I recently received many questions about my new website. It seems like many of you would like to know who created the website. Today you can watch a video that iaan made (from PlusPlusMinus Design & Development) to explain how the site works. I hope this helps you to understand the AWESOMENESS of WordPress and all that it can do for you as a photographer.
My website is entirely built on WordPress as a Content Management System. This allows me to update and make changes to my website very easily and without any maintenance fee or having to wait for the developers to make the changes. These videos only explain the most basics aspects of my website.
If you find this interesting and would like to learn more about how WordPress works and what happens behind the scenes, please leave a comment or ask some questions and I can get iaan to make more videos for you to learn from. We would love to help you understand everything around WordPress, but we need the questions, before we can write the answers :)
Christine Meintjes Photography Part1 from PlusPlusMinus on Vimeo.
Christine Meintjes Photography Part2 from PlusPlusMinus on Vimeo.
Baie insiggewend, aangesien ek gemiddeld 5 keer `n dag op jou webtuiste is. Iaan, jy het `n mooi stem, `n radio stem:).
Thanks Nicola :-)
Christine se site het so baie om oor te praat! Ons beplan om nog baie info te deel oor hoe die site werk…
Hi,
I found your site through a link on mixx.com. I think the site is “awesome”. Could you ask Iaan to tell us how he went about creating your site from a backend perspective. Is there a common framework used as the basis of the theme? Could you also ask him to tell us about the templates that he used for the pages – I’m guessing that the home page for example follows a different template to all the others. If not then I would love to know how he created this. Finally, are all the plugins used freely available from the Wordpress Extend library?
Oh, I almost forgot. How is Iaan pulling in the Relevant Links. I’m assuming that you do not add these manually for each post Christine.
Hi Craig. Thanks for the compliments! The entire site was custom built from the ground up, so no theme mod or framework used.
We use about 15 page templates and 2 post templates!
All plugins used are free, except SimpleViewer Pro (the pro version was actually not necessary for this site) and Gravity Forms to handle all the forms on the site. There are free form plugins available which will achieve almost the same front-end effect.
I must add that some of the plugins were customized slightly to fit into the site and do exactly what we wanted :-)
The Relevant Links plugin is “Related Posts by Category” (http://playground.ebiene.de/400/related-posts-by-category-the-wordpress-plugin-for-similar-posts/)
Maybe a video on the back-end working of the site should come next?
Iaan, thanks for the info. I’ll check out the plugins. I would love to see a video about the back-end working of the site. As a relative newcomer it would be interesting to see how other people put their sites together and utilise the various features and plugins.
Sounds like a good idea for a video or two. As a newcomer, how did you find the installation, hosting, database etc process?
Are you using a free theme for your WordPress site and where did you find it?
My computing skills are pretty good. I found the installation and hosting as easy as pie. The database setup was a bit tricky having never touched them before but I had that solved in 5mins! I am currently using the Thematic framework (http://themeshaper.com/) as my starting point with the intention of styling the various elements through CSS. I’ve had a quick look through your code to find some of the plugins used. For me, it’s complicated to understand how to build templates for the pages, but perhaps you can cover that in a video?
I could briefly explain page templates – not that hard to create. But to maximize their abilities some more advanced PHP skills are needed. (Or a Theme that already has all the functionality required for a specific page)
What type of page templates might you need?
Not really sure what templates I would need. I guess that is where I need to understand the structure and how to pull the various parts of the page (header.php, footer.php etc) together to generate the page via the template.
Perhaps you could go over something like the homepage template which is vastly different to the others and the about me template?
That might be a little bit beyond the scope of christines site, but send me an email or tweet me and I’ll gladly give you a quick rundown on page templates.
As I mentioned, this site uses many templates which might not be required by everyone.
Anything else to cover in a subsequent video?
Thanks Iaan. Yes, I think we are wandering into very technical territory here! I’ll drop you an email Iaan.
So far as videos go, perhaps some discussion on the social networking features. I know everybody is doing it but how has it helped. I don’t quite get it!
Could you please explain the dynamic font technology you mention? Is it a plugin and how do you tweak and tune this?
Love the site, Christine and Iaan, you’re both very good at what you do and it’s a pleasure looking at these works of art.
Hi Gerrit. Thanks for the kind words. We love what we do – it’s great if it shows in the work ;-)
There are a variety of dynamic font replacement techniques available with various methods of implementing.
1) SIFR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Inman_Flash_Replacement)
2) Cufon
(http://wiki.github.com/sorccu/cufon/about)
3) Typekit
(http://typekit.com/)
A comparison of the pros / cons of these technologies are way beyond the scope of this comment. There are merits in all three.
We opted for a SIFR WordPress plugin which actually worked quite well and was a breeze to implement (only needing very basic HTML/CSS knowledge)
Let me know where you try it out – always interesting to see how people implement these techniques!