Artist, Sophie Kahn recently posted her WPFolio site and I asked her to share some of the modifications she made.
Before we go into the customizations, I encourage anyone who is modifying the theme to check out child themes. By creating a child theme for your changes, you have the advantage of updating WPFolio as we make improvements and not losing your changes. If you have more technical ability, consider forking the project on github so we can include your changes in core releases.
Here’s some changes Sophie made to version 1.4.1 of WPFolio (with the help of her google engineer husband, David):
Bigger thumbnails. I found the default thumbnails were too small for my taste, so changed them to 250 x 250 px. This caused some layout problems, so Dave adjusted the max-width and max-height CSS parameters of the image containers to make them lay out properly again.
Fixing Captioning problems in Lightbox. I have long titles and the default text in the lightbox theme I liked was too large; it doesn’t wrap well and was overlaying the ‘image 1 of 5′ text. It was also hard to read as it sometimes overlaid the image and the font was fairly light, which was a problem for renders with a white background. Using CSS, made the font for the caption a bit smaller, and put a padding-right on the caption to stop it overlapping with the page indicator, which as a float:right can occupy the same space. Fiddled the layout a bit so that there was enough space in the margin above the image to accommodate two lines rather than just one. Again, nothing fancy. If it goes to three lines it’s still wrong, but as there aren’t any images which this causes problems with on the site yet I haven’t bothered fixing it.
Removed auto-headings from pages and categories. I felt my images and text were self-explanatory. Just commented out the relevant sections in the category and page php templates.
Using Plugins. We did some other customizations – Constant Contact signup button (Dave changed the look a little to make it cleaner), RSS button and Twitter follow button hard coded into the footer and sidebar templates.
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12 Comments
Hey I just got the theme, love it. I would also like to change my thumbnails bigger, but besides manually changing the size of the photo then re-uploading it, I was wondering if theres an easier way by editing the code to make a larger thumbnail.
I know it says it will change the format, but I figured out how to change that, I just cant seem to find the code for the resizing of the photos.
thanks!
I will try to write a tutorial about this soon, but can’t promise when. In the meantime, if anyone wants to write a tutorial, or I will post it here. Or if you want to submit code that would create this as a theme option, we will add it to the next release of WPFolio.
One of the WP developers wrote about the post thumbnails feature here:
http://markjaquith.wordpress.com/2009/12/23/new-in-wordpress-2-9-post-thumbnail-images/
At the very end of the article, he mentions a plugin for recreating thumbnails – this may be helpful.
Hello,
Thanks for the update. I was wondering though if it is possible to remove the captions above each page/post. I noticed Sophie Kans website doesn’t have them.
Ciao, Eva
I might be able to help, but what caption do you mean?
Also, I can’t help but say, that blog protector plugin on your site, in my opinion, is a bad idea. It prevents curators and other people who want to support you from saving your work to their desktops and republishing it online. Remember, the images on your website aren’t your work, it’s a representation of your work – it can’t be printed in a book or framed and put on a wall. It’s more like a postcard. You would want a postcard for your show to be spread as far and wide as possible. Tim O’Rielly said, “Obscurity is a far greater threat to artists than piracy.” Yes, someone might post one of your images without giving you credit, it is possible. BUT more likely you’re keeping people who do like your work an want to support you and tell others about you and your work from easily sharing it. Which is more important for you and your career as an artist, piracy or obscurity?
Thumbs-up!
I think Eva means the page headings….I’m also trying to remove them.
Lovely theme, Mr. Lambert. Thank you!
I absolutely love WPFolio but I can’t for the life of me figure out how Sophie got her thumbnails bigger… mine are tiny! I’ve been trying to troubleshoot this for hours now, found the settings > media > section where I increased thumbnail size but to no avail!?
What am I doing wrong? Other than the tiny thumbnails, this theme is perfection!
Let’s start with this, how big are your thumbnails now?
Seeing this might be a similar topic related to my question I am having right now. I want to adjust the thumbnail size of my pictures as I think they are a bit too small. I tried to find ‘where’ to edit, trying both in function.php and style.css but nothing happen with the thumb size. I don’t know why. Could you kindly tell me where I can adjust it?
One more (for experts, stupid sounding) question About Tag and description under each picture (Title/published year/tag), can I hide it? If yes, how can I achieve that?
Thank you in advance, Mr. Lambert
Re: Thumbnails, it’s an issue you can vote on and contribute to. One thing you may not have done was increased the size of the thumbnails in your wordpress settings, then run the plugin called “regenerate thumbnails” IIRC. Not entirely sure that alone will work, but it will get you closer. But yes, this is something I think should happen in the near future. If someone could take it on, or commission/hire someone to do the work, then it would happen faster. (This project isn’t mine, it’s ours, so feel free to take it on.) It wouldn’t take much.
Re: question #2. I would make a child theme, then a copy single.php into it and remove those template tags.
Please donate! I use the $ to pay others to help code… I’m busy enough as an artist…
Hi All,
I was able to remove resizing/cropping easily once I ran the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/regenerate-thumbnails/
The plugin won’t resize them, but it will allow your changes in the code to show up when you reload.
Cheers!
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