Crisscrossed

The client had already sourced a designer and had a PSD mockup created. One developer had already partly started the implementation but had pulled out after three weeks, as the design calls for a lot of PHP coding for the custom widgets as it really extends the limits of what the Thesis framework is capable of.

Thesis

My role was to take the mockup, and implement it, yet I could already see some potentially tricky points before I started. The previous developer hadn’t done too badly, but in the end I did have to re-write most of what he’d started, so that all aspects of the design would work.

Most of the design itself was fairly easy to implement – patience and persistence for the bulk of it. Extra styles were added at the end to allow for IE’s misgivings, and these include serving transparent .gif’s in place of the .png images with alpha-transparency. There are a few minor differences, but the content is more than accessible and usability isn’t compromised on relevant older browsers.

Custom Widgets

There are several custom coded widgets on the site. In the bottom left corner is the Recent Comments widget – this was adapted from the core WordPress widget of the same name to enable gravatars to be shown for each commenter. While other plugins exist to do this, they either weren’t suitable in their output, or they were written with the old widget API. It was essential that the widget was written (or wrapped) with the WordPress 2.8 Widget API, so that it could be displayed anywhere, and not just within a sidebar.

The Selected News and Latest Links widgets are adapted from the core RSS widget, in this case, to add a More Link (shown as a + icon).

Finally, the Popular Posts widget is adapted from Alex King’s Popularity Contest plugin widget, again, wrapped with the new Widget API to enable it to be displayed out of a sidebar.