Site Architecture

Interested in how we built this site? Below is an actively updated list of themes and plugins we’re using. If you want to know more (or think we’re missing out on something useful) please let us know.

Framework/Hosting

WordPress hosted on SiteGround (paid).

WordPress Theme

Twenty Sixteen, which we chose largely because it is accessibility ready (you can read more about what that means for WordPress themes). We’ve slightly modified the theme to display our custom metadata.

WordPress Plugins

Data Management

Advanced Custom Fields to store relevant metadata (e.g. ISBN, author, publisher).

WP All Import Pro and WP All Import – ACF Add-On (both paid) to import book data from a Google Spreadsheet.

Search

FacetWP (paid) and FacetWP  – Relevanssi Integration allow results to be filtered by categories and searched. Custom Hooks let us use pagination that was consistent with our theme.

We made some modifications to FacetWP to make it more accessible for screen readers (this was helpful).

 Accessibility

WP Accessibility addresses common accessibility problems and allows users to toggle text size and contrast.

Appearance

Elementor provides more flexibility for page layout (used for Best Of lists).

WordPress Site Structure

We’re representing books as individual posts and using standard WordPress categories (organized within parent categories) for faceting. This has its limitations, so we’re currently exploring other options.

Other Libraries and Extensions

Library Extension is a fantastic browser extension that lets you see whether books are available at your local libraries. We’re working on making the site compatible with it; once this is complete, we’ll provide a more detailed writeup of how we did this.