marinegirl | geek

No longer supported

Becks — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 05:00:11 +0000

Sorry folks, I’m no longer supporting this theme. The K2 and wordpress code has changed since I wrote it, (and keeps changing regularly!) and I no longer have the time / interest to keep updating it. I’m going to leave the site up for now, so you’re welcome to look at the code and work out what needs to be done to update it. If you’re stuck on how to customise K2, I suggest you check out the forum.

Nautilus Update for WP2.2

Becks — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 13:08:19 +0000

I’ve just rebuilt the Nautilus photoblog theme to work with Wordpress 2.2. You can download it here. Make sure you read the ‘read me’! (you’ll need to activate a couple of plugins to make it work properly).

Check out the screen shots below:

Index page
Archives page
Monthly archive
Page page
‘Lights out’ page

K2 Photoblog theme released

Becks — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 02:43:46 +0000

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.

[Photoblogging with K2] Part 3: Styling

Becks — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 01:45:50 +0000

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. (more…)

[Photoblogging with K2] Part 2: Thumbnail Archives

Becks — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 01:45:23 +0000

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. (more…)

[Photoblogging with K2] Part 1: The basics

Becks — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 01:44:30 +0000

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. (more…)

Photoblogging with K2

Becks — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 00:17:30 +0000

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:

Part One: The Basics

Part Two: Thumbnail archives

Part Three: Styling