LearyGates.com is a personal website for, well, Leary Gates and serves as a clearinghouse for his work with multiple companies and ministries. The main objective was to present the multiple facets of his ministry work in an interactive format, along with links to his other efforts, all integrated with a blog where he could continue writing. Some level of social network integration was desired, though it wasn’t (yet) the focus of the site.
Key Tools: WordPress, Thematic Theme Framework, phatfusion’s Image Menu
Notes: The centerpiece of the interactive design is based on phatfusion’s Image Menu script, which creates an interactive navigation menu from full-size images. Each focus of the client’s ministry is represented with a different photo. There were technical hurdles to overcome (see previous post), but all-in-all, it came off as intended.
Because the site has two main areas (five interactive pages + the blog) and a couple of supporting pages, I ended up creating some custom page templates and sidebars to manage the differences in content. The site is built as a child theme of the wonderful Thematic framework, so it was relatively straightforward to create the templates and client PHP functions file. Still, there were quite a few non-billable hours as I learned how to do things in PHP.
The site is currently using 21 active plugins, which seems a little excessive. I’m still hoping to find ways to reduce this number, either by hardcoding functionality into the sidebars where appropriate or finding “all-in-one” plugins that can combine the functionality of a few smaller plugins. Some of the notable plugins include:
Events by Arnan de Gans. I tried out several events management plugins, but this one was the simplest in terms of the functionality that was needed –> managing a simple list of future speaking events. At first, we were also trying to manage an archive of recent presentations as well, but couldn’t find a suitable solution. So I ended up creating a custom post category and presenting those through a single-category title list.
Recent Posts with Excerpts by Stephanie Leary. This is actually a new plugin, created at least in part to a request I made on her other excerpt plugin. This one provides a list of recent posts, with excerpt text. We’re using this on the home page, where the blog posts are a secondary content item. I’m using the “Advanced Excerpt” and “Thumbnail for Excerpts” plugins in conjunction with this.
GD Star Rating by Milan Petrovic. This one is big-time overkill for the needed functionality. I need to find a simple 5-star user rating plugin that doesn’t need a massive backend UI to configure.
Stray Random Quotes. I chose this plugin for quotes management because it had the ability to display more than one quote at a time. I’m using a different pullquote plugin for the interactive pages, but would like to combine everything into SRQ if Editor-level users can access the quote collection.
Twitter. The recent DOS attacks on Twitter have lead to many of the general Twitter plugins failing to provide updates in a timely manner. JavaScript access still works, however, so I actually just went ahead and used Twitter’s HTML/Javascript badge code right on the website – HTML in a text widget, JavaScript in the functions file to control which pages it loads on. There’s not much control over the display elements, but at least it consistently works for my client.
Leary Gates
Key Tools: WordPress, Thematic Theme Framework, phatfusion’s Image Menu
Notes: The centerpiece of the interactive design is based on phatfusion’s Image Menu script, which creates an interactive navigation menu from full-size images. Each focus of the client’s ministry is represented with a different photo. There were technical hurdles to overcome (see previous post), but all-in-all, it came off as intended.
Because the site has two main areas (five interactive pages + the blog) and a couple of supporting pages, I ended up creating some custom page templates and sidebars to manage the differences in content. The site is built as a child theme of the wonderful Thematic framework, so it was relatively straightforward to create the templates and client PHP functions file. Still, there were quite a few non-billable hours as I learned how to do things in PHP.
The site is currently using 21 active plugins, which seems a little excessive. I’m still hoping to find ways to reduce this number, either by hardcoding functionality into the sidebars where appropriate or finding “all-in-one” plugins that can combine the functionality of a few smaller plugins. Some of the notable plugins include: