Use theme for local brigade website

[conantp]

Hi!

I am involved with Code for Asheville, a growing Code for America brigade in Asheville, NC. We're converting our existing site to Wordpress, and I found this theme. We were thinking about re-purposing it for our site, but a lot of the templates are for custom post types - we can have the look and feel but not the functionality of the Code for America blog.

Ideally, there would be a plugin to complement this theme that enables those post types, giving us a full Wordpress deployment for brigades.

I'm happy to help with the efforts in any way possible, including writing the plugin, if someone can provide me with the post type definitions and related content, or a full dump of the database?

Thank you!

[migurski]

Hi,

The absolute easiest way to implement this theme for yourself would be to start with the CfA pattern portfolio, rather than this Wordpress theme repository. We’re getting pretty close to tearing this repo down and rebuilding it from the ground-up using the patterns ourselves!

One thing to keep in mind is that the fonts from webtype.com will only work on a CfA-approved domain I'd be happy to add official brigade domains to the list! Just ask.

[conantp]

Hi, thanks for the quick reply!

I discussed theme options with my team at our Hack Night last night. We had a bit of trouble figuring out how to start with the pattern library - it would be really great if the repo or pattern library site had some information on how to best re-use the library on another site, though I understand that re-use wasn't the primary objective of the pattern library.

In the end, we came to the conclusion that it would be less work to use an existing theme and the pattern library as a reference, rather than layering it directly on top of a theme. Also, almost everyone in our group is familiar with Bootstrap, and the team was more inclined to use a Boostrap theme than a custom pattern library. We want to build the site iteratively over a period of time - if we just layer the pattern library on another theme, many of the elements will be messed up until we re-template everything to match the pattern markup. Let me know your thoughts on that approach - I love the idea of implementing your pattern library for brigade visual cohesiveness, but it seems like we'll have to revisit it a bit later.

[conantp]

Also, we are going to pursue the second component of what I suggested - we're going to build a "CfA Brigade" plugin that will create some custom post types for things like events, sponsors, projects, etc. That way, a new brigade can eventually combine an available theme with the plugin and get a ready-to-go Wordpress brigade setup.