Deadhouse Gates

Over the summer I’ve been testing various types scripts, plugins and cms’s to complete my blog/website the way I want it. It has really taken its toll with a lot of searching and modifications of various types. I ended up using wordpress as my base back-end with some modifications. One of the reasons for choosing WordPress is due to the highly customizable profile and it’s very easy to use. Not to mention all the possible plugins available.

I have also been looking into variations of wordpress, E.G. custom built themes to act as more of a CMS than a regular blog. To make it easier to build my whole site around the wordpress template. A good friend of mine bought a WP-Remix developer license earlier this summer, just a few days after it was released in 2.0 version. I tested it shortly on my own local test server, but found some security issues with it that I wrote about in a previous blog post.

This was eventually fixed by the developers of WP-Remix, and a new file released to the buyers. My friend also got this update eventually, but I no longer had the copy I borrowed to test it out more thoroughly. So instead I used my friend test site to try and get more friendly with WP-Remix. I must say that I just loved it! Its so damn easy to customize, and comes with tons of templates for main content and sidebars.
But in the end I didn’t choose to buy a WP-Remix license, reason for this is that its missing some key features I want, and the script doesn’t work well with some of the more popular and common plugins (I don’t want to go into more detail about this… yet)

My choice ended up with Arthemia Premium theme by Michael Jubel Hutagalung. The theme looks nice, and has some wonderful options. It has plenty of nifty little things included, and its very easy to customize, both from options and code change. It comes with a very detailed documentation, and the coding itself is very nicely commented and detailed. I didn’t manage to get everything up and running before I went on vacation, but most of it is just fixing up some old blog post and re-enter some old content I have on www.w2r.net, which needs to be rewritten and updated of course.

I’ve been having some trouble with my contact form, so its disabled for the time being. Some pages might look messy, but don’t mind it, I’ll make a special blog post as soon as my site is out of the beta stage. I hope to have it done but the middle or end of November (I still got over 3 weeks of vacation left, so not home until the end of October).

Until then, take care everyone!