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Recently I was asked to design a website for a local drummer in Rochester NY. He is fairly well known for being a great drummer, and he actually has laid down some drum tracks for us. Being the nice guy that I am, I offered to host and set up the site for free in return for him playing drums for us.

This is not the first time I have been asked to set up a band site, but this is the first time I am actually not in the band, so if something breaks or needs updating, I won’t be around to help. So ease of use was my first priority.

I initially thought Wordpress probably wouldn’t be the greatest tool to use for a band site, because I don’t see this person posting blogs once a week, or anything like that. He will need to display upcoming shows, bands he is working with, pictures, and of course have a guestbook of some sort for feedback. I have wanted to learn Cakephp, so I saw this as an opportunity to use it. I started developing a site, with a guestbook, show calendar, news blog, and a picture section. I even set up an admin part of the site, so this person could manage everything from one spot. Cakephp makes it really easy to get simple database interactions done quickly, but I found it difficult to really customize some things (partly because I am not a cakephp or php expert).

So back to the drawing board; I got thinking, basically all I was missing was a way to display and manage upcoming shows in Wordpress. I thought there had to be a plugin available that would allow me to do this. After some searching I found the Event Calendar plugin. This plugin allows you to input starting and ending dates for a post, event or in my case a show. The posts are displayed in order of occurrence. Being that these events are really still posts in Wordpress you can style them basically just like you normally would a post. There are also many options available through the plugin itself, as far as displaying certain information, or html tags before and after each event.

Next we need a guestbook! Back in the day when I was blogging with Movabletype I remember reading a blog somewhere that explained how to use Movabletype to run a guestbook. Basically you create a page and then allow comments on this page. Using Wordpress you can accomplish the same thing, as most themes come with page templates with or without comments. So all you have to do is create a new page, and use the page w/ comments template…. bingo…. a guestbook in 2 seconds. I wanted a little more custom look so I created a new template, and changed things up a bit. If what I explained above doesn’t make sense to you, than check out this Guestbook Generator plugin.

Now I needed a way to display photos of his band….new drums…… groupies…… whatever! Depending on the amount of photos you have, you can take the easy (well actually it is hard) way and hard code them into every Wordpress page. I like to do things the hard way, so I set up a Flickr account for this drummer, and used a modded version of my custom photo gallery script to retrieve photos from Flickr and display them on his site. Now I don’t have to teach this person how to code, or even how to ftp them to the site. All he has to do is upload them to Flickr! Harder for me to set up, but easier on me in the long run!

So there you have it…. a quick overview of one way to use wordpress to develope a band’s website. I am still currently working on this website, but once it is done I will post a link so everyone can see how it turned out!

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