When the snowflakes started falling, I found myself lulled deep into the Christmas spirit. So what did I think of first? Baking cookies? Egg nog? Putting up the tree?

No, I thought about building a website. What can I say, I’m a bit of a geek. :)

So, I went off to Santa’s Web Shop and got out the tools of the trade. In a little less than a day I put together the Best Little Christmas Story website.

Here’s how I did it…

WordPress

I love WordPress.

I’ve tried every major content management system over the years. You might say I’m a bit of a junky. In any case, of all the pure blogging platforms I’ve used, I think WordPress is the best.

Of course, I’m also trying something new here by letting other people post content (not just comments). While I knew WP was capable of handling this, my natural instinct was to reach for Drupal instead. I did a little research though and found a user management plugin that seems to be working out well (see plugins below), so we’ll keep on chugging along with WordPress!

Theme – Blue Christmas

Being a programmer-type, I’m always tempted to build my own theme from scratch. I’ve built my own theme before. It was a labor of love, but it doesn’t look like it. Let’s just say I’m glad I did it because now I know about the guts of WP. However, WordPress.org has a lovely directory of themes. If you are building a site, I suggest you get a theme there or from one of the pro houses.

The theme I chose is Blue Christmas. Now again, I’m a programmer so after I got the theme installed I took a look under the hood and made a few changes.

First, the Blue Christmas theme has a lovely bit of javascript that makes snow fall. It’s real pretty but it’s also a major resource hog (i.e. makes the browser run slooow). Out it went, though maybe I’ll go back and debug it later. I mean, it really is quite sweet.

Second, I made a few adjustments to the way the theme handles sidebar widgets. I’m not sure if the developer did a lot of testing on this theme using multiple versions of widgets. In any case, I just didn’t like the way it handled the name of widgets and so I fixed it up nice and neat.

Third, I changed the front page so that one particular post always stays at the top of the page. Right now, that post is Your Favorite Christmas Memory. I’ll probably swap it out later.

Other than that, it’s a stock version of Blue Christmas.

Plugins in Use

I have a few stock plugins I like to use when I put together a site.

  • Matt Mullenweg’s Akismet – Spam protection. If you’re new to WordPress and wonder what the funny name is in your default plugins, spend some time reading. There’s a reason why they include it as part of the base package.
  • Michael Torbert’s All in One SEO Pack – SEO tweaks. This is an oldie but a goodie. Let’s you change page titles and other SEO-related elements without modifying your theme. There are other plugins in this category that do the same thing, but I know this one and I love it.
  • Andy Bailey’s commentluv – Puts a link in the comments to a contributor’s last post. I like commentluv because it lets me get easy access to what contributors are talking about on their own sites. It also serves as a nice reminder to visit friends when I’m behind. In addition, commentluv also encourages contributions since you’re spreading the link love.
  • Travis Snoozy’s In Series – Used for grouping posts into series. I may or may not use this, but it’s on my standard list. Great plugin to manage multi-part posts.
  • Mark Jaquith’s Subscribe to Comments – Adds a button to comments for allowing contributors to get follow-up comments by email. This plugin helps keep the conversation going by bring people back to the site after they’ve left a comment. It also let’s them know when I’ve posted a reply, which is nice.
  • Jason DeVelvis’ WP Comment Remix – Does lots of stuff with comments. I don’t use half of the functionality on this one. I just like the way it keeps track of most recent comments and the most active contributors. It also has REPLY and QUOTE features, which are nice too (I just don’t use them).

In addition to the standard set (which also included FeedBurner and InstantUpgrade), I am using Thomas Schneider’s Role Manager plugin. This is the first site I’ve tried to allow other users to post directly and Role Manager is turning out to be a swell plugin. First, it lets you control every aspect of every user role. It also allows you to add new roles. It rocks and I hope it continues to rock all the way around the Christmas tree!

[Update: I just added Aaron Harun's Dashboard Editor plugin. DE allows you to change the Dashboard page in the WP admin. It seems pretty powerful. I'm using to throw up a block of text for registered guest posters to give tips on writing their posts (formatting and such).]

Content

Ok, so I needed to put some actual stories in there, right? It didn’t take long to write the About the Site and the Your Favorite Christmas Memory posts. After I finished those posts, I grabbed a few of my favorite Christmas stories from the good folks at Project Gutenberg and edited the HTML to make it look nice.

Gutenberg isn’t the only source for the site. Hopefully, readers will drop by and sign up accounts of their very own and contribute stories. That’s the whole idea after all.

Conclusion

While setting up this site took me just a few hours, I suspect it would take a non-tech or non-WP jockey more like 1-2 full days to make all the changes I did. Then again, it’s quite possible that I did a lot of things that most people wouldn’t bother with!

Well, I hope that satisfies your curiosity about the site! Merry Christmas!

– Jamie

 

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