Projects

In the past I’ve mentioned a very complex plugin named “WidgetPress”, which I built and is the underlying foundation of the Sears Community and Kmart Community sites. What WidgetPress does is complex, and the short time I had did not allow me to really clean it up the way I would have liked to. This is why I have not released it publicly. However, the lessons learned from WidgetPress are many, and some of the ideas and solutions that led to its completion can be feathered out of the bulky plugin into their own stand-alone plugins. Thats exactly what I am trying to do now. The specific functionality I’m working on right now is the idea of using custom post types and taxonomies in such a way that they are no longer independent. It will take some explaining to show how this is useful so I will start by explaining how it is used in WidgetPress. ...

For the last few months I’ve been neglecting this blog and my publicly available plugins. Thats because 200% of my time has been tied of in this very large projects - the mySears Community and myKmart Community for Sears Holdings Corporation. This matching pair of Q&A style customer service sites have been migrated from a third-party host known as Viewpoints, and onto a self-hosted WordPress Multi-Site installation. Today I’m happy to say that we’ve launched both. ...

Yesterday we launched a huge update and redesign of the Kmart BirthdayClub website for Sears Holdings. Not only does the new theme look a lot better, the content is much better organized, and its more usable that it previously was - both from an end-user perspective, and from a content management perspective. Kmart BirthdayClub was originally migrated to WordPress approximately 7 months ago from its previous static and flash-based templates hosted on a WebSphere platform. The site attracted a decent amount of traffic and so some additions were made. The existing theme however was ill-equipped to handle the various new sections of content. The new theme solves most of the usability and information architecture problems that were present in the previous theme, looks a lot better, and leverages jQuery and CSS3 features like gradients, and box shadows to avoid unnecessary flash elements and imagery. ...