This website was designed on the WordPress platform, like most of my modern sites. While I can and have developed on any one of a number of frameworks, I find WordPress to be the most flexible and reliable. Joomla is a close second, but the community support for WordPress is far more vast, resulting in better prewritten blocks of code, which save me and my customers valuable time and money.
This site was designed for an ASU student in Tempe, Arizona. He needed a social media site, where users would be able to post their stories from college. The site was themed for ASU colors, and served Arizona State and University of Arizona. I customized several plugins for the required features, including the quick post widget, which was needed because it is WPMU and Buddypress compatible.
Their was also a Jquery slider, which enabled the website owner to display advertisements from local businesses in the college’s own area. This was a great marketing tool, and carried plenty of SEO benefit as well.
The last part of the implementation was to enable a rating system for the posts, using a customized GD star rating, a gem from the folks at WPMU developers. I coded several custom post loops, so the posts could be shown for each author, or by most popular, or by latest post. I also used a translation file to alter the language so posts became stories, which is a lightweight non-intrusive workaround.
