Instructions

This theme is a one column theme that can be used for portfolios, photoblogs, videoblogs, and virtually anything else where you want your content to be front and center. Here is a brief list of the major features:

Best Practices

If you want to make changes to how this theme looks and feels, than create a child theme. Never make changes to the original theme files. Why? Because when a new version of this theme is released, all of your changes will be lost when you update. Plus, making a child theme is incredibly easy. Here is how you do it.

  1. Installation

    1. Unzip the folder contained in the archive to your computer
    2. Upload the folder and its contents to the themes directory of your blog, located in "wp-content/themes" where WordPress is installed.
    3. Change the permissions (aka CHMOD) to the /cache/ folder to 777. This folder is used to store your custom post thumbnails. See this if you need more info on how to change folder permissions.
    4. Click on Appearance - Themes menu from the WP admin panel, then select the theme to activate.
    5. Click on View Site at the top of the page. Bam. Hot site!

  2. Media settings

    1. In Wordpress, click on Media Settings. Set your thumbnails to 200 x 200. Set your medium photo size to 590. Set your large size to 950.
    2. This theme will automatically create thumbnails from the images that you upload. By default, the top, large homepage thumbnails are 320 x 320, and the bottom small thumbnails measure 160 x 160. This can be easily changed, if you know a little bit of CSS. The CSS you need to change to accommodate larger or smaller thumbnails is in section /* Home Thumbs & Nav*/ in style.css. You will also need to change the image size that the theme creates for this predefined space in home.php on line 10 and 12. The overall grid of the homepage measures 1600px wide, so if you choose to customize the size of your thumbnails, make sure the new sizes fit the 1600 grid evenly (do the math).
    3. If you plan on self-hosting your own video to use the theme's built-in HD video player, you need to use the Post Thumbnail text field on the Write Post panel and paste the URL to your video thumbnail. The dimensions of the thumbnail should exactly match the dimensions of the video dimensions that you plug into the Post Video Options panel.

  3. Homepage thumbnails

    By default, the homepage is a visual representation of your last 25 posts. The five big photos at the top represent you latest five posts, from left to right, each measuring 320px tall and 320px wide. The bottom thumbnail group contains space for 20 thumbnails, each measuring 160px tall by 160px wide. Each post requires a thumbnail, or else you see the black X. Thumbnails can be generated by this theme automatically if you have uploaded a photo using WordPress' built in image upload tool. You can override these automatic thumbanils by selecting a Post Thumbnail to represent the post. Post Thumbnails are a new feature in WordPress 2.9. You can read more about it here and see video tutorials on how to use it. This feature allows you to crop, rotate and resize you thumbanils for total creative control. To review, this theme checks for thumbnails in the following heirarchy:

    1. Checks for Post Thumbnail
    2. If no Post Thumbnail exists, the theme checks for the latest image you uploaded and automatically crops it to fit the homepage design.
    3. If neither of the above exist, than this theme will display the post title.

    If you want to limit the homepage thumbnails to only a specific category, follow these instructions:

    1. Open up home.php and locate line 5.
    2. Add the ID of the category that you want to display on the homepage, like this: cat=3
    3. This would cause the homepage thumbnails to only show thumbnails from category 3.
    4. The completed code would look like this:

      <?php $home_query = new WP_Query("cat=3&showposts=24"); $i = 0; ?>

    5. No sure how to find your category ID? In your Wordpress panel, click on Categories. Put your mouse cursor on the name of the category. Look on your browser's status bar (typically located at the bottom of your browser). The ID will be revealed at the end of the URL.
    6. Read more about Wordpress' query post feature here.

  4. Navigation Menu

    You can control the links that show up in your navigation menu by configuring your menu at Appearance -> Menus. Watch a video tutorial on this WordPress feature. If you are using an older version of WordPress, the theme will default to nav.php

  5. Video

    This theme comes with a custom meta box on the Write Post page that makes adding either self-hosted video in FLV format or video from the following popular video services:

    • YouTube (HD)
    • Vimeo
    • MetaCafe
    • Seesmic
    • Google Video
    • Revver

    If you plan on using the built-in video player instead of the services listed above, you need to upload the FLV video to your server using either an FTP program (if the file is large) or Wordpress' media upload tool. Paste the URL to where this FLV exists on your server into the field. Supply the width and height of the video in pixels in the appropriate fields. And lastly, you must add a thumbnail for the video (the default image that shows up on the video player.)

  6. Widgets

    There are a total of three widgetized areas on this theme. The bottom left three-column area is 100% widgetized. The right column is reserved for credits and feeds. You can add and delete widgets by clicking Design - Widgets, from within your Wordpress admin panel.

  7. Common problems

    Javascript conflicts

    This theme uses jQuery javascript to do lots of fancy stuff. If your theme looks broken, than you likely have a plugin that uses a conflicting javascript library. Deactivate your plugins, one-by-one, to determine which plugin is conflicting with jQuery.

    Squished thumbnails

    If you have switched themes recently or uploaded images with incorrect dimensions, you will likely need to “regenerate” your thumbnails to the new dimensions. To do this, you need the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin.

    Professional help

    Still having trouble? Consider becoming a member of Graph Paper Press so you can get access to our private, well-groomed support forum, tutorials, and additional themes.

  8. Credits