• Hello WordPress-o’sphere. I have been working on my blog for a bit now after having moved to WordPress from Blogger. I love the flexibility and ease of customization with WordPress.

    Link: http://www.richandstephsipe.com/

    The homepage is static and then the pages use a more normal 2 column layout.

    I also created a custom picture gallery which I use to upload pictures to my website. It has evolved over the past three years and I recently ported it to WordPress.

    Gallery Link: Picture Gallery
    Some Nifty Features (I think anyways)
    — Automatically resizes images on upload and creates a thumbnail and main image saved in a directory
    — The thumbnail resize actually does a crop using PHP functions so the thumbnails are now all square for presentation purposes.
    — Uses Lightbox for the sexy display
    — Has functions to display random pictures (see the home page and each page’s sidebar) which are resized inline using PHP so I can make them whatever size I need.
    — Movies display in a custom Lightbox using IFrames

    Coming Soon hopefully
    — Comments on Pictures
    — Slideshow (automatic with transitions)
    — AJAX ratings for pictures
    — Tags for Pictures

    I have thought about rolling the gallery into a plugin but with all of the other galleries out there, I figured it would probably be a ton of work that would get lost in the crowd.

    Issues:
    I have some div overlap issues on the homepage which cause weird things in Safari and IE. In Safari the footer gets sometimes duplicated in a very weird way. If anybody has ideas let me know.

    Design:
    The Default Template design started out as the theme “fastrack” but it is fairly modified now. The home page template was designed from scratch.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • I’m viewing in ff, and its a very well-designed site! i love it!

    but, i’m just thinking, what happens when the archives outnumber the categories! there will be chaos in the world of symmetry!!!

    regarding the IE and safari issues: this is a big problem with IE6- it doesn’t handle some CSS very well. i suggest having a separate stylesheet for IE6 (and 7, too) to fix the small problems that you notice!

    you should be able to mess around with your regular CSS to fix the footer in safari, without messing it up in ff!

    good luck!

    Thread Starter richsipe

    (@richsipe)

    Thanks for your feedback 🙂 Designing for multiple browsers some of which are rebels is always frustrating.

    For the archive symmetry it isn’t a problem because when I call the archive function I pass it the number of months I want to return. Currently my archive goes back many more months than is displayed but I only choose to show the top 9 on the home page 🙂 Although, when I add a category I need to remember to add another item to the archive list to prevent ugliness.

    Terrific work. I marvel at what you have done with the image templates and layout. Very, very nice.

    I have thought about rolling the gallery into a plugin but with all of the other galleries out there, I figured it would probably be a ton of work that would get lost in the crowd.

    There are a lot of WP users who are waiting (and waiting) for a gallery plug-in that allows custom cropping for thumbs (like what Gallery2 uses) easy resizing of images and thumbs, multi-file uploads, and even metadata, but keeps everything in WP (meaning, not a Flickr or Gallery2 plug-in). If you can roll that, you’ll be a popular fellow and won’t get lost in the crowd.

    Your site looks great. Nice.

    What plugin do you use for your image gallery?

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • The topic ‘My 2.1 Static Home Page and custom picture gallery’ is closed to new replies.