JoyfulArts Studio Website

My wife, Jen, is an artist and art teacher (among other things).  Her website is JoyfulArts Studio.  I recently rebuilt it from the ground up to include the ability to teach classes online, provide group forums for her students to share their artwork, and to give the site a cleaner, more breathable presentation.

Built with WordPress and BuddyPress, the site has many social networking elements.  Members can post status updates to their profile pages, refer to other members using the @user tag (much like MySpace, Twitter and other social networking sites), upload photos/images to their personal galleries, post messages in forums, and there’s even live chat capabilities built-in.

This website uses lots of available plugins for WordPress/BuddyPress, but most, if not all of them, I’ve tweaked the php code so they would integrate seamlessly with the website.

I also built the gallery section from the ground up using php.  I learned more about php building this website than I’ve ever known. 🙂

One other special item I wanted to mention was that I built the website in a way that certain areas of the site can only be accessed once a user has paid for it (such as access to paid online classes).  This was more work than I was expecting going into, but the result works really well.  Even groups (which contain forums, live chat areas, static pages and downloadable files) can be restricted and customized so users can buy one class or a bunch of classes for a discount.  It’s very configurable and I’m pretty proud of how it ended up.  Now we just have to get some paid content prepared. 🙂

Please feel free to visit the website, create an account and dig around some.  My username there is “Dan” so send me a PM!

To read more about the website, and see more screenshots, visit this link to my blog post.

Click on image to see a larger version.