I’ve spent pretty much all of the weekend working on the SOP site design. Things have progressed considerably since Friday, even though most of it has been small.

Some of the home page ( http://www.schoolofpuppetry.com.au/slam.php , currently on a different URL just so I can keep passers-by from happening on it) has been done, with still some work to be finalised on the ‘recent posts/comments’ area. The draft design I’ve got has a nice background, much like the right-hand sidebar, but it clashes with the colour of the links. So I’ll have to rethink that bit a little.

The contact page is quite done: http://www.schoolofpuppetry.com.au/contact.php. Although I’m tossing up changing a little bit of the colour - the input button - to match what I’ve done for the pagination. (Consistency is a good idea, but hard to stick with when the draft design was only one page; and the home page at that)

What I’m most happy with is this: http://www.schoolofpuppetry.com.au/books.php. Thinking about how to organise the categories, it occured to me that instead of splitting the Amazon bookstore page from the reviews - as it is done on PIM - is a fairly silly idea. So instead, I’ll just have the book reviews on one page, along with other info about puppetry books. I have an idea for how to create handy quick links to popular posts, but that is something I haven’t gotten to yet.

As you can see, the main page of the template now allows the ability to show multiple posts, and taking advantage of the ‘avatar’ plugin (in use on the Shop page on PIM), I have made the whole thing much more visually interesting. To work with the scale, I added all of the book reviews, although most of them haven’t been sufficiently formatted for the new layout. And the pagination - which I can never convince myself I actually like on a template - even looks like it belongs at the bottom of the page. I’m really really loving the way this excerpt-list works out and this layout will be carried across to the main tutorials page.

The next step is http://www.schoolofpuppetry.com.au/books.php/book-review-the-foam-book. Pretty much the same layout, just more text . I took some free icons and massaged them with a colour change and a bit of white highlights here and there, so they match the design better. I’m still working on commenting - which may, if I can get it to work, appear in a lightbox popup for easier reading. I’m also still working on finding a decent lightbox/thumbnail functionality for images. You can also see a much nicer blockquote (the brown border to the left of the third paragraph), which is far superior to the grey-dotted box in use on PIM.

One thing I love about all this… I’ve discovered all sorts of new functionality that’s already built in to the blog software. SOP runs on a newer version (3.0x series versus 2.4.2 on PIM), which means some new goodies backend (save&edit for starters). I’ve discovered I can order posts manually, as compared to by post-date, which is why the book reviews are in the order they are. The Foam Book is a very popular one, so it’s at the top. … Ordering also extends to categories, which means that on the Tutorials page drop-down menu, I can order the categories by popularity, alphabetically, or a mixture of both. Pretty awesome, huh? 

Did I mention I am using one template across the whole of the site? (Minus the contact page, which works slightly differently, and most likely the links, so I can show two columns of them instead of one) One template, it’s that bloody flexible.

One thing I’m still worried about though is the use of space - the single post page is starting to look crowded, and I haven’t even added in the related posts function yet. And should they go at the top of the page, along with the post’s metadata, or should they go at the bottom as they are now on PIM?

Despite all these little things (and big, the drop-down menus still haven’t been fixed yet) I’m very happy with how things are shaping up. The use of the avatars plugin is especially bringing the whole design together, and displaying excerpts on the main/category page will improve navigation and discovery a whole lot.