Tonight I was up late, working with my sister, Alicia Murphy, on plans for her summer tour (I manage her band and sing backup vocals). We’re not signed and don’t have a booking agent, so any touring we do is all DIY.
Planning a indie music tour is a daunting task.
Transportation and lodging logistics aside, we’re not just finding one venue and planning one night. We’re finding 30+ venues and planning for 30+ nights, anything west of the Rockies. Finding places to play in cities you’ve never been to (or heard of) isn’t exactly a quick project. Faced with the threat of hunting and pecking on Google with terms like “live music venue Tacoma, WA”, I knew I needed a better strategy … so I found old tour schedules from bands with a similar sound to ours and started from their lists.
Voila! The pre-existing wheel.
I’m a big fan of innovation and in my day-to-day life, I am not always so keen on using the pre-existing wheel at least without a little revision. In WordPress, the pre-existing wheel is called a plugin and I have been unkeen almost to the point of resistance. (I think it’s residual blocks from a few bad plugins in the early WPdays.) My friends in the Orange County Meetup group continually give me a hard time about my loyalty to hard-coding.
But it’s true! Plugins can be dangerous! They can cause functionality issues, eat up bandwidth, bring on the “White Screens of Death”, and mess up your database tables and your admin. And if you build your site around a suddenly-unsupported-plugin, things can get dicey.
They don’t always work. But when they do it’s awesome.
Case in point, earlier today I met with an SBDC client who needed help setting-up a simple dance class schedule in her WordPress site. She had cut-and-pasted a table from a Word document and, as one might expect, everything was distorted and difficult to read.
Rather than build new tables and try to explain where to put the text, I checked out the WordPress plugin repository. I had used Tables Reloaded in the past, and it was useful (if a bit clunky). So when I saw developer Tobias Bäthge’s latest iteration, TablePress, I happily tried it.
Within 15 minutes I had added multiple grid-based schedules of classes, complete with color changing on:hover rows and sortable data. You can make your own CSS for the table and customize it even further and there are enough features to tweak it liberally, but not too many that you burn out before you start.
Voila! The pre-existing wheel. There’s no need to reinvent it. It’s not gonna get any rounder.
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