The Polymer Centre website uses a WordPress news management system, but conventional HTML pages for the bulk of the site. This combines layout flexibility where it is needed, in the home page, for example, with easy updates. However, these updates are only seen when you visit the news section (run by WordPress) – what was needed was a means to get headlines from the news section onto the home page for the site, where every visitor could see them.

To do this we built a small program that grabs data from the WordPress database, and re-formats it for a text display on the home page. As the Polymer Centre website has a very well defined design, however, we were able to take this a step further. In this we take the headline and a snippet from the text, but also derive a thumbnail of any image accompanying the story. These elements are then fed into a Flash program that displays the last five stories one after another, with short transitions between each.

For those without the (nearly ubiquitous) Flash plugin an alternative text and link description is made available (using Flash satay, described previously), ensuring a high degree of accessibility.

Please visit the Polymer Centre to see how their polymer news system works.

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