Here’s a list of the site enhancements:

• Site-wide Google Translation
• Site-wide Search function
• Breadcrumb Navigation
• Improved News layout
• Improved Archives (now search articles by date, category, and tag)
• Admin Improvements

This transition marks the end of our Expression Engine era as it was the last EE site we had on our roster. WordPress is such a superior CMS in terms of administrative experience as well as in programming. This means that our clients win and we win!

Step right up, be a winnnah! Everybody’s a Winnnah!

Spigot Design

Much time was spent researching WordPress frameworks, spurned on by the WordPress Theme Development Frameworks post over at Smashing Magazine. My thought at the time was to learn a system that could speed up development time – automation of some of the more tedious tasks. But what I found was worth so much more.

Starting from that Smashing Mag article, I narrowed my targets down to just the most powerful and feature rich from the list. I then ran across a comparison of three of the most popular frameworks at WordPress Tavern. The article provided a nice side by side table of features, and while the decision wasn’t easy, I ultimately settled on Hybrid.

I chose Hybrid for its overall feature list, its insistence on the use of child themes, and most of all, the robust support. There is a $25 annual subscription to the support forums, worth every cent as the developer was there to answer all my silly questions. I say silly because I came to find that before diving into this framework, I knew very little about the true power of WordPress.

Here are some of the highlights of the new system:

• Wigitized sidebar – Gives me the power of drag and drop over sidebar items.
• Widgets everywhere – Before content, after content, footer, and on and on.
• Child theme integration.
• A search function that just works.
• Breadcrumbs.
• The ability to add pages without them showing up in the main navigation (This was always possible, but only by directly editing the theme files).
• A greatly expanded knowledge of WordPress

It also gave me a chance to do a little design reshuffling. I added some things and subtracted some things, but hopefully overall the site is easier to use, easier to read, and for me, easier to maintain.

Spigot Design