I’ve just put the final touches to the new version of my long standing music website Baconmusic.
The site has undergone a total overhaul with the front and back-end both changing significantly.
After 2 years I finally managed to find a pretty seamless way of dumping Drupal in favour of a WordPress solution (of course). I hope to write more on this later as it was without a doubt the most challenging part of the project.
Using someone else’s theme
In order to achieve a fast turn around the site was themed using the quite wonderful Guzel Magazine Theme created by Ahmed Fouad over at www.customthemedesign.com.
I did a LOT of work transforming the original theme into a custom design. You can see the original theme has a very basic design and colour scheme
I’ve kept the overall layout and structure of the original theme but the images and textures are totally different.
What I like most about this theme is the automatic thumbnail feature and the dynamic homepage. These features should make it simple for my users to add stories to the site without having to worry about how they will be listed on the site homepage. Something that was a huge worry with the old site.
This was my first experience in using a “pro” WP theme in a project and it was quite a pleasure to work with a solid, working base and only think about images and CSS.
Of course some mild hacks were required in order to get the theme doing exactly what I want (adding Google search for example) but overall its pretty much out-of-the box with my ‘sub-theme’ layered over the top.
Given time I hope to write about the Drupal/WP switch AND my experience customizing the Guzel theme. Keep a look out!
(FYI: The site is totally non-IE6 compatible. I’m working on a script which will warn users. Its about time web developers took a stand. NO-ONE should be using a 5 year old web browser.)
Hi Kimb,
I like it a lot, looks 100x better than the drupal before. It’s amazing what can be achieved with WP & skins!
I’m in the process of creating a CMS using SilverStripe – highly recommended. See demo @ http://www.faithinme.co.uk
WP is good for news/content based sites but i’m not quite sure how great it is as an CMS solution.
URL is not found from menu/reviews/album reviews/ – http://www.baconmusic.co.uk/category/reviews/album-reviews/
Stefan
Finding a CMS is always a great challenge.
I’ve tried SilverStripe, CushyCMS, Easy CMS, Umbraco, Drupal and more but WordPress works for me in so many ways.
Its a small issue that the main bulk of the application is dedicated to ‘blogging’ but with the release of 2.5 AND with a some heavy duty theme work you can re-brand a WP install to fit almost any requirement.