One of the main ideas behind this project is to not only make the display interactive, but to allow people to follow the development of the display over time, make suggestions, comment on the designs, etc. Blog software fit those requirements to a ‘T’.
I have a lot of experience with the WordPress blog software, so I decided to use that right away. Not only will it provide me with an easy to update website, but it also has a number of extension that will come in handy for the display. The fact that WordPress is becoming more of a CMS and less of a blog platform every day means I may be able to leverage things like user sessions and account for the custom software developed for the show. Only time will tell. The idea here is to leverage the site platform software as much as possible.
For now, the site is mainly for posting updates, pictures, and other information. Here’s how it is configured so far:
The site currently runs on a Dual Opteron server in a virtual linux partition with Apache, PHP, and MySQL.
As of this writing we are running WordPress 2.0.x with the following plugins:
- Adsense Deluxe - Plugin for easily integrating Google Adsense ads into the site. Gotta pay that bandwidth bill somehow!
- Bad Behavior - This is a must have plugin that stops spammers from accessing the site and wasting bandwidth and server resources. With spammers relying more and more on ‘botnets’ (groups of hacked machines) to spew spam faster and faster, it can really affect a server’s performance.
- FAQ - I expect to need a FAQ and while I could maintain a static page with the questions, a plugin makes it easier since it’ll handle all the formatting. The problem with this specific plugin is the author forbids any modifications even if you don’t redistribute the code which is silly. I may end up writing my own if it doesn’t fit my needs.
- Feedburner Feed Replacement - I’ve really come to like using FeedBurner for my RSS feeds, so this little plugin ensures anyone hitting the default WordPress RSS link goes directly to our FeedBurner Feed.
- Google Sitemaps - Great plugin to give Google additional information about your content and where to find it while your site is indexed as well as when new content is added.
- Google Sitemaps Tag Plugin - This plugin will add the tag URLs made possible by Ultimate Tag Warrior. This provides search engines more information about your site and posts.
- King Text Widget - A powerful sidebar widget allowing for custom JavaScript and HTML blocks.
- MarketingPop.us SEO - A plugin for Search Engine Optimization.
- Permalink Redirect - A plugin for Search Engine Optimization.
- Related Posts - An excellent plug that will list other posts related to the current one. Great way to find similar content as the number of posts increases.
- Secure Contact Form - Allows for an email contact form while stopping spammers cold.
- Sidebar Widgets - Allows for drag and drop setup of the sidebar. Excellent feature of WordPress.
- Smart Update Pinger - Ensures that we only ping sites like Technorati when new content is posted, not when content is edited (I tweak posts for spelling and formatting a lot)
- Sociable - A plugin that generates easy to use buttons for adding any content on this site to various social bookmarking and content sites like Digg, etc.
- Spam Karma 2 - By far THE most important plugin. This stops comment spammers COLD. You can’t run a WordPress blog without it. It also uses the excellent Akismet spam fighting network as part of the spam tests.
- Time Zone - WordPress doesn’t handle daylight savings well. This plugin fixes that.
- Ultimate Tag Warrior - This is the best tag plugin out there for attaching tags to content. It integrates with a few other plugins like Extended Archives, Google Sitemaps, etc. Allows users to find all posts tagged with a certain tag.
- WordPress Reports - Handy tool that grabs Google Analytics and Feedburner statistics and includes them in a WordPress administration tab.
- WP-Cache - All these plugins add code to the execution of WordPress which can cause significant load on a server during high traffic. WP-Cache will cache most WordPress content unless it changes, allowing for very fast response times and low server loads.
- WP Post Ratings - This plugin allows users to rate posts. It’s fun and also will allow for some theme changes I might implement (most popular content, etc)
- WPG2 - Plugin to integrate Gallery 2 with WordPress. Since I expect to have a LOT of pictures and videos on this site, I’m using Gallery 2 to organize them. This plugin makes it trivial to include Gallery pictures in posts and also shoehorns Gallery into WordPress maintaining the site’s look and feel.
- Xinha4WP - This is a plugin I wrote that allows you to use a very powerful WYSIWYG editor for creating posts.
As you can see, a LOT of addons make this site what it is. Of course no matter how well a site functions, it has to look good. I spent some time searching for a nice holiday theme and really like this one currently in use. The Vermilion Christmas theme from Amazing-Christmas-Ideas.com is a very nice theme that is also easy to modify and handled the addition of so many plugins with ease. I expect we’ll stick with this theme for a while. However, we likely will make some test runs of the equipment for other holidays like Halloween and maybe July 4th. We might switch to a more appropriate theme for those times. Any suggestions?
Over time the site will likely expand. I’m not 100% sure yet, but as we add custom code to the site, it may be easiest to do it as a WordPress plugin so we can use WordPress for user accounts, etc. It sure will help keep things integrated. More on that later.
Any thoughts on plugins that would be helpful? How does the site look so far? Suggestions for layout changes?
Further Reading:
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