The infamous dev site

One of the coolest things about WordPress is the ability to create themes. It makes the seemingly simple blogging software into a (somewhat) full fledged content management system; so much so that when I start a project for a new website I ask, “why not use WordPress?” Publishing new content in the form of posts or pages is so easy, it’s nearly pain-free!

The ease of use associated with WP also makes launching new designs very addicting. I’m currently working on three:

• dub – A new, minimalist theme for my personal website. It’s going to take a bit of hackery, but I’m planning on building both a blog and a photography portfolio into this, among other things.
• OSO – Short for open-source organization, OSO is a theme dedicated to presenting small, student-run organizations as professionally as possible. This theme is being built to address the demands of Whitman Direct Action, while at the same time attempting to be as modular and simple as possible to allow adaptation and redeployment with little modification. It’s first and subsequent releases will be licensed under Creative Commons.
• dental – WordPress goes medical. It’s at its infancy right now at a dev site, but I will be making significant progress on it over the week (or at least I should, as I’m getting paid to work on it!). WP’s ease of use should allow Milwaukie Family Dental to update content without having to deal with any messy and static HTML.

In my dev set-up right now, I’m working on the OSO theme listed above. It should be ready for a version 0.1 release any day now. Shout out to Grist for introducing me to the concept of a dev environment (and not trying to build a theme on a live website, haha).