Bahia Street — Unique WordPress Install (mostly as CMS)

I’ve just finished phase one of a WordPress conversion. This one looks completely different from any other install I’ve seen, so I thought I would share it here.

I have been a long-time volunteer and supporter of Bahia Street. It is a non-profit that does wonderful things in Brazil, now with up-to-date info on their website. (The old website was mostly from 2002 with occasional and incomplete updates)

From a wordpress point of view, here are some of the more interesting points and observations:

• Most of the site is in pages, not posts; I’m really using the site more as a CMS than a blog. I did put the archived letters (“news”) up as blog posts though.
• Themes are great! I do like the look of the default Kubrick theme, but we wanted a different look. Creating a theme pretty much from scratch was a lot easier than I expected…at least the wordpress part of it; Design was as much work as expected! I also loved being able to make a “development version” of the theme and bring it live all at once.
• The WordPress inteface is great for editing the content and separating it from the layout. The people in the organization who are writing the content and most likely to edit it are not literate in html, and they hardly need to be.
• Lastly, I know that from a coding point of view the layout is very unfashionable, even un-poetic. Please bear with me, since I wanted to go live in a hurry, and was given the layout pretty much as-is. So I stuck with a layout that is mostly tables with a little CSS, and probably doesn’t validate. But it does view well in the browsers I tested it with.

My todo list (next month) includes the following fun and nifty additions in no particular order:

• Re-create the layout for the same look with much cleaner html code and more CSS use. I previously spent some time looking for clean code to do rounded corners, and haven’t found a favorite that clearly beats tables, but I’ll work on it. I’m sure I’ll rip out most of the other tables.
• Add more pictures to the website inline with the text
• Re-structure the sidebar/menu so that I A) generate it with one file at all times, and B) show sub-pages that exist directly under the current page but not under unrelated pages, and C) hilite the current page. I’ll probably end up with a bit of custom PHP code, and if I can get it sortof clean, release it as a plug-in.
• Add some way of including custom sidebar content for each page in the WordPress interface with just one page template. This would be things like the paypal links on the donate page or some pictures that relate to whatever page is loaded, or perhaps just text. I might just use the exerpt field…
• Tweak the layout a bit more. We like the general look, but probably have some room for improvement.

I’d appreciate any thoughts you folks have about it–do you like or hate the look? What else would you change?