The Texas Army, the official 1836 ceremonial and reenacting group for the State of Texas, is looking to jump from the 19th century into the 21st century. This being an organization my dad is part of and I have a lot of free time on my hands, I had a hand to lend to the group.

Within a day, I had the basics of a fully-functional web site ready to go.

I had planned on building the site on WordPress originally. In fact, the theme used for the army’s web site is a WordPress theme called Aspire by InfoCreek. The group is a non-profit organization and only gets money from donations. Because of this, I wanted to make sure I could have the site hosted for free using a free service, such as Posterous, Tumblr, and WordPress.com. So I dropped development of the WordPress version of the site and converted the theme for use on Tumblr and Posterous.

After the first round of feedback from members of the army, I quickly learned these services would not meet the needs of the organization. After reviewing other platforms available, I decided it was back to go back to what works. I was back to building the site on the WordPress platform.

Since the inception of the first design, WordPress has moved from the 2.x series to the 3.x series, so this web site is giving me the opportunity to play with the new platform. I’ve barely touched on what all WordPress 3 has to offer, but I have already taken advantage of the new Menus system. In previous versions of WordPress, you had code built in to list all your blog categories and all of your site’s pages, but you could never mix the two. If some of the links you wanted to list were pages and others were blog categories, you’d have to manually edit your code to display what you wanted.

In WordPress 3, a new Menu option was added that lets you do just that, making it a lot easier to change links in your menus on the fly. This required modifying the Aspire theme to take advantage of this new feature, but it really wasn’t that hard to do (a few new lines of code in functions.php, a new function call in your theme where needed, done).

Speaking of making modifications to the theme, I decided to make a few other changes to fit the army’s need. One of the major changes is the addition of a footer to the site.

Top: Original Aspire Theme Footer. Bottom: Modified Footer for Texas Army.

Another major change is the addition of a spotlight home page. Members of the army expressed that having a general blog look for the front page wasn’t telling enough about who the army is and what they do. A custom home.php page with necessary styles were created to get this look for them. This part took the longest for me to get just right. I know just enough to be able to do a little bit here and there, but for the most part, it’s trial-and-error for me when it comes to CSS layouts. Nonetheless, I was able to accomplish what the army was asking for (even though it’s just blank for now).

All these changes to the theme and platform only took me a day to complete. As this isn’t a live site, I’ve been using the incredible MAMP personal web server software on Mac OS X to test the necessary back-end server needs. MAMP allows me to run a basic Apache / MySQL / PHP-based web server on my computer locally for testing web sites without having to deal with all the messy building and compiling needed to run a Linux-based server. Not to mention my computer is so old, any kind of virtual machine would kill it.

All coding is done with the free Komodo Edit software, which has definitely helped me fine silly little coding mistakes (death will come to me by way of a simple semicolon). Graphics editing is done with an old version of Adobe Photoshop, but as soon as single-window mode officially comes to GIMP for Mac and Windows, I’ll definitely give it a try.

This web site is still a work-in-progress and is going through a second round of feedback from members of the army. If all goes well, the web site should be live in October. Changes will most likely happen, major or minor.