A lot of people have asked me what theme is used for this new design and layout. When looking into redesigning the domain, I wanted something to infuse all of the blogspot account I have and with the content management style I had with the Nuke-PHP engine I used previously. That lead me to use Wordpress. But the standard WordPress theme wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. In searching, I came across hundreds of different themes and finally settle with one made by Michael Oeser.

The theme you are seeing now has 3 parts to it:
- Branford Theme
- Wynton Theme
- And lastly, my own customization coding to it

I like the main design of Branford, but also wanted some features of Wynton, both of which was creatively designed by Michael. That didn’t stop there, I wanted certain features and more dynamics to it, thus I made some modification to them. One main notice is on the front page. The feature article is no longer there, but in fact was replaced with an RSS PHP feed I had used in earlier web design. Using the CSS box design from the theme, I had infuse it with an RSS feed from various sources. The engine used is “LastRSS“. It is a simple, but yet powerful RSS parser.

Both the Branford and Wynton Theme are based upon Mimbo and Revolution style theme.

With some plugins, dabbing of PHP code changes, and various ideas, you have the website before you today!

Michael Oeser Themes: http://www.der-prinz.com/
Revolution Themes: http://www.revolutiontheme.com/
Mimbo Themes: http://www.darrenhoyt.com/2007/08/05/wordpress-magazine-theme-released/
Wordpress Blog Engine: http://www.wordpress.org/
LastRSS Parser: http://lastrss.oslab.net/

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In setting up the Photography By Kevin section, I wanted to display random pictures from my photography gallery I had hosted over @ zenfolio. Why Zenfolio? After the previous design of a photogallery website and using a flash photo album, I got tired of maintaining it through PHP. Zenfolio seems to fit the need with standard template layout and easy maintenance. 

Instead of spending time writing a PHP plugin, the first came to mind was to try to look for a plugin someone had done. Why reinvent the wheel when someone already did that?

Vibol Hou had used a flickr RSS plugin and modified for zenfolio need. While is perfect what I was looking. 

Plugin Homepage: (HERE)
Download Version 0.5:
 

You can see an example of it being used in the Photography By Kevin page (tab above). 

To use, you can simply download the plugin and place that in the plugins directory. In the Plugin control, you set how many image(s) you will be pulling per tag call. Afterward, a simple tag added to your post, page, or template will pull the photo from the gallery in. 

Using the tag 

<?php get_ZenfolioRSS(); ?>

Will take care of it. 

If you want to spice it up a bit, what you could do is set in the plugin setting to only pull one image. With that, you can call the tag “x” number of times. Each time it will call on random image. This will give you the flexibility to wrap a table loop around it or add spacer between each image. 

Pretty neat stuff. Try it out and let’s hear how you use it!

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