Museum In A Day

Monday the 2nd is clearly going to be a busyish kind of day, so doing grunt work now is probably wise.

With this in mind, I’ve just spent 40 minutes preparing some WordPress stuff which falls into the “we know we’ll want this but don’t quite know the final details” category. Luckily, WordPress is on the whole a fairly forgiving platform. You can make a whole bunch of decisions up front without having to commit to something you regret further down the line.

My forty minutes were spent installing plugins and putting in a temporary theme so that we can start to populate the site with content.

Plugins, for those of you who don’t know, are used to extend WordPress functionality in various ways. Because WordPress is a hugely active community, there is a plugin for pretty much anything you care to mention. Want to put your Flickr pictures in the sidebar? Need a contact form? A breadcrumb? A Google sitemap? Event calendar? Hot buttered crumpets on your homepage? (I made that one up, but hey – nice thought…). You get the idea: there is probably a plugin for whatever the thing is you’re trying to do. And if there isn’t, you can always write one.

There are a couple of must-haves, plugin-wise. The absolute 100% must is Akismet, which does a pretty fine job of catching comment spam. I’ll leave others to recommend their favourites: today I’ve installed Akismet, Contact Form 7, Google Analyticator, Simple Section Navigation Widget and Unfiltered MU.

WordPress themes are used – not entirely surprisingly – to make a WordPress site look a particular way. We’ll almost definitely be developing our Futuremuseum theme from scratch, but it is helpful at this stage to have some kind of visual framework to hang content on, even if it will ultimately bear no visual resemblance to our final site.

There are literally thousands of WordPress themes available out there. Many are free, some are paid. As always, Google is your friend when looking for themes. I was on the hunt for something vanilla and simple – you can see a few I went through in the image above. One of them was built by my good friend Darren Beale, who developed WordPress Naked as a starting point for anyone wanting to develop their own theme quickly.

Both themes and plugins are trivial to install: you download a zip, unpack it, then upload to the relevant place in the wp-content directory on your hosting. Then you just use the WP dashboard to enable the stuff you’ve added.

Once I’d got that out of the way, I went quickly through my initial information architecture and added all the pages into the hierarchy. We’ll probably lose or move pages along the way, but for now it helps just to have a rough outline of what is left to do.

Finally, I fiddled with the site and plugins as suggested in this excellent post to make our WordPress iteration less blog and more CMS-like.

Time spent implementing plugins and IA: 40 minutes

Money spent: £0.00