Dorataya

Site

www.dorataya.com

Relationship to WordPress Asylum

Client. (Okay, she’s my mom.)

Theme

Modularity Lite by Thad Allender from Graph Paper Press

Active Plugins

• Akismet
• All in One SEO Pack
• Cleaner Gallery
• Extended Comment Options
• Global Translator
• Google XML Sitemaps
• Image Gallery Reloaded
• Picasa Image Express
• Picasa Slideshow
• Sexy Bookmarks
• Shashin
• Thumbnail for Excerpts
• WordPress Database Backup
• WordPress Mobile Pack
• WP Cumulus

Notes

Since my mother is a photographer, I wanted a portfolio-style theme for her site. And since she had already uploaded hundreds of photos to Picasa, I wanted her to be able to insert photos from her existing albums rather than having to upload them all over again.

Picasa Image Express takes care of inserting individual images from Picasa albums into posts, and it’s very easy for a non-geek to use. Shashin, on the other hand, is an impressively sophisticated tool, but the options are a bit overwhelming. It can, however, display all your Picasa albums in a WordPress page.

In addition to resizing a few of Mom’s panorama photos to fit the custom slideshow for Modularity Lite (one day I’ll have to see whether it’s possible to use more than 5 images for that), I chose a dark background for maximum drama and added the thumbnail excerpts because we wanted as many images to show as possible.

Finally, because Mom has so many Picasa friends from overseas, we needed a translator. The Global Translator plugin works well, though it can’t do what Picasa does and translate multiple languages into each other, since it’s designed to translate from the base language of the blog’s author into the language the blog reader chooses.