Recently I had the good fortune of working with Brian Kaufmann at Tipping Media, who contracted me to do the programming end of the website for a program called 50 Ways 5o Days. My job was to convert Tipping Media’s design to a WordPress theme, write two custom plugins, and integrate Facebook Connect. Overall, this was a really fun project to work on- I got to do some pretty cool stuff.

Theme development went very smoothly thanks to Tipping Media’s great design and markup. I added some custom functionality to the theme to make the suggested activities work nicely with the sliding boxes on each page and did a bit of custom programming to number the pages on the left hand side.I also added and configured some standard WordPress plugins.

For plugin development, I wrote two to collect data from the user, both manageable from WordPress admin panel. One allows the users to share stories, which are then verified by the website administrator. Once the story is accepted, it’s added as a blog post to the “Stories” category. The second allows the user to “pledge” to do an activity, which is then stored in a database for the website administrator. That information is sortable by category and activity, and can also be exported to Excel. Both plugins also use the “Fancyzoom” effect which adds a pop-up box for the forms. Facebook Connect was also integrated to allow users to ‘announce’ their pledge on Facebook. Once they make the pledge, they are encouraged to post to their profile.

All in all, the project was a fun one to work on and I hope to work with Brian and Tipping Media again in the future!