Adam reviewed the code for ShadowBox, the new WordPress theme I developed and installed it in on WordPress at Midd. Of course, I immediately used it on our CT team blog and took advantage of some of its capabilities to give a sense of the new possibilities for layout and presentation that it introduces.
I should make it clear that this theme doesn’t introduce any functionality that other themes haven’t explored. It is modeled first and foremost on Kubrick, the default WordPress theme. In addition to this basic theme, I looked at a number of the most popular themes at wordpress.org including Atahualpa, Ahimsa, iNove to get a sense of the direction of theme development in the WordPress community.
I am hoping this will help us determine where we want to publish our work. In particular, whether we want to merge all of our work into the new LIS blog and discontinue this blog or perhaps keep this blog around an example of innovative uses of WordPress…
I am wondering whether or not the curricular technology team is going to move its blog into the LIS blog? What blogs within LIS are not going to be consolidated into the new LIS blog?
Mike, the CT Team blog was moved into the LIS blog last Friday (note the URL if viewing in a browser). The old URLs automatically redirect into the LIS blog to preserve existing permalinks. Some feed readers will also transparently follow the redirects so an existing subscription to the CT Team blog will now show items from the LIS blog.
As for other blogs, I have no idea. Our thought with moving the CT Team blog is that this blog’s purpose was to provide information and updates to LIS staff as well as faculty; consolidating with the LIS blog improves the ability to fulfill that purpose by increasing the number of eyeballs on our posts. Other blogs with divergent purposes — say, exploring the integration of blogging and Facebook by trying out various plugins to each — might be less appropriate for merging with the LIS blog.
As we were informed by the LIS website team, informational blogs are likely good candidates for a merger, but it is up to those doing the blogging to make the decision to merge or not.