Table of contents

1. Activating the theme
2. Theme options
3. Creating pages
4. General settings
5. Adding categories
6. Making a Blog post
7. Making a Portfolio post
8. Adding the portfolio category dropdown selector
9. Widgets
10. Plugins
11. Frequently asked questions

 

Activating the theme

To activate this theme, first you have to copy the folder, called "photospace" into the folder of your wordpress installation wordpress/wp-content/themes
Once you have done that you have to go to Admin → Appearance → Themes. There you should see the theme Photospace by Dean Oakley then click on Activate and you are done.

You will need to set the image cache file permissions. Inside the theme you will find an imagecache folder. Once uploaded you will need to give this folder group or public write permissions. You will also need to set the permissions for your wordpress uploads folder. The default is default is wp-content/uploads

 

Theme options

During the setup of this theme you will need to change some options. Options can be set from the Admin → Appearance → Photospace Theme Options Some of the options have default values which you can leave for now but there are a couple which you will need to set. But first we need to set up the pages.

 

Creating pages

First lets create the home page. Go to Admin → Pages → Add new. Give the page the title of Home. There will be no content on this page. Set the template to Main gallery. There is a drop down on the right. Click publish.

Alternatively you can make the home page a full page slide show. There is a page tample called Full page slide show which uses the Photospace plugin. Read more about it here http://thriveweb.com.au/blog/photospace-wordpress-gallery-plugin/ You will need to install this first.

Now lets create the contact page. Give the page a title of Contact. You can add content here like normal and set the template to Contact page. I will cover adding a contact form later using widgets.

Next create a page called Blog. This is where your blog posts will be displayed. You wont add any content here. You can leave the template as default. By default pages created will have a side bar. There is also a template for pages to without a side bar so if you would like a page with no side bar please select the Normal page (no side bar) template for these.

You may want to order the pages at this point. Click pages. Then hover on each page and click on quick edit. Set the order for each page. The lowest number will be on the left and the higher on the right.

 

General settings

To get the theme functioning properly we need to change some settings to Wordpress. Go to Admin → Settings → General. You probably want to change your tagline for the site. This will show up in search engines. Now go to Admin → Settings → Reading. Change Front page displays to static. Then set front page to Home and posts page to Blog. Save changes.

Next go to Admin → Settings → Permalinks and change the commons settings to day and name or month and name. You can now check out the site and you will have the basic skeleton! Click visit site at the top left. Well done.

 

Adding categories

Before we can add images to the gallery or post blog items we need to setup some categories. Go to Admin → Posts → Categories. Enter a category name of portfolio and click Add category.

Now enter a category name of blog and click Add category.

Next you need to click on the portfolio category name on the right. When the page loads you will see in the URL in the address bar of your browser the category ID. Something like cat_ID=3. Do the same for blog and write these down.

You will need to add them to the theme settings. Go to back to Admin → Appearance → Photospace Theme Options and add the appropriate Portfolio and Blog category ID's. Now we are ready to make some posts! Just the number for the example above you would add 3

 

Making a Blog post

To post into the blog section go to Admin → Posts → Add new and enter some content and a title. Now select the category of blog on the lower right. That's it! It should appear in your Blog section.

 

Making a Portfolio post

To post into the Portfolio section go to Admin → Posts → Add new and enter a title. Now you need to upload an image.

Just below the title field there is a Add an image button. Click that and then click Select an image. Once you have uploaded the image. Copy the link URL.

This must be set to File URL.

That is all you need. The theme will do the resizing. Click insert into post.

Now below the content section there is a Custom fields area. You need to add a custom field with the name gallery and the value you copied from the Link URL.

And you guessed it. Select portfolio as the Category on the lower right.  

If you select captions to be displayed it will display the post title and any content in the body under the photo. You may have to adjust the amount of space under the gallery to fit.

That's it! It should appear in your Portfolio.

 

Adding the portfolio category dropdown selector

To do this first you need to Check the option in Admin → Appearance → Photospace Theme Options. Check Use the portfolio dropdown selector.

Now you need to add subcategories to your portfolio category. You can do this on the fly when you add images to the gallery. When you create a category you need to select your portfolio category as the parent.

Widgets

Widgets are used to control the content in the sidebar and in the footer. Go to Admin → Appearance → Widgets.

• page side column is displayed on normal pages that you create.
• blog side column is displayed in the blog section. In the example I used the Tag Cloud and Archives widgets in the side column.
• footer Left is displayed on all pages. In the example I used the text widget in this section.
• footer Right is displayed on all pages. In the example I use the Category posts widget in this section. See in the Plugins section below.
• contact form is a bigger column displayed on the contact page. In the example I used the Contact form 7 plugin. I used the text widget to paste the generated code and output the form here.

 

Useful Plugins

Photospace Plugin

This theme has been design to work with the Plugin. You will need to install this to use the Full page slideshow template. The plugin takes advantage of the built in gallery features of WordPress, the plugin automatically adds any images attached to the post or page into the gallery.

http://thriveweb.com.au/blog/photospace-wordpress-gallery-plugin/

Contact form 7

I use this plugin to create the contact form. It has a very simple setup and a form you can use with little modifications. To add it to the theme install it and go to the settings panel Admin → Contact. There you can modify the form. To add it to the contact page copy the hi lighted code into a text widget in the contact form section.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7/

Simply Exclude

This plugin stops your portfolio posts from displaying in search results. Once installed select exclude from search in the portfolio section. Warning do not exclude from Archive that will cause the gallery to break.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simply-exclude/

Category posts

I use this plugin in the footer to display posts from the blog catergory only. Once installed it will appear as a widget. Drag it into the desired section and select your blog category.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/category-posts/

Frequently asked questions

Can I use categories in my blog?
No currently you have to just use tags because categories are used to controll the gallery and dropdown selector.