P2 Theme Customized
My most recent postings have been in reference to an event in which I describe how I captured the backchannel from a “low tech” audience by using a team of iReporters. While the preparation of this iReporting team was important, the technology supporting their work was as well. Using WordPress and the P2 theme, I was able to create a single website that allowed iReporters to share reports through that site, while also displaying the postings made to other social media services. As a firm believer in NOT reinventing the wheel, I’ve outlined how I customized the P2 theme should you decide to create similar site.
WordPress P2 Customization and Plugins
- The name of the blog was longer than the header space provided, so I had to adjust the header width in the CSS file.
- Using the P2 admin panel I changed the color background, and customized the posting prompt.
- Using the widgets that came with the P2 Theme as part of WordPress, I chose to display categories, pages, the tag cloud, recent comments, archives, and text. I used the text widget to add a link to the homepage (top of sidebar), which was not available as a default link through the theme. By adding <h2><a href=”index.php”>Home</a></h2> into the text widget’s text box, the problem was solved.
- I added a plugin called Login with Ajax, which added a login box, registration link, and a forgot password link to the side bar (as a widget). I configured the plugin using the admin panel to redirect users to index.php so that soon as someone logged in they were immediately taken to the homepage of the site. Once logged in, the P2 theme displayed a text box for making posts on the homepage. The benefit of this plugin and the P2 theme is that authors were never bounced to an unfriendly admin page for making their posting.
- Customizable Search Widget was added because I didn’t like the how the built-in search widget looked (. Customizable Search Widget (as it’s name suggests) gave me some control over how the search box appeared on the sidebar.
- In an effort to eliminate potential barriers to iReporters, I registered iReporters ahead of time instead of asking them to do it. In doing so, I added their photos using a plugin called Avatar. I added the avatars to make the site feel more human and friendly. The iReporters also got kick out of seeing their photos appear next to each of their postings. By default the images are added to the root of your web folder, but the admin panel allows you to alter the file path, which means you can manually move your images to an image folder.
- To display Tweets made by iReporters and participants, I used the plugin WP-TwitterSearch. I used this plugin because it allowed me to pull Tweets of specific users and our event hashtag. I created a new page and then used the shortcode to call the tweets to the page. I also bumped up the number of tweets to be displayed to 100. Tip: Use Twitters advance searched to help formulate your search query. Here’s an example of how you would display 100 tweets tagged with #ECE, and all tweets from user rebecka7: [wpts terms=#ece OR from:rebecka7 limit=100 lang=en]. Note: Twitter’s search feature only reveals results made within a 5 days of your search. As a result, our history of tweets is no longer available except by visiting the accounts of those users we know were tweeting as iReporters.
- To display a featured video from YouTube in the sidebar and within a page, I used the plugin Smart YouTube. Smart YouTube allows you to add videos to a page as either a single video or you can call a playlist. I chose to display videos individually as opposed to a a single player that included a playlist because I wanted people to be able to quickly navigate to a video to watch based upon the titles specified on the page (not embedded within each video). In addition to displaying video on its own page, I used Smart YouTube’s widget to add a featured video to the sidebar. The player is small, but having it there made the page more visually pleasing.
- In addition to the small video in the sidebar, I also included thumbnail images from Flicker using flickrRSS for a little eye candy. You can choose to pull in your entire photostream using the admin panel or you can choose to display a set. To add the thumbnails to the side bar use the widget.
- I displayed slideshows of Flickr photos on a page that I created, but I didn’t use a WordPress plugin. Instead I used Flickr’s embed code. On Flickr I created multiple photo sets and then grabbed the embed code for each set and pasted in on the page I created.
I recommend easy to use, free tech services and resources that I've personally used/tested. I select free tech tools to review based upon my past & current work with various non-profit organizations in which I provide(d) a wide variety of tech support services including general tech consulting, web design, database dev, and elearning. Additionally, I like to help those new to technology learn more through tips and simple explanations.
[...] to all participants through an internet cafe we setup for the event. You may want to read “WordPress P2 Theme to Capture Backchannel” for details surrounding how I pulled tweets into the [...]
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