Beverly
Aen Tan, art director / designer
Aen Tan, PHP, XHTML & CSS
Beverly.sg, client
Visit: Beverly
Showcased in: CSS Mania, Screenalicious, W3C Sites (Editor’s Pick), CSS Clip, CSS Impress
Beverly is Singapore’s first one-stop women’s portal that caters to the independent, sophisticated and stylish woman. Constantly providing the latest updates and premium wellness products and services, we are the perfect source of information for the busy working professional, whether a fashionista who is concerned about the latest runway and beauty trends or a woman who simply loves to pamper herself.
The core of the website is built around WordPress 2.1 and extensively-customized with a XHTML Strict-compliant and CSS-based theme. Much of the functionalities are achieved with WordPress’s own template engine and features that are not natively available in WordPress are achieved with the use of plugins. A large number of plugins are used in this project to allow the website to be used and managed like a CMS, and to extend the original membership features. On the front end, plugins are used to provide user-friendly features.
WordPress’s flexibility in it’s archival and category system allowed me to create specific category and archive templates. A large number of templates are created for articles, contest pages, membership and archives pages. As an added user-friendly feature, a printer-friendly version is available for any single article view. This allows the user to print information on an article without unnecessary content like advertisements and navigation menus. This functionality is achieved with the excellent WP-Print plugin by GaMerZ.
Article View
Printer-friendly Version
Besides providing printer-friendly articles to users, an article-sharing mechanism is also provided to allow users to share articles through various social bookmarking services such as Digg, del.icio.us, Technorati and also send articles to friends via email. The aim of this mechanism is to encourage users to promote the portal through viral methods and to raise awareness of the portal among the local female community. The functionality is made possible through the use of Alex King’s Share This plugin.
Being a membership-driven online portal, membership features are important and unfortunately, the membership functionalities that came with WordPress are limited. Thus, I needed to customize the membership functionalities to make the portal more user-friendly and easy to use. The main problems I have encountered with WordPress’s own membership features are that the login and registration forms did not follow the theme’s styling. For consistency and branding purposes, the login and registration forms had to be customized. James Kelly’s Themed Login and Register plugin was used but much modifications to the plugin was necessary to get it to display right and fit the theme.
Custom Sign in template
The Login Redirect plugin by Andy Moore was used to redirect logged in users to the original page they were on instead of the admin dashboard. Users will only access their profile pages when they click on the “Your account” link at the top of the site. This way the user is kept within the site and is less likely to get confused than if he/she was to be redirected to the admin dashboard.
Conclusions
Beverly.sg is by far the most complex and extensive attempt at pushing WordPress to its limits and turning it into a more-than-average CMS-driven portal I have made to date. It was a definite test of my familiarity with WordPress template tags and architecture.
Visit: Beverly
Posting comment, please wait…
Bjorn on Mar 26, 07 – 8:52 pm
looks really clean and beautiful… glad to meet you the other day at Nexus.. still rem me? pity we only spoke briefly..
Seraphim on Mar 26, 07 – 8:56 pm
Hey pisces mate, just curious with such heavy customisations and plugin usage would you recommend your client to upgrade when the next major Wordpress update comes along?
Aen on Mar 26, 07 – 9:07 pm
Hi Bjorn. I just posted this and you commented on it so fast. Are you subscribed to my feed? :)
Yeh it was a pity we could only have a brief chat during Nexus as there are so many people to know and meet. But I had to say my chat with you was one of the most enjoyable.
I had to leave early because it was getting really boring. I actually fell asleep in the middle of the “Future of the Web” segment. Just didn’t interest me enough. Haven’t had the time to post a review about Nexus as I had to rush a few projects. But in short, I wasn’t impressed by the speakers at all except Nathan Torkington who really cracked me up with his anti-MS sarcasm and his stage flair. He’s an excellent speaker who can give his listeners entertained and I admire people like him. The old folks were annoying and just gave me an impression that they are trying too hard to fit into the youth of the delegates. It was an event of professionals so I don’t care if they are old or outdated nor not fashionable enough. Most important is what they speak must have value and inspiring, not lame-ass advertising crap that contains nothing we can learn from.
