When the Cochrane Sustainability Plan came to us, they needed a professional site but had limited funds. They had ideas of what they wanted, but nowhere near the budget for a custom developed theme.
We consulted with them, helping them pick a Premium theme and then provided customization and support so they could complete the site content. They chose the popular Architect theme from iThemes. With a few hours of customization they had professional looking site for a fraction of the usual cost.
We just launched a new website for Trinity Church in Redlands, CA using WordPress multi-site.
Utilizing WordPress’ multi-site option we were able to create easily manageable sub-sites for each ministry, while keeping the administration and hosting in a single site. This gives each ministry the flexibility of their own site and content control, but still allows administrative access over everything by the central communications team.
A custom theme was developed which allows each ministry to be able to change the background, department header and widget areas on their subsite (but still retain the master header and footer and overall style of the parent site). Ministry sites can be accessed through the main navigation on the site home page, or through direct subdomains, ie. children.trinityonline.org, highschool.trinityoneline.org, missions.trinityonline.org, etc.
This site also included a custom interface with Google calendar, which automatically creates or updates Google calendar events based on items created in the WordPress site.
Our buddies at iThemes just released Keen, the 40th child theme for their Builder theme platform. Keen provides a colorful, clean style for the powerful Builder theme.
For more information, go to iThemes.com.
WordPress released the first maintenance update to the new 3.2 version today. This new version fixes JSON issues found on some servers and some minor tweaks to the dashboard and Twenty Eleven theme.
The new version 3.2 of WordPress was released on July 4, 2011. The focus of this version was to make WordPress faster and lighter. Several handy new features were added that experienced users will appreciate, but no major new features were included in this release.
New Features:
Faster & lighter – code was optimized to run faster and take fewer resources. The most commonly loaded pages were optimized to load faster. Upgrades load faster now. Internal routines have been optimized to run faster, caching has been added to dashboard elements to reduce load and memory footprint.
Streamlined admin – admin bars, menus, dashboard elements have been updated and streamlined.
Updated editor – new streamlined full screen editor for posts. Updated toolbars in editor.
Developer tools – dozens of updates and new features have been made to the WP functions and libraries used by theme developers. These will make life easier for developers, but should not affect most site users.
A full list of updated details is available here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.2
Issues:
IE 6 support dropped – WordPress 3.2 does not support IE 6 any more. If you absolutely have to reach every possible person on Earth with your website, this version may cause issues. If you are like most and are willing to drop a few old browser users in exchange for the benefits of all the new standards created in the last decade, then this version is a blessing. We finally have an excuse for not coding everything twice – once for old dead IE versions, and once for everyone else. This version also begins the end of life cycle for IE 7. WordPress automatically suggests browser updates for people running old browsers.
New hosting requirements – WordPress now requires PHP version 5.2.4 or greater, and MySQL 5.0.15 or greater. Neither of these are issues with modern hosting companies, but some older hosts and custom configured systems may be a problem. Again, these new requirements allow WP to eliminate old compatibility mode code and run with modern features — faster and lighter.
Update Recommendations:
This is a good update for most clients. As usual, we recommend waiting a couple weeks before upgrading. Every new version of software has a few latent bugs that were missed in testing. Also we often find plugin compatibility issues with new versions. Let someone else find those bugs on their websites. After a couple weeks and a couple minor patch updates it should be safe to upgrade to this new version. Since there are no major changes, we don’t expect any serious issues to be found.
Currently less than 5% of internet users in US and Europe use IE 6. If you have to reach these users, then WordPress 3.2 is probably not for you. But regardless, their days on the internet are almost over.
If your hosting firm is not known for it’s WordPress support, you will want to verify they support the new minimum requirements on PHP and MySQL before pushing the update button.
As always, we are here to help you with any upgrade needs.
Terrell Sanders
tsanders@MainStreetOpen.com
