At the start of this year, my good mate Ronnel and I started the We Ride On Sundays website for DIY motorcycle service enthusiasts (and car guys) to share tips & useful techniques.
I’d initially tried using my mediocre photoshop skills and
caffeine-induced html coding to get us online. We did get online, so I
guess it worked out, but there were no visitors coming in and the site
wasn’t very user friendly. We had forums running vBulletin, a static
front page, a blog with the how-to guides and a videos section. We also
had for a while a Babes Gallery of chicks on bikes but took it down to
make it more family friendly.
6 months down the road and we had a look at the site and decided
wether to scrap it or keep it and if so, how to make it work. We wanted
to be exchanging details with pro mechanics around the world, so it had
to be a simple, easy to navigate and easy to share site with a nice
enough design not to look like something I’ve butchered together in
Photoshop.
We upgraded the WordPress blog engine which acts more like a CMS, and
rolled the forums data into the same place as the how-to articles. I’m
lucky to have met a great and friendly lady web designer in Argentina
who supplies us with clean graphics and compliant html, which I then
attempt to fit into the WordPress engine. So far so good!
At the moment, the WordPress theme is very simple, being contained in
a single index.php file and the only other php files in the theme’s
directory are to run the comments section at the bottom of each post.
I’m really wrapped about the image previews for each post. Our
designer had implemented this in her site design and I wasn’t sure at
first how I would implement it into WordPress, but I had some ideas. My
first idea turned out to be doable.
I used a combination of custom fields in the Write Post screen,
normal image uploads (at the correct size) and the WordPress tag to call
the custom field (which I stored the filename in). I turned off the
option in WordPress to sort user uploads into date separated folders, so
I could have all images come straight under the /uploads
folder. This way, I only needed to remember the name of the file I’d
uploaded and copy and paste that or type it into the custom field area
for each post.
I got a little more advanced (caffeine late at night seems to do that to me) and put an if & else routine in to display a “image coming soon” default image placeholder for any posts which didn’t have specified preview images.
I’d really love to hear some feedback on the site from a wide range
of people and if anyone likes the custom image preview for WordPress
posts work, leave a comment and I’ll do a step-by-step guide for y’all.
The site:
http://howto.werideonsundays.com
