To pop up, or not to pop up?

November 21, 2011 7:51 AM

I'm building a blog-like site that will have lots of old stories about a particular rural area. I'll be adding lots of supplemental information about some of the places, people and things the author talks about, and I'm trying to decide how to display it.

I'm building the site on Wordpress (either a custom theme or a heavily-altered theme). I think I would like to keep everything on one page. I've thought about using lightboxes of some sort, or having little pop-ups that hover at the side of the browser.

The content in the boxes (or whatever) will be comprised of text, links, pictures, and probably video.

I would like your ideas on how best to do this. What is the state-of-the-cool in pop-up technology? I want to keep the page looking consistent and nice. Recommendations for specific Wordpress plugins welcome, as well as opinions about how best (or worst) to do this.

posted by nosila to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

One thing that's easy to miss is custom fields. These are available on every post page and allow you to create more structure posts; instead of dumping everything in the content text area you use a custom field for each data. This makes theming and search so much easier.

As for the layout and design, maybe you can sketch/prototype a couple of alternatives and try them out on friends or your favorite mefi spouse? I use Balsamiq mockups to do this.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 8:06 AM on November 21, 2011

A coupla years back I was playing around with something similar and stumbled across omeka, which appeared then to be perfectly suited to this sort of thing -- collecting and presenting all sorts of historical media.

Not a wordpress theme or plugin, but maybe something to consider.
posted by notyou at 8:50 AM on November 21, 2011