WordPress and the City of Albert Lea

I recently customized a WordPress CMS template for the City of Albert Lea. We started with a theme by Brian Gardner called “Revolution City,” which I’m not sure he is distributing at the moment. Anyway, Gardner provided us with an excellent starting point. We also used the Suckerfish plugin for our dropdown menus.

The city requested that, in addition to navigation across the top of the site, they wanted navigation down the left side as well. This was a feature that was especially important to a few of the departments who had a number of pages that they wanted to make available for viewing. The side navigation is visible on all pages except the home page.

It was tricky to get this side navigation because some sections had far too many children pages, and it was important to present only the children who were descendants of a very specific parent. I figured the best way to do this was to create a template for each section that both required their own side navigation and that had a good number of children and grandchildren. (I realize I’m sounding more like a genealogist than a web developer.)

We ended up with a site that appears to be fairly easy to navigate. And the real upside to using WordPress as a content management system is that the administrative interface is remarkably easy to use. Furthermore, WordPress released version 2.7, which allows upgrades to be made automatically. To whomever did the work to get automatic upgrades working, I say, “Thank you!” WordPress rules.

Here’s an article about the project in the Albert Lea Tribune.