updates to elements like the navigation, integrating a heat-mapping library, integrating trustpilot widgets, general upkeep and bug fixing, but it's the gallery module that I spent most of my time on.

It also needed to be configurable to a huge number of different data input combinations, with any and all elements containing some content, no content, or any mix of content in between.

This resulted in a lot of extra planning, logistics, breaking-fixing-breaking, testing, re-testing, rewriting and restructuring from both frontend and backend/CMS perspectives.

In the end I built what I think was a pretty dope little customiseable component that works well for every usage that the client could think of, and I think could even be abstracted out to a reusable plugin for other sites if they ever felt the need.