There have been some big projects happening in the office over the last few months, which we’ll tell about when they’re public (there should be several emerging over the next few weeks). A smaller one, and I hope she’ll forgive me for describing her site that way, has emerged into the public light: we’ve been doing some WordPress tweaking for Project Happily Ever After.
PHEA, as we call it in the office (any title that long needs a TLA, even if it’s a FLA) is run by a former colleague of mine from Runner’s World, Alisa Bowman, and it’s WordPress at the core. Beyond that core, however, PHEA uses several plugins, a custom page configuration, and a very custom theme. Wrangling all those players became our job, with the primary goal of shifting the theme from a three-column layout which left the content column too narrow for embedded video to a two-column layout. The result is easier to read and places the reading focus where it belongs: on Alisa’s columns, not on the sidebar material.
We’d love to claim credit for this, but actually Alisa is that rare and delightful client who knew exactly what she wanted; she just didn’t know how to make it happen. We demonstrated potential changes on a staging installation on one of our servers, and when they were approved, used Subversion to push theme changes out to the live site.
We have a lot of respect for WordPress as a lightweight publishing system which is easy for non-technical users to pick up, but PHEA demonstrates that for users with a clear idea of their site’s function and the patience to try a few different options, it can also be a powerful tool for creating a rich site which is worlds apart from a cookie-cutter blog.