Their marketing director was looking for new ways to connect with their current clients and customer base but didn’t have to budget to do a full redesign of their web site. Recreating the current site’s structure and design in WordPress, adding social sharing and other functionality with plugins and widgets  looked like the solution but there would be challenges in the project.

• There were over 300 html files on the existing site without much organization. A major overhaul of the web site had apparently been done 6 or 7 years ago but the earlier generation of files had not been deleted. Internal links and navigation menus were a mess.
• A two column front page that pulled post lists from different categories needed to be built and it had to be editable by the client. Templates for other special page types would need to be created.
• Oradell needed a way to manage their busy calendar of events which included everything from special lectures to pet bereavement group session at multiple locations.
• A large amount of content had been collected over the years that needed curating and conversion including profiles and pictures of 100 doctors and staff. I would need to duplicate their doctor-popup windows.

Lisa Davis, Oradell’s director of marketing and I worked our way through the content sorting the pages into a navigable hierarchy. We played with the front page’s features and layout over the course of the project until it finally looked and felt right. I built a special template for the Services & Staff pages that included a dynamically generated menu of all of the hospital’s departments. Each department’s page is a child page of the Services & Staff page.

I installed the WordPress events manager. This is a powerful piece of programming. It’s highly configurable and easy to use but, otoh, required a lot of configuration for Oradell’s requirements.

The most fun was writing shortcodes – one to show posts from a specific category in the content of a page and another to insert a doctor or staff profile in a post or page. The first  shortcode:

[showposts category="featured" display="title"]

in the content of a page produces a listing of permalinked post titles in the “featured” category. The other choices for the display option are “excerpt” and “post”. These are used throughout the site.

The doctor shortcode was more complicated because doctor information needed to be displayed in different contexts with different requirements: in the body of a post, on the various departments pages and in the complete directory of personnel. For each doctor or staff member, the profile consisted of the person’s name, academic credentials, job title, image and bio. Since several of their doctors were interested in blogging, I decided to register all the doctors and staff as blog contributors and use the extra IM user fields to store the titles and credentials. For example, using this shortcode in a post:

[doctor name="John Dolittle" role="true" creds="true" hide="false"]

will cause Dr. Dolittle’s (not an real Oradell employee) complete profile to be inserted, including his credentials and job title following his name plus the bio with a left-aligned photograph. Setting the hide parameter to “true” will hide the bio and photo but with a jQuery toggle, Somewhat like this:

John Dolittle, DVM, MD – Chief of Staff

Dr. John Dolittle lives in a little town called, Puddleby-on-the-Marsh in a little house on the edge of the town. The house was quite small; but his garden was very large and had a wide lawn and stone seats and weeping-willows hanging over. He is very fond of animals and keeps many kinds of pets. Besides the gold-fish in the pond at the bottom of his garden, he has rabbits in the pantry, white mice in his piano, a squirrel in the linen closet and a hedgehog in the cellar.

All in all, I liked working on the new Oradell website. It presented interesting challenges and the people I worked with were wonderful.

This is important news. Not because it challenges Microsoft’s dominance of the PC operating system market, as stressed in the New York Times article on the announcement, but because it’s a sign that we are heading to another sweet spot in the information technology revolution. A sweet spot is where hardware, software and cultural trends come together to make complex tasks much easier and cheaper to accomplish. The effect transforms society enabling new ways for people to interact. For example, in 1994, reliable, dial-up Internet service met the graphical Web browser, Mosaic, just as Al Gore re-invented the Internet as an open platform for business, entertainment and the free, global exchange of information and ideas.

Here are the important trends today: A new generation of high-speed WiFi based on freed up broadcast spectrum from the conversion to digital TV is on its way and will meet up with new portable devices that are fun to use and cheap to own. After Google Chrome OS goes open-source, there should be versions available for everything from X-Boxes to old TiVo machines.

Speaking of Tivo, the recent Supreme Court decision to deny the appeal in the Cablevision DVR case highlights another trend. Cablevision wanted to provide DVR services upstream on their servers. The broadcast networks held that this was making copies for redistribution and, thus, they should pay royalties. The Appeals Court ruling, which the Supremes let stand, held that, once the consumer paid a license for a piece of content, it didn’t matter where it was stored on the consumer’s behalf—on a local hard drive or somewhere in the cloud.  This decision lays the groundwork for challenging all the restrictions that the telco, broadcast and cable monopolies, place on how, where and when we do anything.

Here’s my last trend to watch: A month ago, the state of Vermont OK’d the formation of virtual corporations by a change in its tax laws. This means that corporations (LLCs) in Vermont no longer need to have a physical mailing address and can conduct online board meetings.

