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.