Chameleon-like look and feel
One goal when launching these blogs was for them to look and feel just like rest of the National Geographic Society sites in order to maintain a consistent visitor experience. Using the Carrington Core theme framework the WordPress blogs have been built to appear nearly identical to the rest of the sites and allow navigation in and out of WordPress without realizing it.
Photo galleries and video
The National Geographic Society is well known for its stunning photography and we helped create a way to expose a post’s attachments in a easy-to-browse gallery. In short, if an author has uploaded photos to the current post and enabled the custom “gallery” functionality, a JavaScript thumbnail carousel appears and loads in each image along with the title and description. Also, authors may instead define an oEmbed-friendly video URL to have the video embedded at the top of the post.
Comments from the authors
As with many high-profile blogs, it may be hard to tell who is a representative of the current article. For the Energy Challenge blogs, we added conditional logic to include a background “wash” treatment to see at-a-glance who is a representative of the blog, or the post’s author. Additionally, any comments by National Geographic staff include a small NGS logo alongside their name.
Custom user profiles
While we there are benefits of a service like Gravatar (globally recognized avatar), there are situations where uploading an avatar within the WordPress dashboard makes more sense. In addition to extending the WordPress avatars through filters, we also added custom fields for blog authors to express themselves. For example, we added an affiliation to appear alongside their author byline. We also developed a custom "diet checklist" for the 360 Energy Diet blog for the bloggers to denote which actions they've successfully completed. These checks are then reflected on their author archive page.Abstract child themes
The two blogs are very similar and share much of the same elements on the page. By starting out with an abstract parent theme than can override select areas of code (e.g.: advertisements, header images), we were able, and can continue to, quickly roll out custom blogs with minimal effort.
Social sharing
Each article is tagged with Open Graph metadata so it can be shared as a rich object on sites like Facebook. Additionally, social sharing integrations such as Twitter’s “Tweet Button” have been added to help visitors share their favorite content.