Dorataya

Site

www.dorataya.com

Relationship to WordPress Asylum

Client. (Okay, she’s my mom.)

Theme

Modularity Lite Screenshot

Modularity Lite by Thad Allender from Graph Paper Press

Active Plugins

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.

Conscious Beauty

Site

www.consciousbeauty.com

Relationship to WordPress Asylum

Client (The amazing Kathleena Gorga is Sallie’s stylist, if you were wondering where that red hair came from.)

Theme

screenshot

Conscious Beauty 2 (created by Sallie Goetsch with Artisteer)

Active Plugins

Notes

Converted from static site to WordPress in 2008 to make it easier for Kathleena to maintain and update her own site. The blog was secondary, but she’s starting to use it more. The Advanced Category Excluder plugin and a custom page template power the dynamic content in the Community page.

Looking at this list, I realize that I could simply have used text widgets to do what I used Quotes Collection and Random Image Widget for, since there’s exactly one image and one quote. I was new to widgets at the time, and the name “text widget” confused me. And since it ain’t broke…

I tested a number of gallery plugins on this site, and Kathleena and I preferred the effect of Lightbox 2. I know everyone loves NextGEN, but it creates multiple copies of everything and puts them in strange places.

As for the cache plugins, Conscious Beauty is hosted on GoDaddy, which is known to be a bit sluggish as a WordPress host. (I have some of my own sites there as well.)