BodyKore – Fitness Equipment and MMA Apparel

Written on Friday, October 9th, 2009 | Filed under: Featured, Projects

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BodyKore already had an ecommerce store online and was looking for a way to market the company’s products.  They approached us recently to help them set up a blog and the project took off a bit more ambitious than originally thought.

The end result is a blog platform powered by WordPress with a custom theme developed by me.  Some of the custom features were to use WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS) so they are able to showcase product reviews, have an event schedule, feature profiles of team members or fighters and introduce gyms that are partnered with BodyKore.

The original mock-up in Photoshop involved a three column layout with recent articles on the inner sidebar and advertisement on the outside sidebar.  It became apparent that the spacing required would make the sidebars too thin for content so a two-column layout was chosen instead.

Through careful coding, the theme does not require much third party plugin’s to work with and thus keeps loading times to a minimum.  There is a combination of jQuery and Flash to add aesthetic appeal for interactivity.  The main feature content originally used the FeatPlug plugin but the plugin did not play nice with jQuery so in the actual theme is hardcoded to offer a rotating feature content without the need of a plugin.

One of the discoveries for this project was a plugin for WordPress called Pods, CMS plugin, that extends functionality for WordPress core and allows for programming in PHP.  It is a bit like CCK/Views for Drupal which you are able to create your own content types and then display it either in a page or call it from the theme’s template.  It’s quite robust and powerful.  The only downside is my current lack of knowledge of PHP and issue of Pods using a separate database.

You can visit the completed website project at http://bodykore.com.

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