Posts Vs. Pages
One of the key things to understand with WordPress is the difference between a Post and a Page. (read more from WordPress support) Posts are associated with a point in time, like the year you completed an artwork, an upcoming show, or a recent review. Pages are for information that is less associated with a date, like your résumé, your contact page, or your artist’s statement.
Posts also appear in your RSS Feed (Pages do not) and are organized into categories like artwork and news.
That’s basically it!
Creating a Post
- Please watch the video below and read Writing Posts in the WordPress documentation
- For WPFolio’s purposes, posts are where a specific work or project is displayed. You can think of each post as a gallery of a specific work. Be sure to categorize each post, so if your post is a painting you will place it in the Painting category, for example.
- The majority of the posts you will create will simply be a single or set of images with a bit of text about the work.
WPFolio uses a system to create a neat orderly presentations of your posts and image galleries. So follow these instructions…
Uploading images
Here’s a brief intro video into uploading images to wordpress. Watch it.
- First prepare your images. Large sizes should be up to 900px wide and 600px tall.
- When writing a post or a page there is a set of buttons to upload media in the upper right hand corner of the post form (see the video)
- Click the Add an Image button and navigate to the folder that has your images. Note: you can select MULTIPLE images to upload at once! You can edit the photo information, caption, and more within this interface.
- You can also change the order in which images appear through the user interface. Click on the tab at the top labeled “gallery” and enter in the order the photos should be displayed in the column left of “show”.
- Once the gallery is to your liking click Insert Gallery into Post – this adds the gallery shortcode to your post. (the shortcode is the word gallery wrapped in brackets. You can move it wherever you like with in the post body.
- When you preview or publish the post, your gallery will now appear as a set of thumbnails neatly arranged within the post or page.
- The Carousel feature in the Jetpack Plugin extends the functionality of the gallery by displaying images in a cleaner more dynamic way.
- WPFolio includes a function that will automatically make one of the images a thumbnail representing that post.
- There’s some advanced information on the WordPress Codex on how to further configure the image gallery like including or excluding certain images.
Selecting a thumbnail
Here’s a video on how to select a thumbnail. The narrator is talking about another theme, but demos the post thumbnail feature very well. (So ignore the details related to that.)
Related Videos
Writing and Editing Posts
Saving and Returning to Drafts
Editing Images within WordPress
Another video from vimeo on how to use the cropping, rotating, and other image editing tools within WordPress
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19 Comments
Steve,
Just a quick usability suggestion: change the “featured image” function in the post area to “thumbnail” so that it matches what is in the functions.php (that is, thumbnails) and the type of image it is. I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to add the thumbnail and eventually just tried the featured image as a last resort.
Thanks for making such a great theme!
Bill
good suggestion – that’s coded in the wordpress core, but I bet there is some way to change it with a function…
made it a ticket: link to github.com
There has been a long discussion about this in the WordPress community while 3.0 was being built. Many people over the years have wanted an easy way to have a thumbnail represent a post and had created many ingenious ways to do so and so at first the WP Dashboard did say “Set Thumbnail”. But after much discussion it was changed to “Featured Image” because that was a more accurate description. The “Featured Image” can be displayed at any size, not just as a thumbnail, depending on the circumstance. The strange thing is that code still retains the “thumbnail” name, so that you will write things like ‘the_post_thumbnail(“large”)’ which really make no sense. But code is developed over time and sometimes it is hard to change what has come before.
I realize this is not a WPFolio specific answer but general WordPress answer.
Great theme, I am finally getting around to making a site because of it. I have a question, I have a few flash animations that I have in various formats. When I post the animation as a swf, it is resizing it to 300 x 200. (original size is 720×480) Is there a simple way to override this? It seems preferable to keep them as swf files, due to file size etc, but I can put them in another format if that will work better.
Thanks.
If you enable the “kitchen sink” button in the Visual editor, there’s a button for “insert/edit embedded media” and will help you add swf files with lots of options.
Thank you. By the way, the new version of the theme is really great. I know CSS and HTML, not so much php and I am new to word press, now I am getting used to it I am having fun.
Posts Vs. Pages
How to structure my work?
I’m thinking about structuring my work in categories but how should I build my structure?
Photography
- Landscape
- Black & White
- Infrared
- etc.
Shall I add and align to each category a page?
Or shall I post to each category an post?
How to display this at a menu?
I’d like to have it simple
When a visitor to my site like to click on Photography a page should be displayed with a “Thumb”-Overview of the subsets.
If a visitor to my site like to click on a Sub-Category (or Page) like Landscape another “Thumb”-Overview should be displayed.
I’m quite not sure if I will have another hierarchy on the subsets yet…
Any hints please?
Cheers
Joerg
Seems to make sense. You could also make photography the category and add those descriptors as tags. But if you want thumbnail views for them, I would make sub categories. Also, keep in mind you don’t need to check photography AND infra-red (for example). Just checking the sub-category will include it in the category.
Ok handling with sub categories makes the best sense so far – for me, but is there a way to have a page (of the main category Photography) that shows up just one article (the latest/newest) of the sub categories?
happens automatically. Yogie – try using the wordpress forums as well. Unfortunately I can’t answer all your support questions but there are other options…. See the support page on this site.
Steve,
sorry for asking those things – usually I’m quite familiar with WP I just was thinking if this is something that can WPFolio handle
Here is a Plugin: Article Directory (by DIMOX) that might solve my question just if anyone else is reading here and would like to find a solution.
Thanks Steve!
no problem, it’s just that if you post it on the WP support forums, more people can help you.
All was fine and dandy until just recently. Images in galleries are suddenly opening on a new page. JQuery lightbox for native galleries- I uninstalled and reinstalled. I checked all settings. Can’t seem to figure out this little inconvenience! But, I don’t like the way it looks at ALL. Please check this out and tell me if I’m crazy or not.
conflicting plugin?
I had installed a mailchimp plugin- deactivated it- and the problem was solved. Strange.
How do I display the category page as the default page (e.g. – like the one shown in the WPFolio User Showcase)? I can’t figure it out for the life of me.
good question to ask on wordpress.org/support but specify you want your home page to be a category page.
is it possible to have a parent page with thumbnails representing other pages? I have made my site only using pages. There is a parent page called video and it would great if, when viewers clicked on it, there came up a page of thumbnails ( by the way, is ‘featured image’, another term for thumbnail?)…is there also a way for my home page image to take up the whole space, such as a background, with the menu being able to sit on top, but have that image not carry through to the rest of the site, when navigating other pages ??
Re: thumbnails for pages – You can have thumbnails linking to other pages by doing it manually. In the media uploader, link the thumbnail to whatever page you want. It’s best to use posts for this sort of thing though.
Re: background image – This can be done with CSS. To apply the style to a specific page, find the page’s id and add it to the selector.
Good luck!
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