Every Sole Proprietor’s website needs a resume, and given the expansiveness of the WordPress plugin ecosystem, I expected to see a half dozen to choose from. In reality, there’s only one with any amount of attention, Resume Builder from Boxy Studio.

I’m still working on the resume content, but the auto-formatted layout is not bad. The “star ratings” for skills are maybe a little corny but fun.

The plugin adds a “Resumes” section to your admin console screen, and when you add a new resume you’re treated to a very structured layout.

Don’t expect to drag and drop sections like they’re blocks in a WordPress editor. The plug in works, but doesn’t have that level of polish.
A resume that looks like a blog entry
The problem I encountered was that the resume looked like this:

Ridiculous! One copy of my mug per page is plenty. You can see from top left corner of the image that there’s a bit of WordPress debugging going on (live on the website, of course). I just couldn’t figure out why it was displaying like a blog article.
Well, if it looks like a duck… OK, when I’m editing my resume, the URL ends with post.php?post=75&action=edit
. So resumes are just posts with a hard coded ID of 75. This explains why the shortcodes have 75 in them (e.g. rb-resume id="75" section="intro"
). That left me with a dilemma, because I want at least the date on the blog articles (not sure about the mug), but I don’t want it on the resume.
Working harder, I echoed the post type in single.php
by adding the following after the header:
<?php echo get_post_type(); ?>
When I clicked on the link for an regular blog article (which you have to do to trigger single.php
. Going to the Blog link isn’t enough!), I’d see “post” echoed on the screen. But when I clicked on the resume, I saw “rb_resume.” Resume Builder is using a post type of “rb_resume.”
A Single.php for different post types
To solve the problem, I copied my single.php
file into a new file called single-rb_resume.php
. Since single.php
calls another template part, I had to copy that file as well. And then I started hacking, and more in the machete sense than the computer programming one. Finally I was able to pull away the parts that made an individual blog post look like a blog post, and I arrived at the following:

Of course, instead of actually finishing the resume, I left satisfied with solving the templating problem; it’s still a work in progress.
The template hierarchy is a pretty scary part of WordPress. I can’t even begin to say I understand it, but I know that it’s there, and this situation has proven that exploiting the hierarchy can be a very powerful technique.