A redesign of the blog list and post detail pages for Rev6, a fitness and wellness platform running WordPress + Divi on Cloudways. This is less a "look at the pretty result" piece and more an honest account of the architecture decisions and the bugs that taught me something — including the one that cost a chunk of a Saturday and had nothing to do with code at all.
The starting point
Rev6's blog needed a full visual and structural overhaul: a proper editorial list page with a category sidebar, sorting, and a card grid, plus a clean reading-focused detail page with an author bar, author bio, and related posts. The site is built on a Divi child theme, so the obvious first question was whether to lean on Divi's built-in Blog module.
I didn't. The Blog module is fine for generic listings, but it falls down on the things this project actually needed: URL-based category routing, custom card markup, and membership-aware post handling. Fighting a page builder to produce non-default markup is a losing game — you end up with a tangle of overrides that breaks on the next Divi update. So the list and detail pages are driven by a small system of custom shortcodes living in the child theme's inc/rev6-blog-functions.php, styled by a single assets/rev6-blog.css, and assembled inside Divi's Theme Builder.
