Site Launch: Council of Turkish Canadians
by Mike Badgley on May 3, 2010
Today marked the launch of a redesign of the Web site for the Council of Turkish Canadians.
The site was built using WordPress which gives the content manager the flexibility to be able to easily manage the Web site’s content from within the administrator area of WordPress (Dashboard).
The site was built using Pages with the News and Other News items being Posts. To differentiate the two types of news items, I assigned categories to each and then used that for filtering the results when displaying news items on the Home and News pages.
The rest of the functionality of the site was accomplished via third-party plugins – specifically the items which appear in the sidebar, including:
- Events
- Join Our Mailing List
- Buy Books at Amazon.ca
Events
For the Events – which appears in the sidebar of the Home page and also in the Events section of the site – a plugin called “Events Manager” by Davide Benini was used.
I was very pleased with the customization and functionality that the plugin offers – definitely one of the better ones I’ve seen. There are a good number of short/template tags made available by the plugin, so showing a list of events (past, future or all) on any given page/post is a simple process.
Managing events, from within the WordPress Dashboard, is also a simple and straightforward process. What would normally be a time consuming and arduous task is made simple with Events Manager.
Join our Mailing List
The mailing list is a very simple one-field form that captures a user’s email address. Instead of developing a custom form ourselves to handle this, we instead went the plugin route – mainly due to the fact that this site will be housing at least one more form that will contain a number of fields. Instead of having to create an additional custom form, it made better sense to get a plugin that would allow the user to easily manage/build this – rather than having to create something from scratch.
We used a pluign called Gravity Forms. Gravity Forms allows you to create functional forms easily using a drag-and-drop interface. It doesn’t offer you a whole lot of customization options, but rather keeps things minimal in order to make the process as easy as possible for the end user.
My only gripes with this plugin was that it didn’t offer any methods of allowing custom HTML to be inserted within the form. Also, customizing the validation messages – and the location where they are displayed – was also a no go.
Buy Books at Amazon.ca
Lastly, the plugin we used for the Amazon widget (bottom of the right-hand sidebar) was Amazon Showcase. Like the other two (plugins), implementing this was painless and easy. Adding a book to the showcase is as simple as entering in the book’s ISBN number and then selecting a thumbnail size to use for displaying the cover of the book.
