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New Work at Nature Visions

Nature Visions 2013 LogoI’ve been away from the site for a while, but hope to be back to posting on a semi-regular basis.  The last few weeks my vocation has been taking up an inordinate amount of my time, and I accepted a volunteer role as the primary webmaster for the Nature Visions Mid Atlantic Photo Expo, a local nature photography exhibit that attracts hundreds of entries each year.

Updating the website was quite a bit of work, there are 13 presenters and 21 presentations that required updated pages/posts, tons of linkages to other websites and a tremendous number of functional fixes.  The theme that is being used is quite dated and created menus based on the page hierarchy, which meant the only posts were related to the blog.

I found code that allowed me to add the PHP code necessary to integrate the WordPress 3.x menus, which caused a Z-index issue that had the menu displaying below galleries and sliders on certain pages.  After I got that fixed for every browser to which I had easy access, someone else experienced the issue running a 64-bit version of Chrome (or at least Chrome running on a 64-bit version of Windows 7).

Also on the agenda was creating pages with lists of things like presenters and presentations.  Fortunately I found WP List Posts Shortcode that creates lists of posts by Category, and Posts by Tag that creates lists of posts by Tag(s).  These two plugins allowed me to simply categorize and tag presentations and presenter information, updating the relevant pages automatically.  I also stumbled upon an RSS feed plugin called RSS Multi Importer that allows us to import posts from the presenters’ RSS feeds and add them to the presenter’s page automatically.  Together I believe that these plugins make the site appear more professional, which is not bad for a non-profit organization.

Ultimately this is all part of my goal of paying to back to a community that has provided so much to me without reservation.