Pre-pack Wordpress Templates

Callisti is using the Platform template for WordPress but is re-considering this to allow full customisation of the desired Callisti theme. Currently some customisations would need to be made to the core Platform files to get everything just righ, which makes future updating more arduous as these changes could get overwritten.

Using the child-theme approach would allow for core WordPress and plug-in files to be automatically updated without causing conflict with the Callisti theme.

It's also been noticed that some plug-ins are starting to experience memory fails when executing certain processes but this could be in part a setting in php.ini or htaccess. Further consideration required.

Excalibur Wedding Cars - Mk2

This was fun! A complete revamp of the wedding limousine website using some CSS3 stuff, background image shenanigans, a touch of wordpress plugin-ery and some more experience of using custom themes and menus the way wordpress 3 suggests.

Playing with the custom header images using the set thumbnail function is rewarding but unless you re-define the dimensions of the header image in the wordpress settings, you need to think letterbox or panoramic landscape when selecting images that are going to look right.

Naturally :) there were some editions to functions.php as it still uses the parent theme for this file. The nod to social networking includes facebook like buttons and a recent activity widget.

To ease migration from the previous website, 301 redirects were employed - the xml sitemaps were updated with Yahoo and Google once the SEO-friendly URLs were set.

Documentation for NextGen Gallery plug-in...

...could be improved.

Luckily, Vuthy Thorn (a Bostonian living in Los Angeles) has given a good run-down on how to use the NExtGen album and galleries feature within the popular Wordpress plug-in. The explanation and guide also gives some insight to Wordpressers into the 'logic' of the system which aids understanding.

Separate Wordpress sub-pages are created for each gallery within an album using the NextGen interface and the main album display can sit on the parent page.

See the Comlongon Castle wedding photos for a working example.

Calenderifornication

The events calendar on dg Arts homepage arose out of some ics file experimenting with The Events Calendar (Wordpress Plug-in), Google Calendar ics feed import, and ICS Importer plug-in (which basically brings the feed back into the Wordpress system and outputs it in a much customised calendar.

This will update automatically to include new events as they are added by dg Arts staff. New events are automatically included in ics feed and on the website events page. The ics feed updates the dg Arts public Google Calendar which feeds back to the calendar on the website every few hour by supplying an external ics URL.