I think the hardest part of setting up this website so far has genuinely been making the post carousel. Is that silly? It took like a solid 2 hours to figure out to get the first post carousel to work, and then I realized that… it kind of… didn’t work.

The first post carousel on the Devil-Goat Day website.

Eventually, I did discover that the problem was mostly about quantity. The Gutenberg editor post carousel can only manage 10 posts, which meant that the 13 posts we wanted to show in the “Decade by Decade” slider wouldn’t work.

I went through a few options. I could choose a different display method, try another plug-in for the carousel, or find a way to cut the posts down to just 10. Cutting the number of posts down was pretty much out of the question, since the point of the project is to go decade by decade, and we had 11 decades, a post for undated artifacts, and a post for the future of Devil-Goat Day. That option was cut pretty quickly. I really wanted to stick with the post carousel display method, so my next step was to go in search of options.

A large part of this project is also considering the longevity of the project. Because of this, I didn’t want to be relying on more plug-ins than we needed. Plug-ins can be deleted, their authors can stop updating (causing a plug-in to become incompatible with new versions of WordPress,) they can break at random, and to a certain extent, it’s tedious to sort through hundreds of plug-ins to find one that works for what you need and also looks good. This complicated things, and I liked the Gutenberg editor post carousel system.