An important conclusion was missed in the Vermont reporting – a corporation can have bank accounts and credit cards. This is a privilege hitherto granted by our government only to corporations and individuals and denied to such entities as: MeetUp groups and SecondLife communities. The effect of this, as Clay Shirky points out in Here Comes Everybody, limits our ability to leverage the Internet, with social media tools, to organize and engage in collective actions other than protest movements.

How will society change in the next two or three years when all of us are connected to a World Wide Web of rich media, all the time, in devices on us and around us; with fast, friendly software that knows about us, our friends and the tribes we associate with; when the last geographic and cost barriers to collaborative action for the common good are gone?

Howard proposed a robust set of features to showcase their familiarity with leading edge, social media technologies and services. The specifications called for an integrated BBs, an event manager, feature-rich videos, a Flash-powered header with a customized navigation menu tying it all together. Howard and I knew we were pushing the limits of WordPress and that’s what the client wanted to show off.

We started with a three column theme, Seashore by Sadish Bala. I added a video presentation space on top of the  sidebars and a game space below. With a bit of work, I was able to shoehorn the custom flash video the lawyers designed into the header code and replaced the generated navigation menu with a two-level structure.

The four lawyers were already blogging on other sites. This was their first opportunity, not only to write under their own brand, but to actually craft that brand as publishers and editors. As they began to post articles, they became concerned about their authorship rights —they’re IP lawyers, remember, and important ones at that! So, as we neared completion of the project, new feature requests started creeping in.

They wanted special lawyer profile pages so they could edit in additional content about themselves. These page would feature a portrait image and an expanded contact section with a download-able, virtual address card. For these special pages, I cloned the standard single page template and modified it to fetch the page author’s portrait photo from a sub directory of /wp-content. I setup custom fields for the contact information and displayed those next to the portrait image. Following that, I formatted a box to display the most recent posts by that author. Finally, I displayed whatever content they wanted to add via the post editor. Click here to see some of the code.

The head partner of the IP division liked the profile page so much that he wanted a special version just for himself that also displayed  any press articles written about him. I figured out how to accomplish that using a custom post field and some more template programming.

They also wanted to post co-authored articles. I know that there was third-party plug-in that did something like that, but at this late stage of the project, it was easier to add more template modifications to get exactly the functionality the client wanted. The solution we devised features a double portrait image, double email links and a hook to pick up the post for the special lawyer profile pages.

It’s been exciting to watch this blog progress from it’s initial launch last month. Everything we did is being used by the client and it’s all working well.

Google Chrome is a minimalist’s browser. It doesn’t offer a multitude of features, but it’s very fast and solid as a rock. It relies heavily on tabs when visiting different sites and each tab runs in its own process. This keeps the browser from crashing from a page error or some misbehaved plug-in, and prevents pages in the background from slowing down the foreground window. I like Chrome’s history function. When you open a new tab or window it displays thumbnails and links to your most recently vistited pages.

Chrome offers a single address bar for both URLs and keywords. Google is the default search engine, but it can be switched to others—Wikipedia, Aol, Yahoo, etc. The address bar has a fast auto-suggest function. For flying around the Web from site to site, Chrome is a jet fighter. However, if you mostly stay put on a collection of actively fed “home” pages, Flock may be the browser for you. It’s a mega-cruise ship.

Flock is Firefox on social media steroids. Flock takes a framed approach to visiting the Social Media Web, grabing feeds from places, such as: Facebook, Twitter and MySpace into sidebars and YouTube selections into a headband. Flock works best opened full-screen on a big, wide, LCD display. Beware! The shear number and variety of tool bars, control tabs, bookmarks, menus and search boxes can overwhelm.

Flock, by default, remembers the sites you had loaded when you last quit and reopens them. It also opens a generated page, “My World” that captures all your various feeds, messages and pings.  I like the way Flock integrates with Gmail, and find it useful as an “active desktop” – a one-stop site that I scan every so often to keep in the mix as I’m doing other work. Flock pops-up a standard blog editor when I want to post something and just about anything can be shared with a drag-n-drop action.

The online support documentation provided by the these two new browsers also provide a facinating contrast. Google wrote a Chrome comic book that teaches you how to use Chrome with a technical depth that’s actually readable. Flock has uploaded a series of youTube videos showing Flock’s Features in action. Check it out, you’ll get a better idea of what Flock is like and I won’t have to insert a screenshot here.

Google Chome is only available now for Windows. When it becomes available for the Mac, I’ll probably be using both Flock and Chrome more often than Firefox and Safari.

— Larry