WordPress Development

I'm going to paste the assignment here so that we can refer to it:

1. Create a custom login form
2. Customize the admin panel (he doesn’t like the default panel)
3. Create a custom widget in the frontpage with multiple checkboxes:
o What tribes do you belong?
+ Developers
+ Designers
+ Entrepreneurs
+ Hackers

Here's my take on it:

1. You should do what's best for you and your "client"! A new WP install? Modify the existing one? Up to you. You could add a plugin to your existing theme/install? Google for *wordpress customize login* etc.

2. There are a number of ways you can do this and you can do as much or as little as you have time/knowledge for. And as you point out, there are plugins too.

Just change the background colour or add a logo, up to you. There was some discussion on whether changes to the Admin panel would be saved when the client upgraded WordPress (e.g. from 3.0.4 to 3.0.5). So lots of ways of doing this part of the question, I think I'm going to read up on creating an Admin theme:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Creating_Admin_Themes

3. There was quite a lot of discussion about this in the chatroom, a lot of people were going to add a poll widget (e.g. PollDaddy), some were going to create a plugin.

Could other people add their thoughts please?

oh, one other thing. i plan to make all these changes in the functions.php of my already created clientx theme (rather than create something new).

being in functions.php, when someone activates the theme it will go all branded and have my custom plugin built in. when they disable it, it goes back to default wordpress. just thought i would mention that.

Polly,

Feel free to do the changes where it suits you best. You can of course change the poll options.

Cheers,
Nuno

Ron,

Ideally you would provide the user/pass. If this is a problem you can also submit a screenshot.

Cheers,
Nuno