The air is a bit crisper in the morning, the leaves have started to fall and there is a hint of frost on your car’s windshield in the morning… Surely this can mean only one thing… “Winter is coming” my friends, winter is coming and with it, so are the boys of winter. You might know them as the Winnipeg Jets! Ladies and Gentlemen welcome to the 2016 Heritage Classic!
Few people know, but the seed for this game was planted a few years ago when on an opening night of the 2011-2012 season, the NHL celebrated the return of the Jets by hosting opening day festivities at the Forks. Unbeknownst to those around them, the 2011 – 2012 Director of Operations for the NHL Keith “whatshisname” was sitting at a table with members of some local ad agencies and a plus one who happened to be yours truly.
The Historic Event Idea
Basking in the glory of the occasion I was more than happy to engage “Keith” in celebrating the historic event. During this exchange, discussion of a potential Outdoor game came up. Keith asked the question “do you have the facilities to pull off an outdoor game?” Acting like I own the place, I replied without hesitation, “What kind of capacity do you require?”. Keith then replied “40, 000”.
Without blinking, I began to tell the story of our new facility Investors Group Field which was expected to be a state of the art facility and that with a few modifications would be able to easily accommodate the league’s requirements and the seed for this event was born. The people around me were shocked, wondering “Who is this guy?! How can he speak on behalf of TrueNorth, the city, and the province?!”.
Truthfully, I am nothing more than a fan (with maybe one or two ties in the spirit of the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon) who likely had no influence on the event(though I did send out 2 or 3 emails the next day), but it is a story isn’t it? A story that goes way beyond the NHL or the return of the franchise, it speaks to the hearts and minds of the city, it is a celebration.
A Brief History
The Winnipeg Jets were born many years ago, existing first as a junior hockey team in the WCHL, then as a professional team in the WHA and then finally in 1979 they moved to the big show, the NHL.
Many stories have been written about the Jets of yesteryear, tales of Hull, Nilsson, Hawerchuk and Selanne have been seared into consciousness to the point where they have grown into legend.But that was the past, we live in the present… there is as Teemu Selanne himself said, “a new Sheriff in town”.
Patrick Laine is the toast of the town, a Hat Trick in only his second home game, a come from behind win over our fierce rivals from Toronto!But this team goes far beyond the “flashy” new Finn’s charisma and indisputably potent shot.
Young Up and Coming Stars
This team is about all the young up and coming stars. Mark Scheifele who since his draft day in June of 2011 has yet to say the wrong thing. Scheifele works hard and clearly, makes sure to get his 7 and ¾ hours of sleep each and every night.
His attitude, effort and sheer joy for the game must be contagious. This young man and dare I say future captain absolutely exemplifies everything this team and this city is about.
But Mr Scheifele is not alone in his quest to take this team to the promised land. There is another, a slightly grizzled veteran on this team. A man who leads by example and puts his desire to win on display each time he steps on the ice. He is a game breaker with dynamic speed and skill. This player can lift fans from their seats and the spirits of his teammates with a dash down the wing.
So while Mr Scheiffele may be the captain of tomorrow, “Old man” Wheeler is our fearless leader today. Others before him may have had the passion and work ethic, but it is Blake Wheeler’s added dimension that makes him the perfect general for this exciting team cutting its teeth in the Central Division.
Now back to the inspiration for this post. The 2016 Heritage Classic is being hosted in Winnipeg at the Investors Group Field. To me, this event is massive on so many levels. First, it is an homage to the greats of teams past. Not only for the Jets but the “other guys” as well.
Apparently, this “other team”, the Oilers won a few cups back in their day with some guy called Wayne Gretzky…I don’t know, maybe its bitterness, but I will never forget Mark Lamb whose 3 goals and 5 assists put a swift end to what felt like our team of destiny back in the opening round of the 1990 Stanley Cup playoffs.
This event is about tradition, new meets old. Developing continuity of the two franchises and alumni into one entity. The Winnipeg Jets are rich in tradition, the fan base is passionate and patient. This was our team, this is our team and will forever be our team.
Lastly, a congratulations and thank you to Mark Chipman, David Thompson, Jim Ludlow and absolutely everyone who made this possible. It’s been 5 years, and I am proud to say that the city is behind you every step of the way! GO JETS GO!
Are you new to using WordPress? Maybe this is your first project using X-theme by Themeco. Or maybe you have used X-theme before, but need to make new customizations. If this is you then please stick with us and we will walk you through all of the customizations we made to our most recent project.
We had to integrate a language selector and ensure that we had translations that took included the slugs, search form overlay as well as our site’s meta description tags and titles.
