Facelift

No riding this weekend for me. Formal Dinner and Ball on Saturday night meant I needed to be at home all day Saturday in case anything came up and most of Sunday was spent either sleeping or recovering from a night of excess including too many pints of Tim Taylor’s Landlord and some silly Alaskan Shots. I used most of my free time to apply a facelift to the Independent Fabrication Owners’ Club site over at ifrider.com. The number of publicly accessible bikes is now climbing towards 1,000, but there are already more than this available in the Members Only section known as the Clublounge.

The idea of the new look was to try and implement some form of magazine style. I looked at several different options and was most impressed by The Morning After theme by the Masterplan. That said none of the themes out there really worked well with the basis of the club design used for the major rebuild of the site that went live in September ’07. The core of this revision was borrowed from the MIT Creative Synthesis experimental theme, Recycled Canvas. The proprietary code used in Recycled Canvas caused a massive hit on the hosting server, so the controversial experimental functionality had to be turned off.

Still it presented a unique box-based layout option which was a nice way of displaying posts. So the latest spread keeps this element, uses a three column layout (with fixed widths) and rolls in some new layout elements too. I’m looking at a few other tweaks including customising how many posts are shown in different page types for which some neat plugins already exist and of course all this overlaps nicely with what’s being developed at work. An upgrade to WP2.5 is on the cards too, but there are a few other sites that will get this treatment first before it’s rolled completely.