Mabius Wordpress Theme

Mabius was a business venture I was part of with 2 other creative professionals. Mabius is a creative design studio located in Cheltenham, offering web development, branding, marketing and various other bespoke creative services to clients locally and nationally. I worked to develop the Wordpress theme which was used on the company website. We opted to use a Wordpress solution due to the ease of quickly getting a site set up and for long-term maintenance. Although I had lots of experience with Wordpress as a web host, I hadn't previously been involved in a Wordpress development project from start to finish so I was looking forward to working on this project.

I opted to use the Tailwind CSS utility framework to assist me with the development of this project, as I had previous experience with it on other sites but also felt that it would speed up the development of the theme and allow easy maintenance of new and existing features to be added. Behind Tailwind CSS I made use of Laravel Mix with the Less preprocessor to compile down the CSS ready for production, and Babel to compile the small amount of JavaScript I wrote for the project. This workflow allowed me to very easily tree-shake and minify my stylesheets and scripts for production into the smallest possible file to make the theme very performant on all browsers. The workflow also very easily allowed support for various versions of browsers, meaning that the site would function perfectly no matter what browser the end-user was accessing the site from.

During development of the site I regularly consulted Wordpress Codex documentation to ensure that the work I was doing was matching best practices. This project was a nice change (and a bit nostalgic) to be working with PHP but without using a framework, as the majority of my projects over the last few years had all been done using things such as Laravel. The finalised version of the project included an admin panel when users of the theme could overwrite a number of default values, and also included full support for the new Wordpress Gutenberg editor and for Contact Form 7.