The page is 960 pixels wide with half that for main content and a quarter on each side for the sidebar content.  Throw in some 10-pixel margins and it looks suspiciously like the 960 Grid System although we’re not actually using that stylesheet.  However we are using the YUI reset and fonts stylesheets to have a clean set of default styles to build on, and serving them from Yahoo! for efficiency.  Headings use the CSS 3 @font-face rule for something a bit more interesting than the usual set of web fonts.

Instead, I’ve manually added a link to the gallery at the top of the page, and a random image in the sidebar. Gallery2 provided everything I needed for the random image, with me just copying this line into the sidebar code:

<?php @readfile(‘http://sunriseruby.org/gallery/main.php?g2_view=imageblock.External&g2_blocks=randomImage’); ?>

Once I got over my initial hesitation to edit the theme code, that was much easier for me than trying to figure out how to make the plugin behave as I wanted with a severe shortage of documentation. I should note that my hesitation to edit the code was my uncertainty over best-practices with WordPress, not any squeamishness about PHP code.

The downsides of this simple approach are:

• separate accounts for each application
• coordinating two different themes
• no navigation from the gallery back to the main site

The third point is the one that most bothers me; I actually prefer to not have everyone who might post here also uploading photos to the gallery, and the styles for this part of the site might not be what looks best for the gallery. So as I have time I’ll see about making an obvious link from the gallery back to the main site&emdash;the gallery header logo needs customization anyways.

I intend to encourage our readers to leave comments, so I’ll make that as easy as I can while still keeping the spammers out.

Thanks again for visiting