Free Choice Games – A Site Made For WordPress
Site BuildsPublished April 7, 2010 at 12:55 am 3 Comments
FreeChoiceGames.com is a site concept “made” for WordPress, and WordPress really showed the power of the Open Source community, when this site was built and launched in under seven days – by one person (me).
FreeChoiceGames was born out of an idea triggered by a particular WordPress plug-in, and by a desire to try something different. It’s what I call an “itch-scratcher” site. I wanted to try something, and I wasn’t going to be able to settle until I’d done it, therefore it had to be done fast.
It is a site that partially emulates many long-existing sites in that it gathers and presents a large portfolio of free-to-download PC and Mac computer games, categorises them for easy navigation, and offers the option of downloading either the free trial-ware version, or the immediate purchase unlimited version of each game.
Over time, that should be where the similarity ends, and new uses for old WordPress functionality and plug-ins begins. Certainly the looming release of WordPress 3.0 will significantly extend the possibilities with this site.
The core WordPress plug-in (to gather and post info about the games) also styled their appearance as structured blog posts (a major short-cut for a fast launch, though custom styling may be needed or performed later), and it included a list of recommended marketing, SEO, and site management, tools that were also all WordPress plug-ins.
The hardest part of the build was the choice of site theme, and the wrestling with it to create the final modified appearance and functions to fit the site concept. From an extensive search, a short-list was compiled, and I finally settled on the excellent Vina magazine theme by Nurudin Jauhari at wpgpl.com – I’m sure I’ll be using it again on other sites too. It has many very good, inbuilt features, with simple to understand code.
Some of the plug-ins recommended by the game aggregator plug-in have been around a long time, though I’d never tried them before. Two that particularly impressed me right out of the box were Pretty Links and Popularity Contest. The ease of use and configuration, and the wealth of site management data they yield, is a real eye-opener.
From about day five of site development, when I asked a group of friends to perform some rough and ready beta testing and site appraisal, Popularity Contest gave me the granularity and detail I’d never been able to get from my long-term favourite blog statistics tool, WordPress Stats. It also appears to provide far more accurate visitor tracking and page view data.
A bunch of other never-tried-before plug-ins were used in building FreeChoiceGames.com and they too provided some eye-openers, leaving me wondering why I’d never used them, and what other wonders from the WordPress plug-in community I’ve been ignoring. Has a new age of enlightenment dawned for the Gaz?
Watch for reviews and how-to’s for the various WordPress plug-ins, that I used, appearing in wordpressing.gamtep.com. I’ll also be posting some of the hacks and tricks that I used with the Vina theme, including how I identified and fixed a major bug related to a WordPress function, which had been deprecated (killed off) by WordPress and broke a key part of the theme. In fairness to Nurudin, I suspect the version of Vina that I installed, was not his latest version number, and he’s probably already caught and fixed the deprecated get_cats() function, which is now the_categories().
With “the itch” now scratched, there’s more to come for this site …
Fantastic blog, I had not noticed gamtep.com previously during my searches!
Keep up the wonderful work!
Nice content. Thank you for your information.
First of all ,you have picked a really nice template. I think i might design something similar for a future project that i plan to build. On top of that, i honestly enjoy most of your articles and your different point of view. Good Job