Virginia Tech Themed WordPress Templates

Abstract

Virginia Tech has a WordPress instance available for blogging for VT students, faculty, and staff. They have installed several commercial themes that allow for a variety of customized blog sites. However, they do not have any themes that are developed in line with the Virginia Tech Style Guide. Specifically, the colors and the general layout should be similar to what is available in the university’s current guideline. This project would be developing these themes that could be made available for faculty and departments. Our project deliverables are three Virginia Tech customized themes, with all themes using a drag-and-drop feature. Drag-and-drop is a feature that allows the user to select a virtual object such as textbox, link, video, etc. and drag it into the theme layout. This allows for a more intuitive and easier interface for editing themes. Our client is Dr. Jennifer Sparrow, Sr. Director, Networked Knowledge Ventures and Emerging Technologies, Technology-enhanced Learning and Online Strategies (TLOS). Dr. Sparrow also introduced to us Crystal Farris and Brian Broniak who would be working with us on this project. After our first meeting with our client, they requested a template similar to the www.vt.edu website. This is to present a more unified look across the university. So for our first theme, we created a template based on the Eclipse theme in WordPress. We changed the layout and color to match the www.vt.edu website. For our second template, we decided to use a VT WordPress provided theme. We decided to use the Computer Science courses website to model the template and after looking at the available themes, we decided to use Headway to create the child template. After much consideration and research, we decided to redo our first Eclipse child theme in Headway. For the tools we had at hand, we used BitNami, a WordPress client, together with NotePad++ and Google Chrome Developer tools. For the second template, we used the VT WordPress Blog and Headway visual editor. The developer languages we used were HTML (for the design of the web template), PHP (for the functionalities such as index, posts, images, etc.) and CSS (for creating the style of the web template)