Colophon

Posted by admin

This website was produced as a demonstration project for my friends Ann & Jim Shankman who are working to revive the Chappaqua Dram Group. I did a little bit of searching around for an appropriate free WP theme that I could quickly modify and found the a theme called Colourise which is originally designed by: styleshout and distributed by: Theme Lab. The Colourize Theme, like WordPress, is released under General Public License. It is free to download and use, and there are no restrictions on its use. I had recalled reading about Colourize in a fairly recent Smashing Magazine article 30 Free High Quality Wordpress Themes.

This project website to introduce them to both CSS based web design and the WordPress platform as a CMS. I made some quick changes to the header proportions and text arrangement and added some theatrical stage lights along the top and had this project website up in a matter of a just a few hours. The CDG logo graphics I took from the existing frames based website and I don’t know who to credit for them. The re-design and CMS modifications here were all performed by me, J. Jerrald Hayes of Paradigm-360.com.

While I think this web design looks great (and there are actually two different designs to explore, a black and a white version you can check out via the CDG Demo Theme Switcher in the sidebar) there are still a few tweaks, changes and adjustments I have in mind that I would make to the design of this site if I thought they (CDG) were going to seriously move ahead with developing a web presence.

The following WordPress Plugins are in use, and are part of the basic Paradigm-360 recommendations for using WordPress in CMS applications:

Akismet – checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.

All in One SEO Pack – out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress blog.

Contact Form 7 – another contact form plugin. Simple but flexible.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator – Generates a fully customizable sitemap

Dean’s FCKEditor For Wordpress – Replaces the default Wordpress editor with FCKeditor 2.4.3

Exclude Pages from Navigation – Provides a checkbox on the editing page which you can check to exclude pages from the primary navigation.

Google XML Sitemaps – generates a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO>

One Click Close Comments – conveniently close or open comments for a post or page with one click.

Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu – All admin links available in a neat horizontal drop down menu.

Really Simple CAPTCHA – a CAPTCHA module originally created for my Contact Form 7 plugin.

Simple Section Navigation Widget – section based navigation

Sociable – automatically adds links on posts to social bookmarking sites.

UTF8 Sanitize – handles broken characters that might appear on blog posts, if their content is converted from/to UTF8 and ISO-8859-1.

Category Order—The Category Order plugin allows you to easily reorder your categories the way you want via drag and drop.

FireStats — Statistics plugin for WordPress.

Lightbox 2 — Used to overlay images on the current page. Lightbox JS v2.2 by Lokesh Dhakar.

My Page Order — My Page Order allows you to set the order of pages through a drag and drop interface. The default method of setting the order page by page is extremely clumsy, especially with a large number of pages.

No Self Pings — Keeps WordPress from sending pings to your own site.

Page Menu Editor — Allows you to customise the title attribute and menu label of each page link in wp_list_pages.

Theme Tester — Allow an admin to test new themes without showing your blog visitors

WordPress.com Stats — Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key.

Permalink | February 9th, 2010 | Email This Page