Where Soldiers Come From

Custom WordPress site for an award-winning independent documentary

A static HTML site for this independent documentary was my first ‘real world’ project as I began my journey into Web design and development several years ago. As the film got wider distribution (including airing on PBS), it needed a touch-up to match the poster and DVD art that didn’t exist when the site first launched. This was a golden opportunity to move it to a CMS; so I chose WordPress, because that’s what everybody uses, right?

I toyed with the idea of building a child theme on top of a theme framework, but it seemed like kind of overkill for what’s really a fairly uncomplicated layout. So I fired up Notepad++, Codex at my side, and away I went! I used Matt Mullenweg’s old reliable image rotator script (with an additional nugget of cache-busting PHP) to rotate the images on the inside pages and the Black Studio TinyMCE Widget to make it easy for the client to spiff up the text widget in the sidebar.