Wesley Cavins

After being offline for a year after I left Los Angeles, and a simple landing page for another year after that, I put some work in on-the-side towards building the ultimate version of my website that I’m finally happy with… and it’s a BEAST.

Design:

The interface was expanded from the theme that I designed for my micro-site landing page last year. The graphics are derived from lighting rigs used by grips and gaffers on the film set: hoists, clamps, porta-rail, spinhead, and a winch for good measure. Each module expands vertically to remain flexible for dynamic and post-design content.

Code:

In attempt to remain future proof for as long as possible, html5, css3, and php5 were used to code the site. I haven’t debugged or validated yet, so I will probably be back with an update here some time in the near future… hopefully everything goes smoothly… I’M LOOKING AT YO U MSIE.

CMS:

I updated to the latest version of wp before setting the site up, so that all plugins would function for at least a little while longer before wp decides to start breaking everything like a rock star in the presidential suite.

OPS:

A personal site can be useful as a home base for presenting information publicly, but I’ve been developing an intranet system for my film production company that I am re-purposing the source code for personal use to help keep things organized in my personal life. Access to the OPS side of wesleycavins.com only appears after logging in, along with access to the CMS dashboard.

SEO:

Although the code was written to adhere to SEO best standards and practices (mostly), the AIOSEO system is also in place to support wp’s uniform core files.

Backend:

Although google analytics is the primary site tracker, dashboard stats displays a couple of overviews to convey a sense of whats happening with site traffic without needing to log into analytics all the time.

In addition to wp’s built in uploader intended for media, a different file uploader has been added to transfer any file type to any directory on the server. This mostly used for syncing intranet files in the OPS.

With the release of 3.1, wp now supports post formats (like tumblr), sticky posts, and post types. Post formats give the user the ability to style the content of each post based on the specified format; photos, videos, quotes, etc. This makes things way more interesting than the same bland post format for every single entry. Combined wp’s category hierarchy and a modified category theme file, post formats can be expanded from a brief overview to a fully customized single entry (see the video’s on this site.)

The videos on this site utilize custom fields for creating multiple sizes of the video embeds ala post types; a new way for developers to make dashboards more user friendly for clients who run their own sites. Post types let the developer set up the add-new-post interface to accommodate specific data required to populate custom posts and pages that are dynamic.

Security:

In addition to the 10 point parameter system for setting up the CMS, an additional security scanner has been added to detect and log any suspicious or unauthorized activity occurring on the site. A login protection system has also been enabled to prevent brute force login entry.

Backup:

A database cron system is in place for backing up the database once an hour to a remote directory, for full database recovery in case of emergency.