This is probably one of the largest sites Zack Design has ever built. I created 4 plugins for it!
These include a data monitoring system which hooks into the Sunny WebBox, and downloads the latest results from solar installations connected to Wordpress users and inserts the values in the database, a data graphing system which shows the monitoring results in graph format together with Fusion Charts and environmental data, a CoolIris plugin which shows a NextGen gallery album in a CoolIris slideshow, and an auto-login script which allows schools to connect to the portal automatically.
The website includes a forum (Simple:Press), and uses my Wordpress CSS Dropdown Menu plugin for the tabbing system. It is also aggressively cached using the W3 Total Cache plugin. For PDFs I suggested my client use Issuu and Colorbox modal windows, which work extremely well together!
W3 Total Cache has been a massively useful tool which I’m installing on all large production sites these days. Using a combination of Firebug and the Google Page Speed plugin together with W3 Total Cache I’m able to dramatically increase the speed of page loads in Wordpress. Just using the minification and CDN (or parallelisation options) that W3 Total Cache offers often increases a website’s Page Speed score by 10. Depending on its usefulness, I also implement page caching (though this can lead to problems with authentication so I’ve disabled it for Bright Future).
