Photo-friendly Wordpress theme

Fenster

This post consists of one of my well-intended but misguided attempts to give back to the boards.ie community. Keep your aspirin at the ready.

I've had a few people inquire about my Wordpress theme now that it is more or less finished, especially about integrating a flash gallery like this.

To begin, you need to download three files:

1. The Dark Days Wordpress theme.

2. The Flash configuration files

3. The Simple Viewer flash gallery.

Next, you need to ensure that your Wordpress installation is installed somewhere other than your root folder (this guide will give you a fancy front page). Simply upload and activate and the Dark Days theme as normal. The code isn't commented at this point, but it's all self-explanatory. menu.php has the header links.

Then open root.zip and put all those files in your root folder. You will need to edit a line in index.php to point to your Wordpress installation (usually wordpress/)

Finally you simply need to unzip simpleviewer.zip and put the viewer.swf file in your root folder too.

It should all work fine.

SmashingPilot

This is sweet dude. Great work with the site. It looks really good.

I'd love to try this out myself.

I'm alright with computers but is this easy to do and any chance you would provide a little support when I get a chance to do this next week, after my mocks??

Fenster

Sure.

SmashingPilot

Where art thou Fenster??

Im having a little trouble with editing the index.php file. I'm not sure where to put the directory for my wordpress installation. Any advice?

Fenster

Put your Wordpress installation absolutely anywhere you like. I installed mine under /main.

Assuming you install your Wordpress under there, activate the Dark Days theme (let me know how well it works, it was pushed out in haste and I need to update the release file badly). Make sure you set Wordpress so that it knows it is under /main

Create an index.php file in / and put the following into it:

If you'd like the entire blog available at / put this:

<?php
define('WP_USE_THEMES', true);
require('main/wp-blog-header.php');
?>

If you just want the header and to use your own content for the body, change it to this:

<?php
define('WP_USE_THEMES', false);
require('main/wp-blog-header.php');
?>

SmashingPilot

Thanks for that dude.

Here is what the site looks like at the moment. I think it looks pretty good now. Its great the work you put in on this site.



One last thing.....How do you edit the words "Photo Gallery" and "caption 1" in the simple viewer part. I assume you need to edit the flash file or something??

Fenster

I've updated the theme:

http://www.bhalash.com/files/tar/dark_days.tar.gz

The code is cleaner and some items keyed to my site have been removed.

EDIT: Look at gallery.xml for caption and title information. It should all be self-explanatory.

GristlyEnd

Nice work Mark.

Quick question. How are you at CSS?

Fenster

Rough. I can just about format text with it and tweak an existing stylesheet.

GristlyEnd

Ok then, you are just above my level. Have you seen any decent reading on the net for CSS? I have ideas for my own site but getting frustrated at the hit and miss I'm getting at the moment.

SmashingPilot

This is weird. I've edited the gallery.xml but nothing has changed on the site yet?? I know it can be slow to update but other things are updating, just not the galler title and captions??:(

Fenster

Did you upload the gallery.xml?

Is the gallery.xml in the same folder as viewer.swf?