Key features of this design, learning some lessons from the Adelaides work:

• Again, the design is a child theme of Twenty Ten. In fact there are only four files in the child theme: header.php, homepage.php (home page template), functions.php and style.css.
• The slider on the front page is Dynamic Content Gallery. I’ve used this in a few sites before and it works well for me. I did have a look at a couple of other sliders (and may update this one) but it is functional and easy to configure through the admin screen. I’m displaying a single Category (unsurprisingly called “Featured”).
• I used Gravity Forms for the contact form again. Liking it a lot.
• And this time I got to use Google Fonts. Very straightforward to incorporate in the site.

And I found out that it is possible to turn on page excerpts in WordPress 3.x by putting the following line in functions.php

add_post_type_support('page', 'excerpt');

The next stage in the evolution of this site is to concentrate on the content and refresh that to say something more about the personality and activities of the church. Now that more members of the church can “see” the design, they are better able to suggest improvements. We’re also hoping to keep the information dynamic by including a “grid” (sorry, some ideas are just too good to leave to gov) to be reviewed by the leadership monthly so that we can prepare material in advance.

Most of the photos on the site are by Jonny Ferry, who has a real eye for detail.

The new home page layout directs visitors to the area of the business they are most interested in, and each area of the business has a slightly separate visual identity (different colours, logos and headers). We’re also working on improving the content and making the site more useful to guests, nursery parents and events co-ordinators.

The key design and technical features of the redesigned site are

• Child theme of Twenty Ten. The theme folder only contains five files plus two CSS files, and uses a lot of the features of TwentyTen including header images and menus.
• Featured images are used to drive the different header images for the different business areas.
• All menus (including those in the sidebar for the different business areas) are controlled by the WordPress 3.0 menu system
• Gravity Forms has proved invaluable to develop simple, usable contact forms for the different business areas
• Introduced some more interesting fonts using font-face declarations (I will one day update to use Google Fonts but I couldn’t find the font I was looking for in their limited list).

I’d be interested in your comments on the design. Fire away!

Development Environment

• XAMPP provides me with the right Apache and MySQL environment for my test sites. It makes it easy to use the WordPress one-click install into this environment.

Coding

• NetBeans is a useful IDE for manual coding of WP themes, CSS and plugins. No Intellisense or anything terribly clever (idea: wouldn’t it be good to have a sort of Intellisense for WP template tags built into an IDE?).
• Firebug is an excellent utility for debugging CSS and markup issues in Firefox.

Image and photo editing

• Gimp for Mac is good for image editing. It appears to be a clone of Photoshop and it takes a while to get used to the way it works – I’m still at the early stages of learning how to use it.
• iPhoto comes with the Mac and is good for quickly editing and cropping photos…
• …but I think I prefer Picnik.

Copying to Live

• Cyberduck is a good FTP tool specifically written for the Mac.

http://127.0.0.1:1040/clear.cgi?

which downloaded a 10×10 px clear image.

It appears that ZoneAlarm was tagging the image as adware, simply because the image was named “…Advert.jpg”. I renamed the file to “Pastor.jpg” and it worked perfectly!

Oh well, another good use of 20 mins of my time!

Sandcastle is a Microsoft version of nDoc, although nDoc has not been updated for almost 2 years now. Sandcastle is used to build internal .NET Framework documentation within Microsoft.

Sandcastle is a command-line only program, so if you don’t want to run 14 commands in the correct sequence, then you need a GUI. A few are available from the community, the one I like is from Eric Woodruff.

More info at the Sandcastle Wiki.

Of course, what we really need is a tool that creates full architectural diagrams from code, but more of that another day.