Two New SF/F Client Projects Live
Filed Under: Speculative Fiction, Web Design, creativity
Two projects have gone live to the public this week. Let’s break them down shall we?
Rocket Kapre
Rocket Kapre is a website dedicated to fantastic Filipino fiction. I was approached by the client Paolo Chikiamco a couple of months ago with a tight timeline. We started with a pre-built theme and worked our way from there, customizing as necessary (and customize we did). I modified the slider and many other layout aspects significantly. I also rolled out quite a bit of custom template work using the Flutter CMS tool. Any place where I wanted to add new content areas to be filled out, custom images, etc, I used Flutter to do that. We have custom write panels for the Books and the Authors entries for example. I learned a lot about building a theme setting page by working with this theme as well. Also, I really became a fan of the AZIndex plugin based on the work on this site, and have used it twice since on other sites. I owe those guys a donation.
Fantasy Magazine
Recently, I was brought on board as the regular web guy to implement a bunch of changes over at Fantasy. I look forward to working with editor Cat Rambo on improving things throughout the year. Our immediate goal was to redesign the existing theme in a way that uncluttered the home page considerably and added room for some advertising. I developed the featured content slider and I built on the tabbed interface from the last site design by adding some accordion work as well. Anywhere I could open up content to the editors, I did so using custom page calls and the like. For instance, the masthead information on the About tab is a page that can be edited and modified on the back end now. In general, I did a lot of code base cleaning up for my own understanding. There are a couple of custom plugins at work on the site thanks to Matt Kressel that proved very useful. Coming up will be a much more complex user system allowing user profiles with all kinds of fun custom fields. I just need to get the box upgraded to PHP 5 for that work. Some cool features coming down the pipe there.
So those are just a couple of the projects I’ve been putting the finishing touches on lately. I’ve mostly finished up at least one other site that won’t launch for quite a while. And I’ve got a couple new ones to get to work on, and some subcontracting work lining up as well.
Clockpunk Studios is doing pretty good these days! Turns out that mastering the WordPress template system has been a good career move.
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