Today's Meeting Overall

Taken from Freyr's Blog.

Meeting Minutes - Wednesday 29th February 2012
Attending: Freyr (co-ordinator), Dave, James, Luke. 

1) WordPress theme choices
We had all decided on three WordPress themes to discuss, or in James’ case, six.
James chose mostly contemporary themes, with a very clear style based around silhouetting. In his first theme, the buttons would need rounded corners and the body would need a different background. Following on from Monday, his second theme has a large header image space and contemporary text; his next theme needs some colour scheme improvement; all of his theme choices have strong links to silhouettes and header images. Finally his last theme also follows on from Monday, with a jump-out image. His theme choices mostly need colour scheme changes and some element styling. 

Luke’s choice of themes all have very modern clean designs, with header images and nice bright colours. Very clean, contemporary style. His second theme has a full-width header image, but would need some colour changes and possibly typography improvement. His personal favourite is his final theme, with rounded corners, simple to use layout and good header image, also with a ‘call-out’ image. 

Dave’s first theme had a nice header image, and a nice background pattern, but would need some nav bar changes. His second theme was very image heavy, but would need background changes; otherwise perfect layout. His final theme was quite simple, but had a nice grid-based, module layout. His second and final choices looked a lot more like a website than a blog which is what we want to achieve. He also had a couple of other, simpler themes for us to compare. 

2) Theme structure (James)
A brief history of WordPress as a platform. The themes are structured using HTML, but it can to be complicated to find the right bit, although with some work and patience the right parts can be found. The rest is CSS. 

3) Styling themes (Dave)
The theme is mostly styled using one CSS file called style.css. This can be done by FTP/on the desktop or using the in-blog theme editor. Again, the code is quite long and complex, but it’s easy to find. Things which aren’t achievable using CSS can usually be achieved using plug-ins. 

4) Plug-ins (Luke)
Basic overview of plug-ins in general, to add extra richness to a blog. Research into plug-ins which could be useful to us, e.g. Flickr, Vimeo, and YouTube. By using a WordPress plug-in, we can use peer reviews to find the best one to use. Chris suggested WordPress Constructor theme, for easy customisable. 

5) Embedding Video and Images (Freyr)
Freyr said that it wouldn’t be practical for us to host videos locally at all, due mostly to the fact that to upload video to a WordPress blog, one has to pay to use the VideoPress service which costs in excess of £40 per year. Therefore the group agreed that we would use Vimeo to host the client’s videos, pending her acceptance of Vimeo over YouTube as the platform to use. There is an 8MB upload limit for any media hosted on a WP blog, which can be overridden by editing the blog’s PHP code. An easier solution which Freyr suggested was to host all the images on the dance course’s Facebook page, then add them to blog posts using their direct URL. Therefore we can embed high quality images without having to downsample them to meet the 8MB limit, plus they won’t take up any server space. 

6) Theme choice
The group agreed to discuss their overall preference of theme to use.