The Job Board

The first special project we’ll work on is a job board. You have probably seen this kind of site already, where people and companies can post job openings. You’ll use WordPress posts for storing each job offer, and for sorting them into main categories. Tags will be used to pinpoint more precisely what the job is all about, and among other things you’ll tag each post with the company that posts the opening, which may prove to be an interesting way to sort jobs by in the future.

So far, so good. It is really pretty close to what WordPress was made for, isn’t it? Despite it not being a weblog, I mean. The problem comes when you want to let the parties offering jobs post their jobs themselves, so you won’t have to. Granted, you can just give them a username each (and even open up the signup form), but not let them have publishing rights, but should they really be mucking about in the WordPress admin interface? I say no; that isn’t a particularly clean nor user-friendly solution, since all they really want to do is to fill out a form detailing their job opening, send it in and then have it approved by the site staff.

And that’s exactly what they’ll do. You’ll employ a plugin for this functionality, offering a specific page containing said job form. In the end, what you’ll get is a site where parties offering jobs can send them in through a form, so that they end up in WordPress as posts that the site staffwill approve. Approved jobs (published posts in reality) will be sorted into categories (depending on the type of job), and be tagged appropriately. You’ll take as much of this data from the job submission as possible, without hacking any plugins, so anything that will not go straight in easily will have to be added manually.

The whole idea is to build this job board in a quick and dirty way, launch it with WordPress, and then continue to build it after launch. Time to get started.

The Theme

The actual theme is less important for this project, since it will be so straightforward. The idea is to have a header featuring a horizontal menu, and then have the content in three columns.

1. Jobs available. This column will display jobs posted in the Job offerings category.

2. Looking for work. This column will display jobs posted in the Looking for work category.

3. Other things. The third column will show info text, search, promotions, tag clouds, and other things that should make using the site easier.

Finally, you’ll wrap the whole thing up with a footer containing some basic information. In terms of template files, you’ll need a specific front page template (home.php), and of course a header (header.php) and a footer (footer.php) template, respectively. The home template will contain columns 1 and 2, but column 3 will in fact be the sidebar template (sidebar.php) so that you can call on it when people are viewing the actual job postings as well, which will be posts really, so you want a single post template (single.php) too. And, of course, a stylesheet (style.css); the theme can’t very well work without it. All listings, from category and tag listings, and things like that, can be managed from an index.php template, since it is the fallback template file for everything. You can even put the 404 error into index.php if you want to.

To get started as quickly as possible, you’ll build this on Notes Blog Core, as a child theme. That’s right, you won’t even have to bother with the fundamental basics, just getting right into the fray. I did mention that’s the beauty of child theming, right? So what are you building? A simple job board theme that will display the latest job offerings available. It is more a concept than a finished product obviously, but should be enough to get you started.

The Header and Footer Templates

The changes planned for the header file are actually all cosmetic, or managed by the Submenu widget area, so there is no need to create a new header.php file. The child theme’s stylesheet (style.css) will cover this, and it resides in the wp-content/themes/ directory in a folder called notesblog-jobboard, alongside with notes-weblog-core-theme, which is needed because it’s your template.

As for the footer, you won’t alter anything there besides some styles using style.css. The fact that Notes Blog Core’s footer has four widget areas by default means you can show the latest jobs there using widgetized plugins, and add graphics (using the text widget for example) for promotions. In the future you may want a more customized footer, but this will do for now.