marinegirl | geek

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. You can download my ‘archive.php’ page here and ‘page-archives.php’ here, to see what I’ve done.I’ve used a new div called ‘photo-archive’, and added the following to ‘styles.css’:#primary .photo-archive {width: 85px;margin: 3px;float: left;}#primary .photo-archive img {margin: 0px;padding: 4px;border: 1px solid #ccc;max-width: 100%;text-align: center;}In ‘page-archives.php’ I have added a query to limit the number of excerpts / thumbnails shown to 25, to stop the page overflowing the normal size and taking too long to load. You could change this of course.At this point, your archives should be displaying correctly, as a thumbnail gallery (empty sidebar to the right in this image).However, we run into another problem if your site uses tags. You’ll notice that the tag archives pages are displayed in the old format, as a list with all the meta info etc that we don’t want. To overcome this you need to locate and edit ‘ultimate-tag-warrior-core.php’.Around line 1569, you need to change ‘$wp_query->is_home=false;’ to ‘$wp_query->is_archive=true;’. This will make the tag archives page format the same as you specify in ‘archive.php’.Hurrah! It’s starting to work a lot more like a photoblog now. Have some more cake.