EdTech / Non-Profit

Curriki AI Grants.

Custom review system, motion plugin and page templates for Curriki’s AI grants site, which funds AI tools for schools and publishes free AI courses and independent software reviews.

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RoleWordPress & Elementor Developer

StackWordPress · Elementor Pro · PHP · JavaScript · CSS · wp-cli · Docker · Mailgun · AWS

ClientCurriki

The brief.

Curriki is a 501(c)(3) education nonprofit. Its AI Grants site funds AI tools for schools and publishes free AI courses and independent reviews of AI software, so educators can choose tools with confidence.

The site needed a consistent, branded layout for every review that editors could fill in without writing HTML, video that plays on every device, a visual language with motion across all pages, and a safe path from the development server to production.

The approach.

I built two custom plugins. The first is a review system: editors fill structured fields on the post screen and the plugin renders the branded layout with the tool's logo, a screenshot gallery, video, flexible rich text sections, strengths and limitations, a verdict and a "more reviews" block. Sections reorder by drag and drop, categories come from a dropdown, and a shortcode, [curriki_reviews_grid], powers the Home and Reviews listings. The second, Curriki Motion, adds scroll reveals, a hero cascade, count-up numbers, parallax and hover polish in about 6 KB of vanilla JavaScript, and it respects reduced motion.

Video was the hardest part. YouTube failed with Error 153 because of a strict referrer policy, which I fixed at the page level. On iPhone the first tap only showed the thumbnail, so a real YouTube player now sits invisible over the custom thumbnail and the first tap becomes a genuine in-player gesture, which iOS requires. The same pattern covers the Home intro, the AI Courses modal and a vertical Short on the We Believe page.

I also built the Home, AI Courses, We Believe, Approved Partners and Reviews pages in Elementor, plus a custom 404 and the footer, checked every review against the live content and cleaned up the front end and the database. Changes were developed on a local Docker copy and deployed over SSH with wp-cli scripts that back up the page and refuse to run if it is not in the expected state. I also prepared the move to AWS, with a checklist for domain replacement, Elementor URLs, mail, search visibility and licenses.