I’m really happy to announce that the site dedicated to our year-long family RV road trip is live: http://boyinks4adventure.com.
Content
The home page gives an overview of us and what this crazy adventure is all about via the slides that change out. We’ve been blogging our pre-trip research and thinking for some time - and that content is all there in the pre-trip section. In the About section I’ve added some family bios for those who want to get to know us a bit more (note that we did choose to use online nicknames for our kids as a measure to protect their privacy and security).
That only represents about 1/2 of the content that the site will eventually hold however. I’ll have other sections of content to add as we move closer to our launch date and have other things to talk about.
Design
The design is Woo Theme’s Postcard. While Woo sells it for Wordpress, of course I had to run it via ExpressionEngine. Woo Themes are more than just HTML starter templates so the best way to to get the HTML was to install WP locally, then install the Woo Theme, and then render pages out where I could grab the HTML to bring into EE. It wasn’t as straightforward as other templates that I’ve purchased to use with EE - but doable. A hat-tip to Marcus Neto from Blue Fish Studio for alerting me to the theme.
Logo
The logo, favicon, and Twitter/Facebook icons were done by Ray Brown. Ray can be found at (@bitmanic on twitter and Bitmanic.com on the web.
Implementation
I started with installing EE’s Multiple Site Manager - so Boyinks4Adventure.com runs off the same EE install as Boyink.com and our family extranet. The pre-trip content actually still resides in the Boyink.com install and is just pulled across to the new site.
From the implementation of the currently-visible content is pretty straightforward. One of the sections I have waiting to go live is the travel blog where we’ll post once actually on the road. Since I wanted these posts to be able to include photo galleries, video galleries and a map it made more sense to create this all in a new blog vs. working in the current pre-trip blog.
The more complex content required using some 3rd party tools. I know you can’t see them in action on the site yet - but imagine if you will:
- Per-entry photo galleries using Brandon Kelly’s FieldFrame with FF Matrix and the nGen File Upload plugged in. Images are run through the Image Sizer plugin from David Rencher. Photo galleries are presented using the Galleria jQuery script (I’m so over lightbox-effects for photos).
- Per-entry video galleries using another FF Matrix feeding content to the FLV Media Player from John Henry / 5Pieces. Template conditionals show a player with playlist if there are multiple videos.
- Per-entry Google Map using SL Google Map. Map points will be aggregated to one master map that will show all our travels.
Other Credits:
- The Tweet-stream for the road trip is pulled in and displayed using Erik Reagan’s ER Tweet Me wrapped by the first-party Twitter Timeline.
- The Entries Number from Laisvunas saved me from having to write a custom query to get per-category post counts on the weblog archive page.
- MD Page Type from Masuga Design helps route multi-entry and single-entry requests through a single template for nicer URLs.
- A bunch of guys on twitter including @mcdavis, @ChrisMBarr, @thinkclay, @joelbradbury, @james_evans and @lukerumley for some crowdsourced jQuery troubleshooting.
Many thanks to all the 3rd party developers - who even updated some of these tools per my needs. I’m really looking forward to getting on the road and pushing some content through this site - I think it’ll easily be one of the better sites of its type out there.
More exciting stuff to come - but we’ve got a trailer to finalize the deal on and get delivered. And a truck to buy. And a route to put together. And…....
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Marcus Neto on April 22, 2010
Boyink (Author) on April 22, 2010
Ben Carlson on April 22, 2010
Boyink (Author) on April 22, 2010
Steven Grant on April 23, 2010
Boyink (Author) on April 23, 2010
Sean on April 24, 2010
tk9988 on July 29, 2010