So last week the new and improved Rachel Corrie Foundation website went live in the wee hours of the morning before I hopped on British Air flight 48 and spent 12 hours, three glasses of Merlot and an in-flight viewing of The Transformers to get back to London, Maryam, and The Bump who will be “Jasper“.

More on Bump later. For those keeping track at home, though, I got off the airplane with just enough hours to spare to make it to the appointment where we found out that Bump has an xy — as opposed to an xx — heteromorphic chromosome combination. Apparently some people make a big to-do over this when shopping for color-coordinated onesies and booties. We were more than pleased enough to see that Bump is healthy and with all parts coming in as expected. Updated ultrasound photo coming.

RCF.org has been the project I’ve been focusing on for most the summer, and had a couple different permutations. Sort of like Bump, I guess, it could have gone xx or xy.

I made the new RCF.org site under the Movement Studio banner, which is rounding up quite a roster of nonprofit organizations looking for affordable for spiffy design that keeps the focus on the content. Open source tools keep prices down and Movement Studio’s need to actually like the organizations for which it works means the dedication level goes up.

We decided to continue uising happy, friendly open-sourced WordPress to run the site and to it added PHPlist for electronic and snail-mail sign-ups. I’m still a big fan of WordPress — in spite of some of the initial goofyness that transpired with the initial release of 2.3 — and, well, PHPlist is a strong system, but not the most intuitive, friendly, or maneuverable. But it’s the best that’s out there among both open source and many pay-for services. Still, if anyone has any leads contrary to that assertion, I’d love to check them out.

The main site design is derived from a heavily altered version of the very fine theme Suhweet 1.0 + Widgets by Michael D. Pollock, and also includes a few lines of php here and there from the theme Victoria, by Desperate Curiosity. Initially, I was going with Victoria all the way and was at one point about to release the site with that theme, but ran into a number of problems involving image handling. Victoria was a beautiful theme. the big, sad eyes in the logo photo, the long legs of text blocks and ample footer were all attractive. But in the end, she was high maintenance, and fell apart easily under stress.

At right, I’m including the design I made with Victoria. I still like it for a number of reasons, mostly all aesthetic, but the design we went with was a bit easier on the eye, and more sturdy for the rigors of a website meant for lots of updates from multiple participants.

Suwheet does that and allows for a lot more customization and departure from the framework it provides, and holds up well. RCF has a lot going on and needed a site that reflected the diversity of projects under way. I wanted different sections to have unique designs and color schemes and even typography but wanted it all to be on a single installation of WordPress.

We licensed content on rachelcorriefoundation.org with an Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported Creative Commons license. Why anyone still uses the © is beyond me. What I’m waiting for is some sort of HTML numeric code to create a ‘cc’ in a circle. I’ve been a fan of the cc for a while, though. It does everything you want with a © while still letting fans of your content know what they can do with it.

I’m always thankful for the number of WordPress and php coders out there working on plugins. These ingenious scraps of php, java, etc., are indispensable for any somewhat meaty website to operate, especially outside a typical blog format, and RCF.org uses a number of them.

At the bottom of many of websites you often see a credit offered for the platform, and usually a theme if it’s based off of another one. As a designer, it’s one of the first places I tend to check out when I like the look and usability of a website. But you seldom see any credit given to the plugins working behind the scenes. One reason is that this could potentially take up a lot of space for what is essentially meta data. Still good plugins deserve some credit.

A lot of plugins make promises. These ones deliver and do so regardless of web browser, computer platform, theme choice, etc. If you’re developing a website, may I readily suggest the following:

Advanced TinyMCE Editor by Michael K. Bergman; Akismet by Matt Mullenweg
Anarchy Media Player by An-archos; BDP List Widget and c6-Excerpt by Bryan Palmer; Category Visibility-RH Rev by Brett Terpstra; cforms by Oliver Seidel Rich Hamilton; Force Category Template by Mark Jaquith; GoodSearch widget by Chris Jackson; Google Analytics plugin by Johann Richard; Google Sitemaps plugin by Arne Brachhold; ImageManager by Per Soderlind; iMax Width by Erich Luedtke;
Irrepressible.Fragments Widget by e.; Limit Categories by Owen Winkler; My Category Order by froman118; NextGEN Gallery by NextGEN DEV-Team; Role Manager by Thomas Schneider;Sideblog Wordpress Plugin by Kates Gasis; Simple Forum by Andy Staines; Single Bookmark Category List by Azmeen
Sticky Menu by Ericdes; the_excerpt Reloaded by Kaf ; Ultimate Tag Warrior by Christine Davis; WP-o-Matic by Guillermo Rauch; and WP lightbox JS by Safirul Alredha.

Ok, geek fest is now over. Back to your lives.

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