WordCamp New Zealand: Creating Custom Themes Talk Notes (Part 2)

In August, I had the pleasure of being the second speaker at WordCamp NZ – a large gathering of Kiwi WordPress enthusiasts, users, designers and developers.

I spoke on creating custom WordPress themes and talked about some of the sites we’re working on and have recently worked on and here’s the second part of my talk notes. The first part is available here.

One of the sites we have worked on is popular Australian surfing and photography website Aquabumps with tens of thousands of subscribers who get a mid-morning pick-me-up email showcasing photos taken that morning between 6am and 7am.

Each day, a new blog post is added to the site for people to comment on and share and the email newsletter is automatically created from the latest blog post using a completely different template. The newsletter template pulls in the latest listings in their noticeboard, picks a random photo from their gallery of prints for sale, re-uses the ad from the blog post but in a different layout. This makes the administrator’s job of sending out the email using a 3rd party newsletter system a breeze. This is all done via a custom template with lots of nice PHP code in there to pull in the various bits and pieces.

The site’s noticeboard section uses TDO Mini Forms – a large and powerful plugin which enables you to add customizable forms to allow the public to submit and edit posts and pages – subject of course to moderation if you wish – and content is checked using the standard anti-spam plugin Akismet. People use TDO Mini Forms for all sorts of things like ad managers, contact managers, community contributions etc.

Another Australian site we worked on called The Colour had a bit more complexity with the TDO Mini Form:

This time, it’s using a lightbox, connecting with Facebook and Twitter and uploading images which were processed and scaled to the right size:

Popular sport site The Roar is a massive community site running on WordPress and enables the public and members to contribute articles to the site using TDO Mini Forms:

Back to other features of Aquabumps, this was all done before custom post types but each photo added to the blog can be bought in various formats and this buy page is automatically created for each photo added:

Aquabumps

The site also has special gallery prints for sale – this was all done before custom post types.

The site’s authro creates a new page with a description of the image as content, uploads the images with custom fields for the various bits, chooses a portfolio and location categories and other special places it could be promoted on the site and whether it’s a lead image or not.

This page shows all the main category lead images.

Aquabumps