I conceived & built the BU Landing Pages Plugin around November 2019. For several years prior, we had been using CMB2 and page templates for homepages/landing pages– in order to achieve non-standard layouts including promo boxes, featured news, events, or profiles, and other custom functionality.
Along with the department’s creative director, we identified the most common layouts/components and compiled them into a plugin (still based on CMB2) so that we could stop rebuilding them on a per-project basis. The idea was to keep it as simple as possible with very little configuration needed.
Statistics
(as of Feb 2020)
36
Sites using the plugin
8
Contributors to the repo
281
Commits on the repo
Features & Goals
- Stop-gap between the timing of non-Gutenberg at BU and eventually integrating Gutenberg
- It could be activated on our Responsive Framework with no extra coding, styling, or considerations
- Built for two sites, so original scope was to accomplish those + a few other components we knew would be common
- There was to be no configuration, no hooks, and no reordering or repeating of components
- If you fill out a row/component, it shows up
- Fallbacks for “none found” for the automatic selections, along with notices only viewable to site admins letting them know that
- Built with our university-standard metabox plugin: CMB2
Default BU Landing Page components
- Promo set 1
- Full-width promo
- Promo set 2
- News
- Events
- “Also in this section” (child page listing)
Future Features
- Reorderability (sitewide default set via settings page and per-page reordering)
- Theme constants to lock/restrict the reordering
- WP Action Hooks to inject additional content
Screenshots
Side-by-side screenshots of the frontend and the editor for a page using the BU Landing Pages template:
