Jenn Mears Web Design

I’m happy to announce the existence of a brand new site for Parents United of Salem. Originally an HTML-driven site with a Collective-X management system in the wings, the new site is built on a Wordpress theme entitled YourBlog-20 created by Abhishek Tripathi. The site also required plugins such as NextGEN photo gallery and Simple Forum. I also installed CForms II but haven’t really utilized it yet. This was great experience in terms of expanding my WP knowledge. Since the site’s visual designer wanted to have different looks for different pages, I had to use templates for the various sections.

I had a couple of white-knuckle moments at the keyboard during some key points in development. The first was when I tried to install WP on a subfolder so I could let others track the new site’s progress. At first the install didn’t work, but after a little digging, it turned out that GoDaddy.com is responsible for that little comment on the wp-configure file that says “define(’DB_HOST’,'localhost’);//99.9% chance you won’t need to change this”. But on a Godaddy site, you DO have to change that to a particular address. When IE users told me that the Resources page wasn’t displaying properly, I had to dip into the IE7.css a little and tweak some stuff. Then, when I thought everything was all set to change to the root folder, the Resources page reverted back to its pre-css-tweak mess! After a little thrashing around, I found the culprit, a style declaration on the actual page’s template that was overriding the page’s conditional IE7 formatting. A little snip and Eureka! The page displayed correctly again.

All in all, a fun project and it felt good to be working on something that I could really relate too. It’s a great group of people and a really great resource for Salem families who want to connect to their community.

My latest project needed a lot of plugin help. It’s a site for a parenting group that the board of directors needed to develop into an online community forum, calendar, newsletter and, last but not least, a photo gallery for news and events.

The online gallery portion of the site had several criteria: 1) It had to be something that displayed the photos directly on the Photos page. 2) It needed to be something that people could upload their own images to. 3) It had to be fairly easy to use without involving a whole lot of hand-coding.

At first, the Shashin plugin seemed like the way to go, but after fiddling and twiddling and searching for online information beyond the simple statement; “Shashin is a photo gallery plugin that’s really awesome!” I got fed up and started looking again. NextGEN seemed like another good prospect, so I plugged it in and gave it a whirl.

To my immense relief, it was a good choice. The interface is fairly intuitive and there seems to be more support on how to actually USE the thing. For a good overview, check out Kansaiblogger’s post.

Since I knew I needed something a little more comprehensive for the people who would actually be running the site, I decided to write this short tutorial on how to add galleries and images to your Wordpress site using NextGEN. (more…)