History as a Webminister
While I have never been a webminister, I did manage to program this website all by my lonesome. Since WordPress is the program of choice now for the SCA, I thought I would share some of the things I ran into while creating it. I also maintain two other websites.
Awesome Links
Color – This link points to an awesome translator which takes an HTML color code and shows you the color plus the graduations in 5% increments between white/light and black/dark. (link: http://www.w3schools.com/colors/colors_picker.asp)
Help Sites – the following sites are blogs containing WordPress help
- WordPress for Beginners – wpbeginner.com
- WordPress Explorer – wpexplorer.com
- WP Squared – wpsquared.com
- WP Mayor – wpmayor.com
Tutorial – A motivational/self-help podcasting website has posted a WordPress Tutorial Series online on their website which normally costs money. Excellent resource while it lasts. (link: http://www.eofire.com/wordpress/)
Favorite Plugins
While themes make the site pretty, it is the widgets and plugins which make WordPress so powerful. Below are the plugins I have found most helpful.
Askimet – Kills comment spam. I was helping a friend who in a weak had received over 1,000 bot-spam comments, and one important comment buried in the lot. Get this, activate it! (FREE)
Broken Link Checker – If you are going to have a lot of links, like I have for this site, get this plugin to let you know when the links get broken. (FREE)
Jetpack by WordPress.com – Not quite as useful as initially hoped, but I have found the widget to add an image to the sidebar useful. Others may find the various social media widgets also helpful.
Table Maker – A very simple option allowing you to create tables quickly and modify them without opening posts or pages.
TinyMCE Advanced – Still in the testing process for me, but adds an additional line to the editor. The function I am hoping to use the most: Insert Table. Less limiting than the Table Maker plugin, but likely more difficult to manage. I will let you know how it works out.
If anyone runs into plug-ins or information especially helpful to SCA websites, please let me know and I will add them to this page,
Details about website
I started looked for a wiki theme but none of them worked with what I wanted to pull off. Strangely the standard Twenty-Thirteen WordPress theme did the trick once I changed the ghastly brown-maroon-beige theme to my heraldic colors of Vert, Argent, and Or. To do so, I went into the CSS editor and changed about 100 of the color directions in HTML. (ongoing project to get it tweaked right)