CampOutColorado.com is a website I created to review campgrounds and give outdoor enthusiasts tips and tricks to enjoying beautiful Colorado. There are a number of WordPress customizations I have done to this website.
Campground Data Custom Plugin
For the camping reviews I created a custom campground information plugin. It pulls up-to-date information for campgrounds through a REST API. These help campers see important details as well as know if there are any up to date details they need.
Camping List Custom Plugin
To help campers be prepared to go camping I have created a number of camping lists for them to reference.
This is implemented through a custom WordPress plugin which stores all the information in a custom MySQL database. These camping lists are broken down into three categories of need. The items in the lists are linked to searches on Amazon so they can easily get the an item them are missing.
Custom Template for Solunar Table
Hunting and fishing are a regular activity with campers in Colorado. I have created a few useful tools for them. One is a solunar calendar to figure out good activity times. This was created as a customized template in WordPress.
This solunar calendar takes the moon cycle, rise and set times of the moon, as well as the sun and uses an algorithm to calculate good times to go fishing or hunting. It then displays these times, the moon cycle and a number of fish depending on how good the day looks. In the example below the solunar calculations suggest a bad day fishing, so go for a hike instead!
Custom Fish Stocked Plugin and Database
Another one of the tools I have created to help campers enjoy their time in the great out of doors is a fish stocking report with the quality of stocking in the body of water. This a nice add-on plugin that also enhances the campground details plugin.
This is updated weekly from the data that the Colorado Division of Wildlife releases. I created some search capability within this dataset so a user can find the area they are looking for.
Within this plugin I added the ability to calculate the quality of fishing at any particular spot depending on the date and frequency of fish stocking.
The best part is that it ties into the camping details plugin and adds extra information to the details if there is water nearby that the campers can enjoy.
Technologies Used
- AJAX
- Bootstrap
- cPanel
- CSS
- Dreamweaver
- HTML
- jQuery
- JSON
- MySQL
- Photoshop
- PHP
- REST API
- WordPress
- Workbench
I’ve used a wide variety of technology and techniques on this website. Starting at as little more than a camping blog it has become something that has a lot of really cool features and is very useful to anyone who enjoys camping, especially in Colorado.
