For those of you who want an out-of-the-box solution, you can now download my first K2 photoblog mod ‘Nautilus’ here.
Please read the readme, which explains how to use the theme!
Enjoy.
Archive for April, 2007
Photoblogs typically have a minimalist, clean design to focus the readers eye on your images, but it’s up to you how you want your photoblog to look. I’m not going to go through step by step everything I’ve done with Nautilus, but here are some points to consider:First, you might want to remove the sidebar on your main page. Make a copy of ‘index.php’, and rename it ‘home.php’. Remove the call to get the sidebar. This will stop the sidebar showing, but will leave a big gap where it should be. Continue reading ‘[Photoblogging with K2] Part 3: Styling’
I think the most important thing to make a photoblog look slick is the way the archives are handled. Lots of photoblogs out there have archives that just show the photo titles. That’s fine, but in my opinion, a photoblog is all about the photos, so my archives use thumbnail images. In fact, they only use thumbnail images.The key to thumbnail archives is the ability in Wordpress to specify an Optional Excerpt. In this field, you want to paste the url to the thumbnail image (75px x 75px) of your photograph (and nothing else!). You then need to do some pretty serious editing of ‘archive.php’ and ‘page-archives.php’. Essentially, you need to put in a modified version of the loop that retrieves the excerpt for each post, and makes the excerpt a permalink to the full version of that post. Continue reading ‘[Photoblogging with K2] Part 2: Thumbnail Archives’
In contrast to ‘normal’ blogs, which often have a long list of posts, photoblogs usually just display one photo on each page, using links to navigate back through the archives.To achieve this, first set ‘Show at most 1 posts’ under reading options. You will now get only one post displayed on each page. However, we want the archive pages to display more than one photo. To do this we need a plugin that will allow you to specify a different number of posts to be shown on different page types. Continue reading ‘[Photoblogging with K2] Part 1: The basics’
Whereas a typical blog uses text as its primary form of communication, in a photoblog the emphasis is, well, photographs. It therefore makes sense to have a theme which is better suited to using images, both for posts and the archives.
There are various photoblogging programs out there, but none of them really offered what I wanted. So I made my own, based on the wonderful K2 theme for Wordpress.
I’ve since had oodles of people asking how I made it. So, finally, here it is: tutorials for how to build a K2 Photoblog, and for the lazy or css-challenged among you, the Nautilus theme.
Disclaimer: I am in no way a wordpress, K2 or code of any sort expert! I wrote this tutorial and made my theme available for download because a few people asked me to. There are probably more efficient and/or elegant ways to achieve the same results. If you work them out, please let me know! If you have any problems I’ll be happy to try and help you fix them if I have the time, but please don’t rely on it, or come complaining if it doesn’t do what you hope!
Ok, now that’s out of the way, let’s get started!
You will need:
