the Mind’s Chew Toy

As Heather pointed out to me the other day, I always seem to decide to start a site redesign at the most inopportune times. The last one, back in July, kicked off just a few weeks before our wedding. This time around, it’s close to the holidays, and we are busy finishing up the last of our shopping, sending a whole ton of presents via those friendly folks at our neighborhood UPS store, and preparing for a visit from relatives. What can I say? When the urge to redesign overtakes me, I can’t seem to stop it.

This new redesign (which is progressing nicely), is inspired from the Structure theme by Justin Tadlock. Using jquery to make tabs, he’s created an impressive theme that takes the WordPress blog to new heights…and it’s free to download.

After perusing the demo over on the Structure blog post, I was hooked, as I envisioned the changes I could add to really kick the site into a new gear for 2008.

Want to know what’s going to change? Here’s a couple of items we’re implementing:

• The Reviews section (and Previews section) will include (as now) the review (preview)…and it will also include the trailer and photos. This way, all the movie info will be accessible from the same post, negating the need to search around to find the trailer and photos (yes, those categories will disappear).
• We will be implementing “Asides” (thanks in part to the Sideblog WordPress Plugin) to showcase the latest updates for the site, located neatly in a tab on the sidebar.
• There will no longer be a separate page for Keywords. Instead, Justin has created a simple Tag cloud that will highlight the major keywords.
• Pictures, pictures, pictures! As we have already started to do with the PEZ categories, new posts will include a simple picture to highlight their particular topic/category. This may eventually be produced using a Category Images Plugin, but for now we’re adding the pictures manually.

With this update, we hope to make The Mind’s Chew Toy a more streamlined site.

By adding the trailers and photos to the preview/review, we are able to keep all the movie information on one page, thus negating the need to search for the other movie materials on the site. As an added bonus, we will be able to add a trailer to a preview/review with a single line of code, making it easier for us to add the latest and greatest trailers as they appear. And, since the trailers will now be a part of an existing post, we can get rid of the Monday Trailer post, and just notify everyone of the addition through the new Asides.

This let’s us post the newest trailers immediately, without waiting for the next Monday to roll around (at this moment, we already have posts for trailers post-dated all the way into March of 2008). That’s better for us, as we can concentrate on bringing another preview (or Pez photo) or other type of blog post out on Mondays, and it’s better for you, our public, as you can see the trailers (like Iron Man) that much quicker on our site.

Needless to say, with major changes taking place during this site redesign, plus the upcoming Holiday festivities, we haven’t been watching too many movies lately, as evidenced by the lack of new movie reviews this past weekend.

Still, the downtime shouldn’t be too much longer, as the redesign is coming along great! After a bit more work on some category pages, we’re off to see how PHPLD and jquery work together - we’re hoping for the best.

Stay tuned to witness the new redesign!

Updates

• 12.26.07 - As you might have noticed, I’ve started using the new theme, even though it’s not quite finished. I’ll be tweaking it in the next week or so (at least), and I’ve still got to update the PHPLD section (hence no “Links” link on the site at the moment). In the meantime, let me know what you think of the new look!