The first site is The Green Road Show. The client had a banner already designed and said she wanted a simple WordPress site set up to go with it. I created a child theme from my trusty standby, Mimbo,  which I’m loving more each time I use it (as well as each time I don’t).  It is so simple to modify and by default includes dropdown menus and post thumbnail generation. Clients are generally very happy with the results. I hardly ever use its built-in functions like the featured category posts on the home page. These could be useful if you aren’t going to get into the theme files and rearrange them, but I’ve never had a client have a use for them.

The next site we worked on was Design Life Blog. The site already had a full design created in PSD, and the client had purchased the Thesis theme from which to work. I previously had some experience working with Thesis and some other themes like it, like Hybrid. I wasn’t initially attracted to either of these themes because of the complexity involved in modifying them. Yes, there are many built-in functions that you or the client can manipulate without touching a line of code. That is the advantage. The disadvantage is that if you want to modify the theme beyond these built-in functions, you don’t simply go to the WordPress codex and follow the Template Hierarchy to create a new layout. No–you must actually program little mini-plugins called theme hooks. I’m not going to get into all the details on theme hooks, but suffice to say they drove me absolutely crazy. This may be because this particular site was so complex and customized. If I were working on a much simpler site where changing some colors, fonts, and column widths would do the job, then Thesis or Hybrid might be a good choice. But then again, I would probably still go with something like Mimbo just for simplicity’s sake.

But enough of Thesis, which probably deserves a whole post of its own. For Design Life Blog, I took the PSD design, then pulled up the Thesis theme and customized it beyond all recognition with theme hooks. This site really has a lot of cool additions. We installed VideoPress, which is Automattic’s own video plugin for HD video upload and playback. Then we created a contest plugin where visitors can enter design contests, upload images, and vote on other visitors’ contest entries. The client can see vote tallies and set contest start and end dates through the admin.

The third WordPress site we worked on was GraduateFog.co.uk. This site was already set up for the most part, we just came in for some small tweaks like resizing and placing the banner, creating the dropdown menu, and customizing the home page to the client’s specifications. The client had already chosen the Arras WordPress theme, which I liked for the most part, though parts of the coding seemed unnecessarily complex made modifying it much more time consuming. I had to dig through several directories and files before I figured out why it was doing what it was doing. The thumbnail generation is not automatically done like with Mimbo. This always leaves the client frustrated, since they generally have to insert urls in custom fields–not very intuitive. But at least customizing it didn’t involve theme hooks!

Before I knew about WP-Hive, I gave WordPress MU a try. The installation is quite complicated if working with multiple domains, and then you run into the issue that many plugins and themes are not compatible with MU. MU is great if you’re thinking of running a social network of blogs, but not the ideal solution for running several separate sites on one installation.

There is also Stephen Rider’s Virtual Multiblog which sounded great at the outset, but the instructions proved complicated, involving symlinks for pointing the different domains. Edit: Per comment below by Stephen, symlinks are only required if the multiple blogs are set up in different directories.

Come to the rescue WP-Hive. A simple plugin, simple instructions, simply park your domain through cPanel, install the new WordPress site using the new domain, and you’re set to go. You have one installation you have to upgrade for everyone. All the plugins you upload for one blog are available to all. Each installation will run it’s own theme, it’s own set of active plugins, and it’s own user and permission set. It gets somewhat complicated when adding XML sitemaps and robots.txt so that each site has it’s own, but following the instructions easily get’s that done.

This site is running on a WP-Hive setup, as well as our client’s site Roca Services and two wedding websites I set up for some friends. We will no doubt be adding many more sites on this setup now that creating and maintaining them is so easy.

Update 2010/11/12: I’m still using this great plugin to run the WordPress sites that host with us. Some say that this plugin is redundant now because of the built-in multisite capability of WP since 3.0. However, multisite was built with a social networking idea in mind. Multisite also is a pain to add multiple domains (doesn’t work out of the box). As WP-Hive says on its website, Hive is built for a single administrator to run several sites and on a single WP install, and it’s perfect for that.

Update 2011/06/17: The plugin developer has unfortunately stopped active development on this plugin. It is a shame since I do still use it. There are some instances, for a web developer hosting his/her clients for instance, when multisite isn’t the perfect tool. WP-Hive is. There was a minor scare when the plugin didn’t work with WP 3.1, but that has now been fixed. But as far as being a tool for the long run, it looks like we’ll have to count on multisite.

Both softwares have their pros and cons. I originally stuck with bbPress because it is so customizable. Since I was used to customizing WordPress, bbPress follows a lot of the same techniques: making theme files with template tags, adding plugins for extra functionalities, using an admin backend for, well, admin things. While the integration process with WordPress was a bit complicated at first, it got better. Then WordPress 2.6 came out and bbPress would no longer integrate. User registrations and logins for WordPress 2.6 and higher would not synchronize with bbPress. I waited quite some time for a fix to come out, but it never did. The bbPress user forums suggest downgrading to WordPress 2.5.1. However, this limits you from using new and updated WordPress plugins that don’t work in older versions. Apparently Automattic is working on a new version of bbPress which will be compatible and better.