Overall the event was good for a first but I really expect the second one to be at least 3 times better. Not difficult if the right speakers were chosen. If it’s Web2.0 and Open-Source, speakers should be notable figures in the respective industries and not those who think open-source software is not good because they are free and not possible to earn money from because they don’t know how. No wonder Singapore is so far behind.
Aen on Mar 26, 07 – 9:17 pm
@ Seraphim
Fortunately, I didn’t edit any of the core WordPress files at all so the only compatibility issues I foresee to have in future are plugin issues.
The site is currently based on WP2.1.0 and not the current 2.1.2. As long as the plugin writers update their plugins, which they most usually do, I will have no problems updating WordPress to latest minor versions.
WP2.1 is more than good enough for my client’s current needs and I expect the system to be able to hold up against any rise in traffic, performance-wise until the next major WP release.
Having said that, battling with plugin compatibility issues have always been the problem for WordPress developers. But we cannot achieve much of the functionalities without the plugins anyway.
Seraphim on Mar 26, 07 – 9:34 pm
As a matter of fact, I asked this coz me also working on a Wordpress customisation pertaining to membership/subscribers. Instead of customizing the registration template (i.e. wp-register.php and related) like you did, I’m modifying an old WP-Members plugin, which uses a separate membership table.
Reason I did this is I wanted to keep the my own membership table separate from wordpress users table as I can forsee many future changes to the table structure in response to my client’s business needs. By doing this I can rework this plugin to death while maintaining the original WP DB structure. Also the original plugin author seems not to be active on this plugin for quite some time.
Would welcome your opinion on any potential issues in what I’m doing.
Aen on Mar 26, 07 – 9:43 pm
I wanted to use that plugin in the beginning but dropped the idea because the plugin did not provide what I wanted and I wasn’t too good in customizing plugins at that level.
Actually the plugin that I have used places hooks in wp-login.php. Just 1 line of extra code so it shouldn’t be too hard to keep track.
I’m really interested in how you have customized WP-Members. Care to share?
Seraphim on Mar 26, 07 – 10:07 pm
This is the site the reworked plugin is currently residing in. It has gone live (albeit prematurely) but I’m still working on adding the necessary hooks in the relevant places (don’t think there should be too many).
I’ve quite a bit of changes to the original plugin together with my theme template so they’re a bit integrated and as such I cannot consider this an independent plugin anymore.
Let me know which aspect you’re interested in and I’ll be happy to share what I’ve done. But I think we should take this offline as it’s getting rather technical. You should already have my email from my comments right?
Aen on Mar 26, 07 – 10:14 pm
Alright I’ll email you.
Bjorn on Mar 29, 07 – 11:45 am
i really love the design for beverly.sg… tho i am more curious to know who’s behind it and if they are local.. who’s ur client actually? no “About” page?
Aen on Mar 29, 07 – 8:55 pm
Hi Bjorn. Good to see you.
Beverly.sg is a local online portal targeted at high income female professionals and is managed by a small group of editors and freelance writers. I’m currently engaged as webmaster and administrator of the portal. However under agreement with my client, I shall not disclose which company is behind the project.
They have a daily-updated column and regular promos so you should definitely recommend it to your female friends and relatives. Not advertising for them but I personally feel it’s really a good and resourceful site. The editors and writers work around the clock to update the site with meaningful articles as well.
kiat on Apr 03, 07 – 12:08 am
nice ah the beverly site…interesting you push yourself so far with wordpress…unlike web developers who care more of codes and programming…you added good aesthetics to the overall site while maintaining good codes. :) congrats
Aen on Apr 03, 07 – 11:30 am
Thank you kiat. I’m not so much of a programmer but I was able to familiarize myself with the WordPress template system by working on WordPress-based sites a few times. It is a very powerful system so I proposed WordPress as the engine for Beverly when bigger scale CMS systems like Drupal and Joomla are usually used for such sites.
I have to thank WordPress’s excellent template system for the good code. It is very easy to integrate WordPress logic into XHTML and CSS layouts. It’s all “template tags”. Not that easy when it comes to e.g. Drupal.
I’ll be pushing WordPress to similar limits or even further with my upcoming AEN DIRECT v2. I don’t know when I can release it, too much work on hand. Ha!