Zelda Universe – Revamp’d Fansite in WordPress

  • Zelda Universe, the internet’s biggest Zelda fansite, relaunched just over a month ago with a brand new layout and all-new content. But a lot of people don’t realize that the backend was moved from Joomla! to WordPress.

    I’m a huge WordPress fanatic and use it for most of my sites, with the exception of Zelda Wiki.org, which uses MediaWiki. So, as soon as I stepped into control of ZU, I said: Man, this place needs some WordPress love (not that I just randomly stepped in and took the place over – I’d been an avid user, staff member and webmaster for four years).

    It took a good while to figure out how to get WordPress to behave as a serious content management system, but I think it’s been pulled off rather well. There’s a slew of plugins; if WordPress wasn’t as wonderfully extensible as it is, this whole project might not have worked. We even wrote our own custom plugins for some parts of the site.

    I waited a month to show this off because we launched initially with a bunch of bugs and issues (the current forum template is actually being redone because there are so many bugs). A good amount of those have been weeded out… and now it’s something, I think, to be proud of. A gigantic non-blog site being run entirely by WordPress – I really, really had in mind the goal of showing off what WordPress can really do when put to work. The project, from start to finish, took ten months with a professional designer and a gracious coder, and a whole bunch of will power and work ethic.

    So… what do you think?

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • Congratulations! After many months of staring at PHP, XHTML, CSS files and the lot, you deserve a break! Cheers.

    Wow, it’s pretty amazing…

    My personal opinion, which I wouldn’t give unless you were asking, is that it’s a bit 1995 portaly-looking compared to the current web trends, but of course with the amount of content you have, there isn’t much else to do with it.

    I think the template is obviously a beautiful illustration, and you can tell the efforts that were put into it to make it work correctly were not in vain.

    Good job to everyone!

    On shorter single post pages the advertising banner at the bottom of the left column is causing a problem.

    In both Safari and Firefox 3, the banner disappears nicely behind the bottom of the stone column, but then ends up hanging out of the bottom of the whole template.

    Wow. I’m impressed. Good work.

    Thread Starter goldenchaos

    (@goldenchaos)

    @johnpope: Yes, I’m aware of this issue. I actually just stuck that banner in yesterday, and my co-webmaster Scott needs to tinker with the way the sidebars work to make it so that the height of the layout is determined by what’s on the sidebars if the inner content is too short. That should fix the problem.

    The whole banner looks sloppy, really, because I quickly whipped up a widget for it after the ad company told me I wasn’t making enough money :<… so yeah, it’ll be prettified.

    Hopefully I’ll catch him around today. There are quite a few fixes and changes that need to be made ASAP.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • The topic ‘Zelda Universe – Revamp’d Fansite in WordPress’ is closed to new replies.

Tags