Capture the Phrase is an online photography treasure hunt, where we give out a list of phrases, and it’s the job of the user to make, stage, or create an appropriate photo for each phrase.

The site was developed in WordPress, highly modified with custom PHP code, and utilizing lots of Progressive Enhancement techniques with CSS3. The structure takes advantage of WordPress’s category sorting mechanism, using several category names and those categories’ parents to create a rich and varied collection of different photos.

To be more specific, each new photo takes three categories. These categories are children of the categories
“Phrase”, “Place”, and “Photographer”. So if I took a picture for the Phrase “God”, and I took it in New York, that photo would be given the categories “God” (child of “Phrase”), “New York” (child of “Place”), and “Joseph Moore” (child of “Photographer”). With this structure I was able to make it simple to sort the photographs by Phrases, each specific Phrase, Places, each specific place, Photographers, and each specific photographer.

One fun addition to the site was putting the Google Maps into the “Places” menu and the page for each specific place. The Google Maps API requires some special code, and the overhead of several extra scripts, so I decided that I should create a special header just for those pages, so as not to waste resources by having this extra code execute on pages that don’t have a map.

I also used the API to give me a static world map with push pins for each location where we have a photo. Then, after clicking a place, the map will zoom in to that specific location. Google’s API is entirely in Javascript, so it was a snap to modify with a very small learning curve.

For the next release of the site, we plan to offer better controls for the user to navigate through all the photos. Also, we plan to include a random feature that will allow users to casually flip through a pile of unorganized photos, encouraging more aimless surfing through the site’s content.