January 2, 2009

In the days between Christmas and new year I had a job to do. A WordPress site for a family member that I designed quite some time ago wasn’t really doing the trick any more and I had promised to updated it. I decided to use the Flexx theme from iThemes

Before Christmas I had watched a live screencast demonstrating Flexx. I was really impressed with the features. I was lucky enough to be given a free copy and I was close to creating a new blog just so I would have the chance to use it. Luckily (for my schedule at least) a real project came up where I had the chance to use it.

As I was updating an existing site I didn’t want to vary too much from the layout that was there already. With Flexx I was able to choose where to include the main menu in relation to the header, which site the sidebars would be on, even how many sidebars there were, whether to include wigitised areas at the top and bottom of the posts, etc. I was able to do a good job of replicating the layout of the original site very easily.

The next step was updating the header. I used the old image from the site, cropped it a little to size and used the image manager built into Flexx to upload it. Flexx allows for several images to be uploaded and it will fade between them at specified intervals. I didn’t need to use that as I was trying not to move too far from the original design; however, the fact that it is there means I can consider some interesting additions to keep the theme fresh without doing too much work.

Putting the menu together was also pretty easy. I used Mark Jaquith’s Page Links To plugin to create pages linking to categories on the site and then used Flexx’s menu selector to choose which pages I wanted.

If you’ve been reading this site long you will likely know that I am a bit of a code junkie; I tend to like getting stuck in to the code and as a result tend to dismiss things like widgets as a bit of a gimmick; however, in this cases I didn’t need to and I really noticed how easy it can be. The site I was updating used my Fun with Categories plugin to allow posts to be selected based on both Country and type of post (journal entry or photos) and as such had some extra code to output that. I used my Fun with Theme Widgets plugin to convert this to a widget and then attached it to the sidebar.

I am fully aware that I didn’t use the Flexx theme to anything close to its full potential. What I used it for was very simple and could be accomplished with most themes; however, I do think that it would have been more difficult in most cases. Flexx is certainly a very flexible theme. It has a lot more features that I didn’t touch on here and, although I did get a free copy, I would recommend it to anyone.

*Note, the links to Flexx in this post are all affiliate links meaning I get paid if you buy anything. If you do not want to use these you can go direct to http://www.ithemes.com.

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