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Ken Marchtaler is possibly one of the most impressive men I know. Martial Arts World Champion, Advisor to the Olympic Association and Founder of more programs to help and nurture children and teens then I can mention. 

I have been working with Ken for almost five years developing branding and marketing materials for the many martial arts and fitness programs that fall under the umbrella of The Marchtaler Group.

So for this article, our focus is on plugins that make custom theme development more cost effective.

Custom Sidebars

I used this plugin on a site that has a membership area. The client wanted basic sidebar information in the front of the site with additional, expanded widgets hidden behind the membership section. Traditionally we would have created a second template for the theme with a completely different sidebar. By using Custom Sidebars we were able to specify which sidebar widgets belong on which pages. 

Additional Information

Display Widget

This widget work ‘almost’ like the Custom Sidebars widget but gives the ability to completely remove a sidebar or widget area from selected pages. We are using this on a site that is currently under development. On the home page we have a couple of widget areas at the top of the main content section. One is pulling custom excerpts from the blog and the other displays a YouTube video.  The client wants these two areas displayed on the home page only. Traditionally we would have created another template for the theme without the widget areas, instead, we created a single template with multiple widget areas that can eliminated as needed. 

This widget is particularly useful for themes built with Artisteer.

Additional Information

WP Cycle

Because sometimes, all you want to do is to simply slide images. No thumbs, no frame, no drop shadow and nothing being pulled from a post. This is possibly the simplest, and most useful image slider available for WordPress. Simply install the plugin, select the display size, select the transition effect and speed and upload your images. The slider can be inserted into a page or post using a short code or directly into a theme using a short PHP snippet. Useful for rotating header images and simple to replace the actual graphical header in any third party theme.

This is the plugin that we are using in the header of http://fernwoodnrg.ca/

Additional Information

Business Directory Plugin

This one is proving to be a bit of a pleasant surprise. We were looking for an inexpensive solution for a client looking to add a searchable business directory of their membership. It did take a little longer to set up but I was able to integrate it into the client’s site with a minimal amount of CSS tweaks.

This plugin displays a list of members, with thumbnail and selected information within a list that is sorted by category. The read more link leads to a page with a larger image and expanded information. There is even a small contact form on the expanded page. 

Disadvantages: It does have a few display challenges that will require me to massage the CSS code a bit more and, unfortunately, members can only appear in a single category.

Additional Information

UberMenu 2.0

UberMenu is the best WordPress tool for creating mega menus that I have been able to find. I sourced this tool out for a university site. They wanted a menu system that offered more than just flyout options. UberMenu creates a number of sidebars. These in turn can be loaded up with widgets and installed directly into the menu.

The plugin comes with a number of nice styles options that can be tweaked either through their interface or, more directly, by accessing their CSS. It can also be set to work with custom CSS.

A working version was set up on our website at ideazone.zenutech.com and additional information can be found by following the link below.

http://wpmegamenu.com/

iSlidex

Finding a simple, affordable (free) image slider that actually works the way it is suppose to, and does not toss in a bunch of jQuery errors has always been a bit of a challenge.  On our last few projects I have been using iSlidex.  This application will pull the featured images from a pre-selected blog category and add them to the image rotation and link to its related post.

The administrative panel is feature rich offering many options for the look and operation, and the style sheets are easy enough to edit if needed.

I am using iSlidex for the top header on ideazone.zenutech.com. For this particular use I access the style sheets and stripped away a lot of the features.

More information is available at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/islidex/

Event Espresso

Admittedly I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with this application. We are using it for a new site that will be launched next month. It does everything it claims to do, and does it nicely right out of the can, but styling the look and feel to match the destination site took a lot of tweaking.

Things that I really like about this application are:

• The ability to preset a number of venues makes it faster to create multiple events that are hosted at the same venue
• The sidebar widget works well and is easy to style
• The calendar function works well
• Was easy to integrate the API for the payment gateway so that visitors do not have to leave the site to enter credit card information
• Creates a blog post for all of the events as well as the event information page. This means that once the event is over it is easy to change the blog category to ‘Past Events’ and still have the details available
• Incorporates Google Maps into the venues nicely
• Integrates with MailChimp – hopefully this means that in the future it will incorporate with other solutions such as Constant Contact

On our application we added the ability to add an event to a Google Calendar. It is unfortunate that this function was not part of the application. More information is avvaialble here… http://eventespresso.com/

Community Options’ decision to move to a WordPress driven website was based on the amount of content updates they required every month. They estimate that the new site is saving their association $5000.00 annually… nearly twice the cost of the website we built for them.  Their home page features excerpts from their blog as well teasers from their photo galleries. 

We created a custom WordPress site that features

• Excepts areas on the home page for featured article teasers and embedded video
• Multiple image galleries throughout the site
• Newsletter registration within the sidebar
• A blog for their upcoming events and news
• Social networking management tools

Development Credits

• Custom WordPress theme designed by Jon Valade
• Advanced programming features by Nolan Walker

Click HERE to visit

This site was built around the client’s intensive social networking efforts. Along with the HTML5 driven rotating headers, the home page hosts multiple excerpt sections highlighting featured articles and instructional videos.  Every aspect of this site is managed by the client through the WordPress administrative section

We created a custom WordPress site that features

• Two separate templates control the look and feel of the different types of pages
• Multiple excepts areas on the home page for featured article teasers and embedded video
• Multiple image galleries throughout the site
• Event calendar
• Newsletter registration within the sidebar
• A blog for their upcoming events and news
• Social networking management tools

Development Credits

• Custom WordPress theme designed by Jon Valade
• Advanced programming features by Nolan Walker

Click HERE to visit

The Cridge Centre for the Family is possibly one of the most content intensive sites that we have built… twice. Although they were happy with the look and feel of the original site we built for them, they wanted the flexibility and scalability offered by WordPress. We created the new site with the exact same visuals and content as the original but with some added features. The left sidebar hosts links to their many programs, each with their own template and editable sub menus. This site is also rich with social networking features.

We created a custom WordPress site that features

• 9 unique  templates
• Multiple sidebars
• Multiple image galleries throughout the site
• Event calendar
• Newsletter registration within the sidebar
• A blog for their upcoming events and news
• Social networks management tools

Development Credits

• Custom WordPress theme designed by Jon Valade
• Advanced programming features by Nolan Walker

Click HERE to visit