Wordpress - Harvard Gazette - How did they do X ?

Question

Hi all,

I just came a cross matt's post on the new Harvard Gazette wordpress based magazine.

This theme is doing some very cool things I would like to know how to do too. So if any one knows of tutorials/plugins on how to do them, please share.

Here are some of the things:

1) Amazing calendar.

2) A very strong multimedia section.

3) A revolving "top news" (which I believe I have seen a plugin that does that)

4) posts from a specific category (I am guessing this is done through games in the loop + good CSS)

Any comment (especially for the first two points), will be greatly welcomed.

Best, Tal

Answer 1

The calendar uses a javascript driven widget - you can get plenty of them if you search for jquery datepicker and it also has some preloaders setup as you can see those spining circles when page loads. The multimedia uses embeded flash video player which is pretty much the standard these days.

I don't understand really what you mean by revolving news so can't help you there, but most of the things that make something move on the page are done with javascript. Posts from specific category? Don't see what so special about that - it's just an sql statement that selects needed posts out of the database.

Answer 2

1) It says at the bottom of the calendar "events calendar powered by Trumba"

2) Just a Flash video player and a post list. You can put all the video posts in their own category and exclude that category from your main post list (see #4).

3) Look up "jQuery carousel". There are a number of versions available that you can easily plug in to WP.

4) Use query posts to alter what posts appear in the main loop, and get posts to create multiple loops in one theme file.