Of the many projects I have tried to get off the ground in the last 12 months Cover Art Review was one I was quite excited about.

The idea of the site was simple. I would open up a submittable form where users could come along, upload pretty album covers and then spend there days commenting and rating on the content to there hearts content.

Quick to market, quick to the grave

It didn’t take much work either. Built on WordPress (of course) with a modified free theme from the guys at WooThemes coupled with the TDO Mini Forms plugin meant I got things off the ground after about 2 days work (it also took about 3 hours to grab a few decent ‘starter’ album covers and upload them of course, but this could be considered testing).

Once finished I ‘launched’ the site with a few tweets and word of mouth to some of my friends.

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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.)