Habitat For Humanity

I originally designed and built a site for Habitat for Humanity of the Chesapeake using a custom-built PHP content management system.

The CMS allowed non-technical Habitat employees to edit and preview the site right from their pages.

The CMS also allowed users to create blog posts, create events, and keep track of their front page featured images and captions easily.

Soon after I turned the site over to them WordPress 3.0 became available. I use WordPress a lot and had determined that it wasn’t the right fit for Habitat, but this new version resolved all of those issues and made it the best choice for them moving forward. So I ported my system into WordPress for them, and the new WordPress site will launch in 2011.

Here are a few examples of the WordPress features I’ve used in developing for Habitat so far.

Custom Post Types

I created the “Events” type and the “Features” type so that users can add these as easily as possible.

Sidebars

WordPress gives you the option to register multiple sidebars, but I wanted to give these users the ability to create new sidebars on the fly and assign them to a page without having to know any PHP or custom code. They can create a sidebar from the Sidebars page.

And they can assign them per page by choosing from a dropdown box of available sidebars.