We had to add 4 custom widget areas and assign them to appropriate screen sizes
We had to use custom fonts
We had to add a site tagline to the text logo
We needed to create a custom layout for multiple screen sizes that incorporated our other customization (widgets, etc)
Responsive design is great, it really has changed the way many of us need to think about designing our sites. BNI was our first project using X-theme and I can tell you, it won’t be the last. I have used many themes over the last few years, but so far X-theme has to be one of my favorites. On the surface, it is very lightweight and is very customizable. Personally, I would love to be able to have a little more flexibility with some of the choices, but hey anything is possible with a little code right? In our case, the client wanted to have their contact information and social media icons on one side with the language selector on the other. This meant we needed to add two custom widget areas to the header that aligned side by side below the topbar. In order to achieve this effect, first we added the following code to our child themes functions.php file:
Once we added the code, we needed to modify the copy the parent themes /views/renew/wp_header.php and paste it into the child theme’s corresponding directory. We achieved this by inserting the following code starting at line 18
<div class =”custom-widget-left”>
<?php if ( !function_exists(‘dynamic_sidebar’) || !dynamic_sidebar(‘custom-widget-1’) ) : ?>
<?php endif; ?>
</div>
<div class =”custom-widget-right”>
<?php if ( !function_exists(‘dynamic_sidebar’) || !dynamic_sidebar(‘custom-widget-2’) ) : ?>
<?php endif; ?>
</div>
</div>
Once we created the custom widget areas, we needed to populate them and style them. It wasn’t long before we recognized that we would also have to reconfigure the layout for mobile view. Using a combination of built in X-theme shortcodes and custom media queries, we were able to arrive at the desired look we were going for. After adding 2 more additional widget areas to the functions.php file (same process as before, but make sure you name them accordingly before inserting the appropriately named functions into the the view/global/_nav_primary.php file, which was copied into the child theme from the parent).
We then made the following css customization through the “customize/ edit global css tab” in the WordPress customizer:
In order to achieve the desired look for the language selector, we created a custom horizontal menu and styled it as indicated above. We also needed to translate the search form overlay so that visitors would not get English messages when they were viewing the site in German. We did this by adding the following code to the functions.php file:
<?php
if ( ! function_exists( ‘x_navbar_searchform_overlay’ ) ) :
function x_navbar_searchform_overlay() {
if ( x_get_option( ‘x_header_search_enable’, ” ) == ‘1’ ) :
?>
<div id =”custom-searchform-overlay”>
<div class=”x-searchform-overlay”>
<div class=”x-searchform-overlay-inner”>
<div class=”x-container-fluid max width”>
<form method=”get” id=”searchform” class=”form-search center-text” action=”<?php echo esc_url( home_url( ‘/’ ) ); ?>”>
<label for=”s” class=”cfc-h-tx tt-upper”>
<?php if(function_exists(‘qtrans_getLanguage’)) { ?>
<?php if (qtrans_getLanguage()==”en”): ?>
<?php echo “TYPE AND PRESS ‘ENTER’ TO SEARCH” ?>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php if (qtrans_getLanguage()==”de”): ?>
<?php echo “TYPE UND DRUCKEN SIE ‘ENTER’ ZU SUCHEN” ?>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php } ?></label>
<input type=”text” id=”s” class=”search-query cfc-h-tx center-text tt-upper” name=”s”>
</form>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<?php
Equally important were the custom fields we created within the plugin. As shown below:
At the end of the day, a company’s website is about sharing information with potential customers as well as communicating brand identity. One of the ways to do this is to prominently display the company logo.
In the case of BNI being an Interior Design company, appearance is quite literally one of the top considerations. This means the logo, the font choice, image quality are all critically important.
As mentioned above, we used a custom font. We toyed with a few different options to display the font and settled on using Adobe Typekit . We installed the plugin, added the relevant code to the document header and then assigned the font using the X-theme customizer.
We then adjusted the font-size and line-height for the title, tagline and nav menus via @media queries and amended the views/global/brand.php file (after copying it from the parent theme to the child of course) to create two new anchor text classes as you can see here:
<a class=”bnisitebrand” href= “http://e61.a10.myftpupload.com/”>Bohemian Nordic Interior</a></br><a class=”bnisitetagline” href=”http://e61.a10.myftpupload.com/”>dresses your home</a>
Personally, I liked the added challenge of working on the page customization manually, but for those of us who are familiar with page builders, or that have time as a major factor, Qtranslate X may or may not be the right fit for your project.
Having said that, if you have the patience to work through its peculiarities and have access to people who are able to translate your message into multiple languages, Qtranslate X is a terrific low-cost open source option (I suggest donating to the project).
On that note, I wish you all the best with your own X-theme customization and as Hal Johnson and Joanne McLeod used to say “ until next time, keep fit and have fun!”
