A Redefined Website
I’ve spent many many hours (lumped as best as I could into one very solid week) rewriting my entire website into WordPress. I’ve been creating almost all of my client sites these days in WordPress. They love the relative ease of it and, as I’ve grown more and more familiar with it, I appreciate it’s functionality. I also appreciate all the work many many people have given to the continued evolution of it’s core source code and all the many many plugins that make my life so much easier. In any case, after seeing all the nifty things I could do and spending many moments looking into space (yeah, I’m not just spacing out…) visualizing just how I could manipulate it to do what I wanted it to do, I decided I was ready to roll up my sleeves and dive in. There were a few requirements:
- Easy gallery management, with varying templates for types of galleries that would seamlessly replace my current gallery layout
- Fully integrated ecommerce solution
- Easier ‘sharing’ capabilities.
- All the usual perks that come with database driven websites.
- I also had the intention of paring down and focusing the site, removing what I felt was ultimately auxiliary information that detracted from the focus of the artwork.
To accomplish this I kept the general design the same, although many aspects received subtle improvements for readability and ease of use, and I focused on tweaking some main plugins and adapting my site design to the theme-based template system of WordPress. After my theme was created, with appropriate sidebars, specific page templates, some nifty jquery stuff, etc, I utilized the following plugins. Some of these have fairly poor documentation, tho I don’t fault their creators. It just takes a bit of searching and experimenting to get it to do what you want.
NextGen-Gallery by Alex Rabe for the gallery system. While I use WordPress’ media library for general blog or page images, this plugin is essential for creating an easily managed gallery system. I tweaked it in many aspects to work and display as I wanted it to, doing my best to trim extra code off along the way. I also integrated the NextGen Custom Fields plugin for extra info with some of the images. However, this, along with the templates, allows for all of the image galleries – fine art, murals, design – to function cleanly and independently of each other.
WP e-Commerce from GetShopped.com is a great plugin for ecommerce with a semi-intuitive backend. It took a bit to figure it all out but such is the nature of code. I then did my best to integrate it into the site. One nice feature it the sidebar widget shopping cart. Someone adds an item from the store, then goes and looks elesewhere on the site, and the widget gets displayed with the item in the cart. The user has the option of emptying the cart, at which point the widget disappears. So, I don’t know, buy something and let me know that it works ok.
cFormsII is just a great – and possibly the best – form management plugin. I’ve used it with many clients – even making huge fifteen page multi-part forms – and it never fails to impress me with it’s ease (although that fifteen pager got tedious). I highly recommend it. It, like most plugins, is also fairly easy to customize and tweak. Pretty soon spam comments will start flooding in because I didn’t set up the whole isHuman part, something that is essential for any blog. I used it on my old blog though and it worked perfectly.
From there, I also use the following plugins:
- All-in-One SEO pack which just works great for SEO stuff.
- WP-Minify nicely packs JS and CSS files to reduce load time
- WP-Cache also helps increase load time. This and Minify should be turned off tho if you are editing the site.
In the admin area:
- Fluency Admin – this is just a really nice admin skin. Easy to look at. Well organized.
- My Page Order – drag and drop page ordering that ought to be standard in the next version of WP
- TinyMCE Advanced - TinyMCE editor with better options, tho I still prefer just writing things in raw HTML.
- Exclude Pages – small plugin that allows you to keep pages out of the main navigation. Very useful.
I’ve yet to add a “Links” page. If i do, I’ll use My Link Order – another drag and drop ordering system. I’ve yet to go in and write descriptions for my Blog Categories. But now the site is underway.
O yeah: I also added some new paintings. Or new Old paintings. In any case – there is new work here and there on the site.
