Building the lost film site

I’ve been busy this week constructing the site which I spoke about in my last post so I haven’t really had much time to do anything photographic, although I did manage to run a test film through my Agfa Karat and hopefully I will develop that film later and post the results.

The lost film site has turned out to be more complex than I initially thought. Before I really thought about it I assumed I could construct a basic blog site, but when I put more thought into the data structures I want to represent I realised I would need to add some different content types and fields.

Although I’ve used WordPress for a few years in order to create content, I’d not actually looked at it from the point of view of developing a site outside the basic blogging platform that WordPress is famous for.

It turned out to be relatively easy to add new Custom Post Types and add fields to them, but the main problems I have run into are to do with displaying the content. I’m not a designer so although I can create a plugin and get the functionality that I want, getting the data into the correct places on the page layout without messing with the theme system has been more challenging.

Although I suspect that I could eventually get the theme looking how I want it I don’t want to take a long time building the site – it may not actually be popular and no-one may visit so I wanted to find the quickest way that I could get the site running but still give myself the option of extending it later if it seems worth while.

So for the display of picture information like film format, film manufacturer etc it turned out that the easiest way to get this to display was to create a text widget in the sidebar and update it as the picture changes. This actually turned our to be quite useful anyway, because it the data was placed under the picture it is generally not seen.  You can see how this look in the picture immediately above.

For the picture browse I needed to create a new copy of the existing archive page and change some of the template display so I can display a page of image thumbnails with each of these linking through to the individual picture page. That isn’t the ideal way to do it but it turns out the theme I’m using doesn’t have hooks to change the content at that point. As I said, I can always change it later if it is worthwhile.

I’m hoping to add some cool social and feed back systems so visitors can comment and update locations etc, although that may be in a few months time. I’m also hoping that I can get the site running by Christmas and start putting images up over the Christmas holidays.