Literair Nederland

For the Literary review website Literair Nederland, we developed a WordPress block theme that provides a classic newspaper-style layout.

The theme uses a special block we developed for this purpose (building on the Gutenberg core query loop block) to show a list of intro texts and stamp-sized images based on a category or other characteristics, in such a way that when multiple lists of this kind appear on one page, the same article is never shown twice. This works by excluding the results of earlier queries in subsequent database queries.

In addition, we developed a Gutenberg block for bibliographic data. With this block, publisher, author, cover image, and other book data can be added easily in the editor. The form also includes a button that retrieves book data in real time via an API based on ISBN.

The old website relied heavily on custom fields for this type of book data, which led to fragmented content, made template changes cumbersome, and put heavy demands on search functionality and even on some template files.

The new template can still display content in the legacy format (that is, WordPress content based on post_meta values and custom fields), but in the Gutenberg editor it can also detect this old content and convert it to the new system with bibliographic blocks.

In addition, we built the following for this website:

• Priority+ menu
  Custom-built main menu with a dynamic overflow into a submenu.
• Newsletter template
  For the Newsletter plugin.
• Push notifications
  With a self-hosted message server via Perfecty Push.
• Archive
  With cover view and text view.
• Indexed search engine
  With a search results template via the WordPress Fast Total Search which, based on its download numbers, appears to be seriously undervalued .