Project Overview:
Bonnevaux is the international meditation and retreat centre of the The World Community for Christian Meditation. The retreat centre is now open, but much of the grounds are still under construction. The WCCM wanted to create a site to support fundraising efforts for the center as well as the events that are starting to take place there. The WCCM enlisted Being Design's help with this, and I was drafted to run the technical side of things.
Challenge:Gutenberg
The vision for the site encompasses different phases over the next few years as Bonnevaux Centre becomes more and more operational. Because of this we wanted to build this site in an especially forward-thinking manner and that meant utilizing the new Gutenberg editor. Being Design thoughtfully crafted a design system, and I created custom Gutenberg blocks to implement it. This became quite the challenge since documentation was still sparse around creating Gutenberg blocks. Working with Gutenberg requires a different way of looking at WordPress development. We found that Gutenberg excels when paired with a design system. Our blocks are used around the site to create a feeling of unity through all of the site's content.
This content block above is a great example and a block we are particularly proud of. It looks great on all screen sizes and is versatile enough to be used many times on the site through various block options.
The Gutenberg editor has allowed us to pass considerable control to the site editors. Using Gutenberg and the blocks we created, our editors have created beautiful donation pages for the different areas of the center to which users can contribute.
Challenge:Multilingual
Because The WCCM is a global organization, it is inevitable that people with many different language preferences will be viewing the site. Therefore, we wanted to make sure that the site was built with full translation support. In all of our templates, I utilized the WordPress translation function namespaced to our theme.
ex: __( 'Facilitator', 'bonnevaux' );
Using this in conjuction with the WordPress Multilingual Plugin allowed us to create a theme where all text is available for translation. The site is currently in English and French with plans for more languages in the near future.