A travel blog you can browse by trip type or by place

What it is

A travel blog built on the Blocksy theme. The posts cover places like Penang, Chicago, Bali and Dubai; the titles are real, the article text is lorem ipsum. There is also an About page, an Advertise page and a newsletter sign-up.

What I built

• Six categories for the kind of post. Itineraries holds 14 posts, Activities 8, Airbnb 5, Hotels 4, and Stays and Food one each.
• A custom Destinations taxonomy. Made with Custom Post Type UI, separate from the categories, so a post can be both an itinerary and about Dubai without mixing the two ideas in one list. It holds 17 places.
• Tags for activities such as beaches, waterfalls and paragliding.
• A newsletter sign-up and a contact form, using the Newsletter and Contact Form 7 plugins.

What the live copy cannot do

The live version is a static copy, because GitHub Pages cannot run PHP. Posts, categories and destinations all work. The newsletter sign-up and the Advertise form send through Web3Forms instead, which emails each entry to me; there is no real mailing list behind the sign-up. Search and comments need WordPress running behind them, so the live copy says so when you try them.

What I would do differently

I set Destinations up as a hierarchy and then never used it. All 17 places sit at the top level, so Chicago is not under Illinois, Dubai and Abu Dhabi are not under the United Arab Emirates, and Paris sits in the same list as countries. The tags have the same kind of drift: "Paragliding" and "Paraglding", "Jet-Ski" and "Jetski". And Stays holds one post while Hotels and Airbnb hold nine between them, which says Stays should have been their parent, not their neighbour.