Pulsion of Life is a blog about Art Journaling and Gratitude.

This project included custom theme creation, development, integration and administration.

It uses extensively Zen-Dreams Plugins such as ZdMultilang, ZdCommentWidgets (Comments displayed using gravatar).

The sidebar has been developped with lots of customization as the owner of the blog can choose from various colors for each widget.

The commenting system is also managing threaded comments as shown in the screenshots.

More Screenshots:

After a few weeks with a different design, We decided to go back to the previous one with some “minor” changes.

You can see that a special fonts have been included on some parts of the site. This font is called Harabara, from the name of its author André Harabara. I really like the way it looks, not too fancy but enough to be noticed. The font system was implemented using Cufon.

We also decided to revamp the portfolio and its previous carousel as I think it’s better to give the user a way to interact with the elements instead of having them just scrolling around. The portfolio uses extensively jQuery as this is our Javascript framework of choice.

This new portfolio is showing thumbnails of interesting work and when you click on these, it will popup a bigger version and also a short description.

We also worked on the sidebar and leave it less crowded with just the featured project and some social links.

The tools we used to make the site live are WordPress-MU, BuddyPress and BBPress for the forum features.

There was also lots of development and customization involved to make featured elements easily manageable. The administrator can Feature members, posts, groups and pretty much anything content related.

The site also takes advantage of Cufon for font embedding and specific plugins for branding such as the login screen.

More Screenshots

David H White Jr is a successful writer and needed a website to promote his books. This project was to integrate the design from PSD to a fully working WordPress site.

The goal of this site was to give readers to connect with him via a site, but also via a blog. All the sections of the site has a special look and feel and easy maintenance and keeping the visual settings were key to the success of this project. As the end user will add more books to his portfolio, the design has to remain the same over time without expertise of the WordPress and no css knowledge.

Their requirements were pretty straight forward, they needed a social website and the only pre-requisite was to use Wordpress. Fine, this one of  my domains of expertise.

Here is a list of the required elements that also have been implemented :

• Videos using YouTube
• Images using Flickr
• Blog features and the content must be used to populate some of the ’static pages’
• Multiple visual styles depending on the page we are visiting
• Twitter integration
• Live search a la Apple spotlight
• Current Career Opportunities page
• RSS Feed everywhere with an easy subscription system
• Lightbox style image viewer
  

Screenshots

]]> http://www.zen-dreams.com/2009-04-03/slant-six-games-corporate-site/feed/ 0 http://www.zen-dreams.com/2009-01-28/abc-cooking/ http://www.zen-dreams.com/2009-01-28/abc-cooking/#comments Thu, 29 Jan 2009 07:39:07 +0000 Anthony http://www.zen-dreams.com/?p=60

ABC-Cooking.net is originally a French blog about cooking : recipes and restaurant reviews.

It is using ZdMultilang (a multilingual plugin developed by Zen-Dreams) in order to blog in French and English. It is also using ZdStatistics in order to track visitors, visits, site usage, etc…

The design was completely made by Zen-Dreams and is based on Sandbox.

Zen-Dreams is also responsible for the maintenance and administration of the blog. The tasks also included the migration from a closed platform (canalblog) to Wordpress without loosing content (blog posts, comments, trackbacks, etc…)

Zen-Dreams’ blog is a heavily customized version of Wordpress through home made plugins such as ZdMultilang and ZdRecentComments and also a specific theme made using sandbox as the main framework and enhancing it to be fully multilingual.

ZdMultilang is the second plugin made by Anthony in order to blog in any number of languages and being able to manage a multi-lingual blog with no fuss.

In fact this is completely transparent to the end user and allows to reach a wider audience.

A Forum is also setup on this blog using BBPress, which allows tight integration with wordpress.

This site is developped, maintained and administrated by Zen-Dreams