automaton

That is perfectly possible, but you should have a look at the database schema. Posts are linked to an author, categories & tags (‘terms’), comments and metadata so you have to take that into account.
You’d need to know any category ID’s you want the post to appear in, for example, or the ID of the desired author.

Would be a nice idea for a plugin, though: import a csv via wp-admin and link it to categories/tags/authors from there.

I think you’ve misunderstood slightly: I’ve got the .po file and I could use that for translation, but I was wondering whether there is a Dutch translation already available. If it is available on quirm.net, I didn’t find it.

Is there any sort of repository for localisation files? I’m looking for the Dutch translation, specifically. Googling ‘eshop’ isn’t turning up much.

Found the .po file, thanks! Maybe you should mention the localisation options more clearly in the help files, it’s not obvious that you can localise eShop so I assumed it wasn’t possible.
With the templates I meant that you would be able to modify all the ‘non-logic’ content through template files, as an alternative to .po/.mo files. But that latter option is way better, so never mind ??

Also nice would be some sort of language localization, in one of two ways:
1) .po/.mo file with all necessary strings
2) easy to modify template files (like for the e-mails)

Otherwise a very nice and flexible plugin

That ‘othersite’ class would be what I’d automate via php or something. I can’t expect an editor to add this class to all external links, years of experience have taught me that much ??

Didn’t notice the robots thing, it was added by wp_head() through a WordPress admin setting under ‘privacy’, which I presumably switched on during development. Silly me.

I’m starting to suspect that https://www.leobormans.be has somehow been blacklisted by Google. I have no idea why, but none of the content shows up in Google, and when I search for the domain the site does not appear in the results. Should I be worried, and what could I possibly have done wrong?

@jberghem: Yup, I know about the target thing. For now I just keep using them, I think the Javascript solution is a bit over the top. Best would be to have an ‘external link’ icon with every external link, but it’d be best to have that automated.

Why change the doctype? For standards-compliance?

Bedankt, by the way ??

So, the full post-mortem?
Well, I’ve been using WordPress for a number of sites since roughly 2003, and I love the down-to-earth simplicity, and especially how user-friendly its back-end is.

So, for this project, I decided to use WordPress pretty early on. I knew the site was going to be 90% Pages and only 10% (blog) posts, but I was pretty confident I could make it work.

Template-wise, I didn’t base it on any existing theme, this was actually the first time I built a theme completely from scratch.
I more or less know what makes WordPress tick, the first thing I did was create a home page design in Fireworks (a hugely underrated program, I think). Once approved by the client, I then started building completely static HTML pages.

By then I had received most of the actual site content. I think it’s always a good idea to develop using real content instead of ‘lorem ipsum’ dummy stuff. Things like text length, subtitles, inline links, etc. are hugely important for how a page should be designed.

So, only then did I install WordPress. I created all the pages, nested them appropriately, created the necessary categories and users. I did all this with the WordPress default theme.

Then, one by one, I replaced the default pages with my own designs. These were based on my initial static HTML pages, I simply added the WordPress code where needed.

I only used two plugins . One was a breadcrumb plugin (Yoast Breadcrumbs) which I modified heavily to fit my needs. The code generated by the plugin isn’t that flexible, I’m thinking of creating my own more developer-friendly version.
The other plugin I used was the excellent Dagon Design Form Mailer. I think it’s the single most useful third-party WordPress plugin out there. Something like that should be included in the core, with database support.

A lot of stuff, especially the homepage, is hardcoded. The client can do his own text corrections, but creating extra Pages in the top level and making them accessible isn’t possible without a significant modification of the template files. That’s an obvious trade-off to the visually-rich front-end. But I don’t see it causing any problems. Even if I get run over by a bus tomorrow, someone else who knows WordPress can easily add another set of images and link them to a page.

So, any questions?

The transparent png in the footer is about 150k, a bit over the top, any suggestions on how to make a seamless transition in the wood background without alpha transparency somewhere?
The big block of text on the homepage is a 170k jpeg, I’ve just changed it to an 8-bit png and it’s now only 35k. That should help.

Any ‘less hacky’ way of doing this? I thought combining parameters like this wasn’t possible until i stumbled across someone who managed it, and now it turns out i need to downgrade three versions to make it work. Sillyness.

Good points on the graphics, the homepage is kind of heavy. I was thinking about putting a simple drop-down navigation somewhere for people with slower connections or for navigating to deeper-lying pages directly. I might also shave some size off of the images here and there or see if I can change the loading sequence. For now, I’ll wait to see what other users’ opinions are. This is a personal site, so many people will know this guy personally and will send him their feedback.
The templates are constructed in a way that is friendly to screenreaders and other image-less browsers, so semantically everything should be more or less in order, at least. That should help me along the way when I need to optimise.

I’m having the same issue with some jpegs. The problem does seem to be related to gd choking on some files, with various results.

I’m guessing that one of two things goes wrong:

• sometimes no resized (thumbnail) image is output at all. In this case WordPress should give a meaningful error or at least show a default thumbnail image instead of the full size one. That’s really annoying since you only notice it when it’s too late.
• sometimes a thumbnail file is output, but it’s not actually resized because gd failed somewhere without giving an error. This would me more difficult for WordPress to spot, but it should still be possible by checking image dimensions.

As to why some jpegs work and why some don’t, that can be caused by many things. The most common problem with jpegs on the web in my experience is that they’re not in RGB but in Greyscale or in CMYK. Especially the latter can be tricky since it’s harder to spot and only fairly specialized software can reveal a jpeg’s color space (irfanview, for example).