To coincide with the launch of Compendle as a web-based application we, at MyKnowledgeMap, also wanted to create a platform for a community of users and enthusiasts to collaborate and share their experiences. We looked at a variety of ways to quickly establish a blog and we settled on WordPress as the platform.
There were some real plus-points that led us to choose WordPress for this:
- It’s so quick to get set up and established
- We could give out contributor rights to a ton of people while maintaining editorial control
- We could all contribute to the posts while the theme was being developed
- Incredibly easy theme and plugin development (the Compendle blog is a totally custom project)
So, with a new WordPress install set up on our PHP hosting service we got to work with the customisation of the site.
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Task 1 - Theme development
We decided to integrate the product blog within the existing product website so the design and general layout were pretty much established. This gave us a really good base to work from and, as the main site was built on the 960.gs CSS framework, bringing the main styles across was fairly easy.
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We added some neat features to the site to make it a little more specific to our needs including some custom functions in the sidebar and tie-ins with CampaignMonitor and FeedBurner.
Task 2 - Custom plugin development
Once the main site was established we looked at how we could encourage users to contribute-to do this we needed a simple contact form.
Now, this sounded simple enough but I don’t know if it’s our server setup but actually getting a contact plugin to work was impossible–this led us to develop our own.
The D13MailForm plugin is pretty simple but allows you to add a short tag to a post which is then replaced with an email contact form for visitors to complete.
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The plugin, although simple, has a few nice features:
- Form validation with fancy messages
- Authentication using hashed values and session data
- Custom “to”, “from”, “replyto” and “cc” options
- Customisable message content
It’s all fairly straight forward but is seeming to work well–stay tuned for a D13MailForm project page soon!