You can see a WordPress 2.5.1 integration with bbPress at HECMWorld.com. On this site we’ve created a “member-only” forum accessible to paying members only using existing and customized plugins for bbPress and WordPress. So the bbPress pros: very customizable in theme and function. Cons: ironically doesn’t integrate with it’s sister software, WordPress (unless you use an older version).

The Simple:Press forum had one big thing against it from the beginning. The default install is ugly. And for customizing appearance, you’re stuck with the options available through the admin backend. This was a big drawback for me as I was used to having full control over the design. Recently, though, the folks at Simple:Press have done an overhaul which now gives you much more control over appearance. I am quite impressed with the level of customization I now have over the forum functionality too. One big plus is allowing unregistered guests post as you build up your user base. Another big pro for this plugin is the ease of installation and integration. As a plugin of WordPress, it uses the WordPress user registration and login by default. It also fits nicely into your existing design. Just create a page for your forum, and there it is. See my new and customized Simple:Press forum at Girlebooks.com.

For now I’ll probably stick with Simple:Press. It seems a lively community and the developers are dedicated to their product. I hope they stick around.

The site’s main focus is hosting free ebooks. Since we have our own hosting space for our web development work, I have been using the extra space on that account for Girlebooks. Lately, due the the increasing popularity of the site, Girlebooks has been hogging all of our extra bandwidth and disc space so that we have none left for hosting new clients or upgrading existing accounts. It was either buy more space on our hosting account or seek out an alternative for Girlebooks’ growing needs.

Amazon S3 is an extremely cheap solution for hosting files, and its pay-as-you-go pricing model means you’re never paying for space or bandwidth you don’t use, and you never will run out of space and freeze up your site. Great! That sounds like the perfect solution, right? Unfortunately there is currently no web-based interface for transferring files to their system–it’s only accessible through SOAP and REST APIs. Since I’m not familiar with SOAP or REST, I’m out of luck.

Come to the rescue S3Fox which I discovered thanks to this article at CodingHorror.com (which has a much better tutorial on using S3Fox than I have here). Once installed as a Firefox add-on, S3Fox appears just like an FTP program, with your local files on the left, your S3 files on the right. Create your “buckets” on S3 to host the files, upload, and set permissions. Then link to your S3 Files from your website. The download manager plugin I use for Girlebooks, Drain Hole, has built-in support for S3 hosted files.

It worked flawlessly. I haven’t set up all the ebooks this way yet, but you can already see the results with our most popular ebook on the site, Pride and Prejudice.

Our latest work involves development of a subscription system using WordPress on the popular financial blog, Footnoted.org. The requirements of the system were as follows:

1. A subscriber registration and payment processing interface
2. System tracking of subscription expiration dates
3. Download management allowing the administrator to easily upload files as well as restricting file downloads to paying subscribers only
4. An email notification sent to paying subscribers when a new publication is available

It turns out that we spent a large part of this project researching our options in using existing WordPress plugins. There are a few ecommerce plugins already available, but most cater to shopping carts. The wp-ecommerce plugin proved to be popular only because, unlike some of the ecommerce plugins, some people actually get it to work without messing with the code. But it is a monster in size and complexity, poorly written and documented, so we are glad we ditched this option early on.

Our solution was as follows. Site registrations are handled by WordPress’s own registration system, slightly modified to simplify the process and to show the Footnoted logo instead of the WordPress logo when registering or logging in.  For payment processing we ended up modifying Shannon Whitley’s Easy PayPal plugin. We could never get this plugin to work out-of-the-box–there are some nasty bugs that had to be fixed before it would even interface with PayPal properly. But it is simple and nicely documented so therefore easy to modify. Once the subscriber pays, PayPal immediately notifies the system that this is a paying subscriber, and the the subscription expiration date is stored.

Downloads are handled by a modified wp-downloadmanager plugin. This handy plugin inherently provides a interface for the administrator to upload files. The plugin also provides embedding of file links into posts and file redirect links to hide the real download path of the file. We modified this plugin to allow downloads from current, paying subscribers only.

Finally, we wrote our own email notification plugin, notifying paying subscribers that a new download is available. See the results in the FootnotedPro area of Footnoted.org.

Recently, a client asked if I could create some ad spaces on his WordPress blog that he could administer himself. The requirements:

1. ad spaces of differing sizes
2. ad spaces in multiple locations on the site
3. a simple administration interface with the ability to input ads with HTML code or to upload an image with a link

Simple enough? I went through several WordPress ad plugins, and while all were good, there was always some limiting factor in the above requirements.

Then I found Ad-minister. This lovely plugin lets you put ads just about anywhere on your site. If you know HTML, just slap the plugin code where you want it in your template. If you want to handle your ads through widgets, you can do that too. You can make your ad whatever size, in whatever location you desire. You can input HTML for your ad, or your can upload an image and link it (with the handy visual editor built in). You can also track impressions, clicks, schedule your ads for a limited time, and make your ads appear randomly or give more “weight” to one ad over another. There is some nice documentation that goes along with it, although it needs updating at present.

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Beautiful!