Want to help save the planet? @edadkins and I created Globes for the Globes (NSFW 18+) to help spread tips that will help the earth.

Ed already wrote about why we made the website, which you can read here. I wanted to quickly talk about what went into making it happen and why we used WordPress to power the whole thing.

WordPress is obviously a blogging platform but the fact that it is lightweight and customization is only limited to the developer’s imagination and knowledge of PHP and the WordPress core.

Plugins used:

TDO Mini Forms
Used for image submission. TDO Mini Forms takes the content entered on the G4tG submission page and creates a draft post in WordPress. We are alerted of new posts and can approve or reject those posts.

Popular Posts + Post-Plugin Library
Used for displaying the most viewed images in the sidebar. This plugin and the post-plugin library offers a very robust set of features for filtering and displaying your posts based on related content, highest number of page views and more.

Ad-minister
Used to display our Partner Sites. Ad-minister is another plugin with a very rich feature set including the ability to track ads and an ad’s individual cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-impression(CPM) in terms of impressions and clicks.

Akismet
Our spam fighting power, thanks to WordPress

I’m 18 or Over

Due to the content of the website, we decided to hide the actual images until someone clicks on the “I’m 18 or over” button. We’re using Javascript to set a cookie indicating that the user wishes to turn off the image filter. Setting cookies via Javascript is pretty simple and because they are set in the browser, we can access the cookies later via PHP for showing, or in this case, hiding certain content including the “Flag This” links, most viewed images in the sidebar, and of course our unicorn gatekeeper.

The ability to set, retrieve, and manage cookies within a WordPress theme is a pretty slick way to show content or display options to a viewer. As soon as I get some downtime, I’m going to make it into a plugin that will allow cookies and related template tags, such as <?php if(is_18()) ?> to be created through the admin panel for use in existing themes.

Flag Content

Once the image filters are turned off, each image also has a “Flag this” link that sends a notification to us indicating that someone believes the content to be offensive or have comprised our system somehow.

This was a really fun project to work on and Georgette and Shone over at Bohocrush (NSFW 18+) are awesome as always to work with. We look forward to more community and collaborative efforts in the future.

Tags: Design, earth day, g4tg, Wordpress

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 at 11:11 am and is filed under Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.