Washington Independent Review of Books

Washington Indepedent Review of Books (washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com) was a complicated project to say the least. The client wanted a site in WordPress that used custom post types to display book reviews, podcasts, author interviews, and news articles. We made use of existing WordPress functionality to create custom post types for all these data types so website admins could easily add and delete items from the website. We added all this functionality instead of a WordPress theme (no plugins required!).

Each review post has special fields for author, number of pages, publisher, and year. The admin can drag-and-drop latest book review widgets in to the sidebar and customize which parts of the review are shown as well as how they are categorized. The theme contains a recent contribution widget which when dropped in a sidebar shows the latest review, book blog post, or news article. Visitors can comment on reviews with ease and administrators can moderate those comments as they see fit. The theme also contains an Amazon Top 20 widget, which pulls books from an RSS feed on Amazon.

We created this theme without a design as the client wanted a very simple, clean layout. It is amazing to see the types of websites we can create with just WordPress. Clearly, the flexibility of WordPress can be transformed to create any type of website imaginable! Stay tuned to see what we create next.

Website Screenshots