Wordpress – Plog theme
A while ago I set up a poetry blog for a friend, built using Wordpress and the pyrmont-v2 theme created by motta.
There were a couple of UID decisions that were required, the main one being that each poem should be viewed in isolation, rather than as a long list of the most recent 10 poems as is typical for your standard blog view. That was easy to sort out via the Wordpress admin pages, I just popped a ‘1′ into the “Blog pages show at most” setting on the Settings > Reading page.
I also needed to present a list of related poem title links, underneath each poem when viewing by category or tag. This I acheived by writing some PHP. There’s probably a perfectly good plug-in for that, but I didn’t know what it was off the top of my head, and knew that I could write the code quick enough that would present it just how I envisioned it.
My friend wanted a tag cloud in there somewhere. I put this on it’s own page, to keep the sidebar minimal so as not to distract from the main content. A simple job to set up, a couple of hours at most including buying a domain and pointing it at a subdomain on my server. My friend was happy with the results.
Creating the plog theme
I decided to do a version of the site for my wife who has her own website that she uses to publish her creative writing for friends and family to read. The Wordpress admin pages for creating content have some nice AJAX features, and would probably make her life easier than using the system that I created from scratch for her whilst I was a student. The idea was that she could use her new Wordpress blog, and I could update the flash app on her site to pull in the writing content from the Wordpress site.
Rather than copy the site, or set it up again by ticking all the same boxes, adding the widgets to the sidebar etc… I decided to see if I could put most of the functionality into my own theme. Admittedly most (or all) of the design was inherited from motta’s Pyrmont-V2 theme, but I added a new banner and changed some of the colours, spacing and sidebar etc. The biggest difference was the single-post-at-a-time view, combined with the related content links shown beneath any category or tagged item. (I changed the word “category” to “book” to fall in-line with her existing site terminology).
I haven’t tested the theme on any live Wordpress installs yet. I did try it out on a fresh version of Wordpress on localhost (screenshot above), threw some dummy content in there, and everything seemed OK. Feel free to download the Plog theme below and try it out for yourself if you are a Wordpress user.
Download: plog.zip