Technical

This site is using Wordpress. The theme has been designed by me based on mimbo as a start point. I wanted all the images to be full width, rather than vary and the layout to be ’superlastic’. This way the posts come out visually well. This is achieved by setting the image width in the css files to 100%. I plan to release the theme to the community, but as I am still working on it, it will take some time. In the meantime if you cannot wait just email me at yannis_lazarides at yahoo dot com.

If you enter the site via the front, you will notice the images are smaller than the ones on individual posts. This is achieved with the same image, that although is heavy on bandwidth is easier to develop, by having a single image file.

I use very few plugins. The one that I have used are:

  • All-in-one-SEO-pack

The Front Page

The front page was a challenge as I had to delve into the php soup and get the spaghetti out! I did use wordpress tags and the loop to get the ‘features’ sorted out.

The requirements:

  • Show a lead story in a nice box on top as the ‘lead story’. I preferred this approach in order to provide something new to the users, every time they visited, assuming that I will manage frequent updates. I also preferred this one rather than listing a set of ‘features’ and always picking up the latest ‘featured’ story.
  • Each and every post should have an ‘image’ to promote it.

how to display the ‘Image’ teaser.

This is done using ‘custom’ fields. The custom field is named ‘Image’. One thing I would like to mention here, that all images on this site come only on size and are scaled using CSS.

Directories gave me a bit of trouble as each artist is saved under sitename/images/artist-name/image.jpg.
I used bloginfo(’url’). This retrieves the url information. In saving the custom field I did use ina-belogi/image.jpg. This way it will pick up the custom field from the correct directory and also paves the way to retrieve a random jpg file from the directory (a feature I want to add later on).

Past Issues

Past issues are simply pages and posts categorized monthly or bi-monthly depending on the frequency of issuing the magazine.

Integrating the GD Library

PHP ships wih the GRD library included. This enables automatic