new web site: wordpress as CMS / Portfolio

If you haven’t noticed, my main site has had a massive overhaul, with which the royal ‘we’ are very pleased.

Besides the new design, some new work and texts have been added in the upgrade process, most notably the digital and traditional prints I did at the Frans Masereel Centre in Belgium this summer, the Johannesburg-based public intervention from a few weeks ago (a continuation from my Wireframe Series started in Croatia), and new writings on my research and artistic inquiry.

For non-geeks:

The new site is driven by categories, so as to showcase interesting through-lines and trajectories in my pieces. Artworks are each listed across all the concepts and media they might fit into, and are then organized by date. A hidden system of keywords also helps to show related pieces, and there are other goodies such as lightbox slideshows, youtube videos, RSS feeds, and more, throughout the site. Feedback welcome!

For geeks:Â

There are now 2 WordPress installs on this site: the blog (what you are reading now, this is a standard install) and the main site, which is using WP as a Content Management System.

The idea was to have an artist portfolio that did not look like a blog, but that did use a similar database for cross-categoried posts and related works (through tags) in a way that could showcase interesting through-lines and trajectories in my pieces. After a lot of research – and not wanting to have to do any database coding on my own – I came to WordPress as my best choice for a starting point; there are no changes to the wordpress core at all (just a very customized theme and a bunch of plugins) – I’m very pleased with the result:

http://nathanielstern.com

Feedback welcome! More geek tidbits below the fold…

The theme and site have a few hard-coded bits and necessary settings, so it’s not exactly portable right now. I’m a little themed/php’ed out for the moment, but if there are any keen coders who’d be interested in talking wish-list, time-frame and open source release of this as a theme/plug-in/add-on type thing, gimme a holler through the site, I’m totally game. And if you just want the code to look at, also not a problem – just mail me.

some features:

come on, the design itself is pretty, isn’t it?
custom field for thumbnail images in index and archives
custom field for ambiguous dating (like “Jan – Mar 2004”)
custom field for medium (“video installation”)
custom field for “post-specific” sidebar — note that I do _not_ mean “single posts” sidebar. I mean that I can put content in the sidebar of one specific post as I see fit. I often use these for multi-page posts (for direct links to video or images), or for external links in the case of exhibition sites or net.art
special “press” category — posts to this category only appear in the press section, which is listed under pages rather than categories
uses fun plugins – easytube, lightbox and slickr gallery (to pull flickr images), search pages, related posts (i do not show my tags in the works, but use them to drive this plugin), quicktime embed, and a few very very simple ones I wrote myself for optimization of art entries and to work out a few kinks in the theme (I only know limited PHP, which I learned through writing a couple of wordpress themes).
And of course, the whole site is xhtml, css and accessibility compliant, and has RSS and Atom feeds for new press and artworks.
everything is open source!