My newest project: Lionhead

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on a website for an the independent film LIONHEAD. Although the trailer is still on its way, I implore you to check out the site because the movie looks incredible. I was extremely excited about the opportunity to get involved in such an interesting project, and now that it’s live, I wanted to show it off!

Taking WordPress to a New Level

Although I’m always looking for the latest and greatest tricks in WordPress, this project was all about speed. Since the filmmakers needed the site done quickly for their early round of festival submissions, I had to be quick. For me, that meant child themes, page-specific classes, and a few key plugins.

Thematic

Thematic makes it easy to create your own child theme on top of the fluid, reset blank theme that comes stock. There’s no quicker way to create a child theme that to use Themetic. It even comes with a sample child theme ready to go, just copy/paste and you’re already on your way.

Page-Specific Styling

The semantic, organizer in me always wants every style to be created with the most elegant, efficient execution possible. In reality though, this sometimes just gets in the way, especially when you have a time crunch and a artistically demanding client. Although the filmmakers let me execute my vision, they had very specific points to be made about the art direction and styling of the site. As this will be the representative of the movie to a broad majority of potential viewers, I can understand their need to have the site accurately communicate their vision. In execution, this meant a lot of doubling back on styles, trying something, reversing it later, etc…

Doing everything the most elegant way possible would have been nearly impossible or at least taken twice as long. That’s why I defaulted to basic global layout styles and page-specific selectors for the more minute details. Will there be duplication? Will the stylesheet’s organization be less-than-ideal? Yes, but I can double back after launch and clean those things up. The important thing during development is to stay agile enough to respond to feedback quickly.

Quick & Dirty Plugins

• Widget Logic – The best little things I’ve found to just “get it done.” You can select a widget to just display on one page, or remove it from just one page. This is perfect for quick additions to the homepage, or contact page because you don’t have to mess with editing the child theme files and putting the logic in php.
• Simple Music – I needed something quick a simple to play the film’s theme on page load. This is just about the simplest music plugin I’ve ever seen, not to mention it works like a charm with no fuss or muss.
• Vimeo Video Player With Playlist and Google Analytics –  This impressive-looking plugin is one of the best for playlist-enabled Vimeo content. Along with a backend UI page, the plugin comes with an great flash player for any Vimeo content you specify. One fairly huge caveat: There’s seems that a bug in the php breaks WordPress’ backend javascript. This means no widget edits while the plugin is enabled!