Tan Tuohy

Over the last couple of weekends I have been working out ways to recreate a ‘magazine’ style wordpress design for the campus newspaper, The Record. Let me tell you, it was no easy task!

First of all, wordpress is not designed to be a full fledged content management system like phpnuke or joomla. With this hurdle in mind, there was front end coding that had to be done and a ton of conditionals. A typical wordpress design looks like this:

As you can see, there are only two columns and there is no real ‘magazine’ feel to it at all. With a bit of php and innovation I managed to turn the blog style design into something more ‘newspaper’ like:

My favorite part of the project was working on the menu. When you hover over the link with many sublinks such as the ‘news’ link an entire list will pop out with multiple columns. Everything can be easily seen and clicked within two clicks essentially.

The comments system design was also redone. The last one was not appealing and it probably did not draw in too many people to comment on the articles, hence the change in the design. Among the changes to the comment system is the fact that avatars and gravatars can be used with your account. You will find a new option in your account options page.

Did you find an interesting article? Share it with your friends easily. Underneath articles there is a ‘Shareit’ button that links to popular social networking sites such as facebook and myspace. You can give other people links to that specific article with your myspace and facebook accounts. Or, you can email yourself a copy and print it off later!

Although there are new features, I am definitely not done updating the website. There will be design fixes and enhancements as time goes on. So stay tuned for a lot more.

Here is a design I made for a MyBB forum:

I enjoyed making the design. I wanted to make sure that when you first see the forum, you are immersed into a world of family guy. The way that the logo is branded into the rest of the forum makes it more of an ‘official’ family guy forum feel. I added some css effects to make the navigation interesting and the color scheme fits the overall design, I feel. For never touching MyBB until this project, I would say I learned a lot!

I noticed that it was alot easier to make a forum design compared to other bulletin board software such as IPB and vBulletin due to the search feature in the template area. I loved the feature of MyBB and I used it quite a bit. Kudos to the MyBB developers.

I have decided that I will be changing my personal blog into more of a web design blog that promotes more of my projects that I have started recently. Some of the things that will be available here at TanTuohy.com will be:

1. Wordpress themes
2. Zetaboard themes
3. Invisionfree skins

Stay tuned for more updates! You can see a zetaboard theme I am currently working on below (adminhq):

http://s1.zetaboards.com/adminhq/index/

You probably don’t know this, but the student run CSBSJU campus newspaper, The Record, will be getting a face lift during the coming weeks. There will be alot of new features added and the currently outdated design will be updated to WEB2.0-ish looks. The objective of the change is to not only to be more professional, but to increase online activity on articles. Hopefully after the new and improved campus newspaper website is up we will see more comments on articles written by our students.

Here are some projected changes:

1. Modern web layout
2. Photo gallery / Images with articles
3. Polls
4. SEO (search engine optimization)
5. Tag Cloud
6. Videos

You can visit The Record by the following link:

http://www.csbsju.edu/record

If you think there could be any improvements or you have a comment please forward them to me, Tan Tuohy, the web editor of The Record (CSBSJU Campus Newspaper).

I have no idea that happened over at CSB but it did. Someone vandalized the college and they are looking for two males.

Here is the email that I got from the college:

Early this morning two male individuals took a fire extinguisher from its case in the Gorecki Center near the men’s restroom, and emptied it into the men’s restroom. The Dean of students has asked me to give those responsible a chance to turn themselves in before we involve the police department. If you are the person (s) responsible for this act, you have until noon tomorrow (Monday), before I turn over the video from the Gorecki camera system over to the police and have them review it and charge you with tampering with a fire suppression system. You can reach me at the numbers listed below or by e-mail. It is your choice as to how you want this to end for you.

I received an email a moment ago from Students Fostering Conservative Thought. Heres the email:

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