Ever wondered where the brown tourist signs would lead you? Rubidyn has soft-launched a new website – https://www.brownsigns.net.au.
The website is built by Rubidyn using WordPress hosted on our own server. A straightforward WordPress website wasn’t going to be able to achieve what was wanted when listing the brown sign destinations on the website. A few plugins enabled the specific features wanted for it, including extending the plugins features themselves.
To start with, the Brown Signs website needed to store destinations for signs. Posts (or blogs) within WordPress allows for the content of each destination to be entered, and photos to be embedded in the content, as well as specify the featured image.
Brown Signs Theme
A WordPress theme was selected to present the website cleanly and simply, and allow for colour settings to match the Brown Signs theme.
Google Maps Integration
The posts in Brown Signs are location-based, the destination the brown tourist signs indicate. On each post, a map showing the location of the destination is displayed. On the front page, the map displays a marker for all of the brown sign posts.
For this, a paid plugin was selected, WP Google Map Pro (affiliate). The plugin displays fields for the location address, latitude and longitude, and the type of marker which sets the type of pin to show on the map.
A map is shown on the front page, and the plugin collects all of the posts’ details to display all of the brown sign locations throughout Australia. On the post, a map with only the post’s marker is shown.
Booking.com
Brown Signs displays a booking.com search box in posts, with the location preset to or near the post’s location. Brown Signs is a Booking.com affiliate, and the Booking.com plugin allows for the search box to be simply configured and set up to be displayed.
Widget Options
The theme template has a right sidebar used globally over the website. What I wanted to display in the sidebar, depending on what the page or post is about. Widget Options allows the added widgets into the right sidebar to be selectively displayed. The free edition provided the features I needed. This allowed for the Booking.com search box is displayed only in posts, and the different map types to be displayed in posts or the home page.
PHP Code Widget
The standard set of widgets in WordPress don’t normally allow for PHP code to be added (some theme templates may include this feature). A plugin was added to use PHP code widget, to allow for more advanced modifications without altering the main code in the theme template or other plugins.
Advanced Modifications
Some modifications were made to get the desired features for the website. Other approaches could have been used to include the features, but modifications were chosen to implement them to how it was wanted to operate.
The addition of privacy policy and terms to the footer were not easily available in the theme template. The footer of the template was changed to display these links, as well as links to social media accounts.
The WP Google Map Pro (affiliate) plugin provided all the features for displaying the posts in the map but didn’t have a way to display a single marker based on the post’s configured marker information. A PHP script was written to extract the marker details, including the marker type, and construct the WordPress shortcode to display the map with the post’s location. This could have been done by writing a shortcode on each post, but this way there is no further work to be done to include the map, and there is only one place to enter the location information for the post.
WordPress Websites
Brown Signs demonstrates the use of WordPress for website building, and allowing for customisation for specific needs with the use of free and paid for plugs. Rubidyn can help you with your WordPress powered website, on one of our website hosting options.
Updated August 2018
Brown Signs website has been updated since first launching and has had a number of destinations added to the map. The view of the website presented has been updated as seen in August 2018.