Background:
The FPIP.com website was 5 years old and they wanted a refresh. The First Philippine Industrial Park (FPIP) manages a large area in the CALABARZON (Cavite Laguna Batangas Rizal Quezon) region an hour south of Manila. It is the home of 139 manufacturers in 34 categories ranging from heavy machinery, automobile, aerospace, food production and computer parts from 13 countries.
We settled on using Featured Pro theme from Themehunk.com because of its one – page scrolling feature and the ability to use some of the terrific hi res aerial images of the property available to me.
If you have images like this as great as this, you have to make use of them as best as you can:
What Makes It Different
The project came with a flat Excel file of 139 ‘Locators’ or companies categorized by industry with description, country of origin and ‘tier’ or the size of their operation. The old website only listed them down alphabetically and I wanted to improve on that by allowing them to be listed down by category, country and tier. There are a few more special plugins I used particularly that involving the importing of all the company logos, but these were the notable ones.
- WP All Import – WP All Import is a very powerful plugin that allows you to migrate data from xls, xml or csv format and even images into wordpress categories, posts or pages.
- Simple Taxonomy Refreshed – WordPress by default only has one taxonomy which is the generic ‘category’ and tags. I had to add a couple more so I used this plugin to add ‘country’ and ‘tier’.
- Content Views – This is similar to Drupal’s ultra powerful ‘Views’ module. Once you have taxonomy to categorize your data with you will then need to display it in some way and this is the solution.
These plugins convert WordPress from a simple blogging platform to a true Content Management System (CMS) that can display large amounts of content in various ways. That’s usually the sort of stuff Drupal is great for but this time with the simplicity and ease of use of WordPress.
The only thing left to do is move it to the appropriate domain which should be any day now.
