Attentionsw.org – Simone Weil Site
New work published live this week, attentionsw.org This was kind of a fun site to build, while it is in many ways a ideal site for WordPress, I did have to set up a good number of customizations in function and form. This project had a soft deadline, but we started early enough that I was not rushed and had time to really think thru the details and build the site in an organized way. Kinetik designed the site.
The site is a compendium(?) of content and references about Simone Weil, the sister of Andre Weil, the famous mathematician. She was a philosopher, and her work and writings became noticed and respected after she died. There are three different types of content, normal posts that have content on this site, posts that are essentially just a reference to content elsewhere, such as a video, and lastly items that don’t really have content or can point to content, just a title for example, and maybe a bibliographic reference. Since the item might be a book that is out of print, there is no way to reference it.
The sections of the site are color branded, and there are issues, like a magazine. So periodically, the owner will publish new content and create an issue, this group of items is what is shown on home page. There is also an archive so that previous issues can be browsed and viewed as if they were the home page.
The project also involved importing hundreds of entries that make up the content of the site. Kinetik copy/pasted items into a spreadsheet format that I set. I then had to automagically and manually clean up the content, make sure quote marks and italic content carried thru properly, and format the spreadsheet content into an xml file that can I could import into WordPress and populate all the necessary fields for each post. So, once imported the content does not need to be adjusted or edited. It is cool to import a file and immediately have a bunch of content, but it can be a real pain to get it set up. Lots of details to work out and each and every one must be right.