The new and improved CrashPadSeries.com went live last Monday. I can honestly say I’ve never been more pleased with a project; I’m unreservedly proud of this one.
It was a group effort, to be sure. The design direction was decided on by Shawn Tamaribuchi of LIARPHOTO and the results are brilliant. Everyone from Shine Louise Houston herself to behind-the-scenes folks like Jiz Lee spent hours helping with the tedious bits of copying five years of content from one WordPress install to another (I want to thank everyone individually, but this being porn I’m never sure who’s comfortable being publicly named).
I also owe a big, big shoutout to the WordPress community. The complex functionality involved in the site would not be possible with out the numerous message boards devoted to solving coders’ questions–a huge thank you to everyone that replies to questions with an honest answer rather than useless snark.
I tried to stay away from plugins as much as possible, but there are a few that are too useful, and I’ve used on too many sites, not to thank here:
- NextGen Gallery continues to be an amazingly useful extension for image management, and this build takes advantage of its many tricks like nothing I’ve done before. NextGen is seriously one of the most useful plugins ever made, and the fact that it’s remained free this long astounds.
- Blog Posts 2 Blog Posts solved a unique dilemma I encountered on the site. Simply put, it makes creating associations between two different custom post types a breeze. This allows you to do things like call up links between the two, which creates all kinds of possibilities.
- WP Bannerize is the simplest, best ad management plugin I’ve found.
- Likewise, Members is the absolute queen of user, role, and content restriction plugins. Trust me, I’ve tried a lot of them. This one’s from Justin Tadlock, who is a nonstop font of useful WordPress knowledge.
- WordPress’ “custom fields” are powerful tools. They’re also user-aggressive. Meta Box, which began as a script and became a plugin while I worked on this, fixes that like no other plugin I’ve seen. You need coding skill to use this one, but you can get beautiful results. In fact, I only barely skimmed the surface of what I could do with it.
- Disqus Comment System. Forget messing with WordPress’s native commenting. Use this.
There are also several bits of useful code I found, but just listing some of the plugins used is probably a security risk already. So just, you know, comic thank-you waves to anyone that’s ever contributed anything to WordPress anything.
Expect blogging on this site to pick back up soon, once I get a few posts backlogged.
