We have been lucky enough to be working with the Creative Spaces project for the last twelve months.  In that time the scale, scope and potential of the project has grown enormously as more and more support has come on board.  The website was officially launched on the 20th February 2009 by Deputy Lord Mayor Susan Riley at the Boyd School Studios (managed and facilitated by Creative Spaces).

The website itself is a highly customised multi author build of Wordpress.  Racket managed all aspects of the project from infromation architecture through to the graphic design, XHTML & CSS coding and ofcourse the Wordpress build and integration.

We have just completed a website for Melbourne based artist Ghostpatrol.  Built with Wordpress 2.7.1 as the CMS it also features some pretty seamless integration with Flickr (which the client uses as their image CMS) and an integrated shop for managing all art sales.  Building sites for artists in always an enjoyable process as there is so many image resources to draw from…

View the Ghostpatrol website here.

It seems inevitable that this post be written… so why write another one? I guess because there are so many different Wordpress appreciation posts / top plugin lists, each person focuses on their own particular application of the Wordpress system to their context and requirements, meaning each is slightly different - and while I have read many excellent posts covering these topics, in building this site I have used various bits and pieces drawn from a variety of sources. This post is also a way of giving something back to the Wordpress developer community - as the best form of marketing in any context is having people talking positively about your product without have to ask them to do so. So here is a roundup of the techniques and plugins that make this site tick:

Plugins (all these plugins are 2.5.1 compatible)

Admin drop down menus: This plugin ends up in every build of Wordpress we do, essentially it creates a drop down menu for each of the Wordpress categories (Write: Page / Post etc). The developer is Ozh and in his words: Replaces admin menus with a CSS dropdown menu bar. Saves lots of clicks and page loads!

Configurable Tag Cloud: As the name suggests, this provides you with a bit more control over the tag cloud display. Developed by Keith Solomon.

Dashboard Editor: Again, this plugin goes into every build. Very useful for cleaning up and customising the Wordpress dashboard. Developed by Aaron Harun.

Fold Page List: The great this about this plugin is it’s compatibility - all of the existing functionality of ‘wp_list_pages‘ can be used, “simply replace the code fragment that looks like this
<?php wp_list_pages ($arglist); ?> with this: <?php wswwpx_fold_page_list ($arglist); ?>. But what does this plugin actually do? In short it enables you to display the top level pages in a list, then once you click into a particular top level page, the listing of pages will now display the child pages aswell. Describing this plugin using text is kinda like describing a painting using text “Well there is a tree on the right hand side and err… a human.. and the sky is nice… yeah real nice…”. I recommend viewing Webspaceworks visual explanation.

Similar Posts: This is a great little plugin (and much easier to explain). It enables you to generate a listing of similar content found elsewhere on your site. All settings are configurable, meaning you can adjust the way the plugin decides how content is actually related - for example: 30% heading, 50% content, 20% tags. Developed by Rob Marsh, SJ.

Simple Tags: This is another plugin that extends functionality already present in the Wordpress build. The main reason we use this plugin is for the ‘Click Tag’ functionality (display all preexisting tags for one-click insertion) - so we don’t create two very similar tags when one would suffice. However, it also has a swag of powerful global tag management functions which seem good aswell. Developed by Amaury BALMER.

WP Super Cache: This plugin create a static HTML version of your Wordpress site. In the developers words “WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts.” They also brag somewhere that this plugin will make your Wordpress site Digg proof… Developed by Donncha O Caoimh.

Role Manager: Great for client sites. Allows custom roles to be created and named something relevant. Useful even if all you do is rename the existing User accounts. Developed by Owen Winkler.

That’s it so far. I plan to do a couple more these Wordpress posts that delve deeper into the Wordpress web… but this should serve as a useful initial roundup.

We have just completed a re-design and complete rebuild of the ACTS website.  Having designed and built their previous website (back in 2004) we had a good understanding of both the technical and design requirements. The client was essentially happy with the original design - so it was basically just tweaked a little to modernise it a little and help it play nicely with the new content management system (a highly customised version of Wordpress 2.5.1)