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 (more on this later).
    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 are generated by this theme automatically from the latest image that you upload to each post. You can override this thumbnail by pasting the URL to your new thumbnail image in to the Post Thumbnail field in the Write Post area in Wordpress. To review, Post Thumbnails in this theme work as follows:

    1. Theme checks to see if you have provided a URL to your thumbnail image
    2. If none exists, the theme checks to see if you have attached any images to the post using the "Add Media" button. If images exists, the theme will use the most recent image that you uploaded as the Post Thumbnail.
    3. If neither of the above exist, than this theme will display the black X. You don't want that.

    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

    The navigation contains a listing of all your pages and posts, your contact info and the search bar. To change your contact info, open up nav.php and change lines 16 and 17 accordingly.

  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

    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.

    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

  9. License Details

    There are a few things to know that you can and cannot do with this theme:

    • Give credit where credit is due. Keeping the credit link intact is recommended. If you want to remove the credit, consider becoming a developer-level member of Graph Paper Press.
    • You may use this product for personal and commercial purposes.
    • DO NOT resell or redistribute this product in whole or part (including derivative works).

    This theme was created for by us for you for free. Inquiries, comments, suggestions: info@graphpaperpress.com