Photo Workshop Instructions

Photo Workshop is a photography theme for WordPress for displaying both photo & multimedia portfolios and pitching photo workshops or products. Designed as an all-in-one solution for professional photographers and entrepreneurs, Photo Workshop can help you grow and diversify your business, while maintaining a killer, mobile-friendly portfolio all under the same hood. Homepage designs can be turned on and off at the click of a button on the Theme Options panel. Subscribe to Graph Paper Press' feed or follow us on the bleeding edge of development by following us on Twitter.

Here are the main concepts that you to know about this theme:

  • This theme relies heavily on the use of Page Templates
  • Slideshows are added as Pages and assigned to the Slideshow Page Template
  • Workshops do not rely on Page Templates; they have their own menu link on the admin panel
  • All photos should be uploaded using the Add Media icon in WordPress
  • If you are installing this theme for the first time, visit your Settings -> Permalinks page once. You don't need to save; just visit the page. This will initialize the creation of our Workshops custom post types.
  • You can group pages (slideshows, videos, etc) together by following step 7 below
  • Download Gravity Forms if you need to create web forms for collecting workshop registration info.

Here is a brief list of the major features:

  • Theme options panel to configure homepage design, easy logo insertion, css style over-ride, insert ads and more
  • Slideshows on homepage, portfolio, workshop and about pages
  • Workshop custom post type
  • Image protection - right click disabled sitewide
  • Automatic thumbnail generator with the ability to override the automated thumbnails
  • Built-in HD video player for self-hosting HD quality video, multiple videos in a post
  • Ability to embed any kind of Flash media via custom fields.
  • Three footer widgets
  • Multi-tier drop-down navigation to maximize homepage space
  • Built atop CSS frameworks to speed customization
  • Forward and backward compatibility with previous versions of Wordpress
  • XHTML: This theme has been tested on Firefox, Safari, IE 8, 7

Best Practices

If you want to make changes to how this theme looks and feels, than create a child theme. Never make changes to the original theme files. Why? Because when a new version of this theme is released, all of your changes will be lost when you update. Plus, making a child theme is incredibly easy. Here is how you do it.

  1. Installation

    1. Unzip photo-workshop.zip to your computer's desktop. It should be contained within a folder called /photo-workshop/.
    2. Upload the folder and its contents to the themes directory of your blog via FTP, located in wp-content/themes where WordPress is installed.
    3. Click on Appearance - Themes menu from the WordPress admin panel and then activate Photo Workshop.
    4. Perform your Initial Setup steps.

  2. Installation Troubleshooting

    If you've performed a clean install of Photo Workshop and are having problems, make sure that the following conditions have been met:

    1. Make sure that you've installed Photo Workshop properly. You should use an FTP program like FileZilla, WinSCP, or Fetch to upload your files. Do not use WordPress' Install a theme in .zip format option.
    2. Permissions: On most servers, Photo Workshop files should be set to 644 and folders should be set to 755.
    3. Make sure that you've deactivated all of your plugins before installing and/or upgrading Photo Workshop.
    4. Your Photo Workshop folder should be named photo-workshop. Do not rename this folder.
    5. If you are upgrading your version of Photo Workshop, make sure to backup first and completely delete your old version of Photo Workshop from your server before uploading the new version of Photo Workshop to your server.
    6. Permalinks: After installing Photo Workshop for the first time, you need to visit your Permalinks page in your wp-admin panel. You only need to do this once to initialize the Workshop custom content types in the theme.

  3. Initial setup

    Photo Workshop is a 950px wide, one or two column theme, depending on options you have chosen. We need to set up your default image and thumbnail sizes to allow for easy posting and consistent design structure. Click Settings - Media.

    • Set your thumbnail size to 275px wide by 200px tall.
    • Set your medium size images to 590px wide. Do not set a height.
    • Set your large size images to 950px wide. Do not set a height.

    Post thumbnails are generated automatically by the functions contained in this theme. This theme uses the new Post Thumbnail feature available in WordPress 2.9. Read more about this new feature here or watch our video tutorials, if you are a member of our site.

  4. Theme Options

    This theme has seven optional homepage designs:

    1. Slideshow Section - A full page slideshow
    2. HD Video Section - A full page video presentation
    3. Welcome Message - Introduce yourself to your visitors
    4. Featured Section - A main post at left, with three earlier posts at right

    Please activate each option and view your new homepage design. Remember, less is more.

  5. Navigation

    The navigation contains a listing of all your pages and posts, your contact info and the search bar. You can set or remove the contact info from the Theme Options panel. For further reading, please see these instructions.

  6. Slideshows

    To create a slideshow, simply create a Page and upload images using WordPress Add Images button (the little square icon). You can hold down SHIFT + CLICK to upload multiple images at once. After the images have uploaded, save the gallery. Do not insert the gallery into the post. Assign the page to the Slideshow page template. The diagram below illustrates the main points just explained.

  7. Slideshow Groupings

    Lets say that you want to create one page called Photos and have this page display all Slideshows. Lets call this page your Photo Archive page. To create a Photo Archive page, create a page called Photos and assign it to the page template List Sub Pages. Publish this page. The Photo Archive page that you just created is all setup to display every page that you assign to is as a sub page of the Photos page. Next, lets create a sub page. Create a Slideshow page using the instructions in the previous section and assign that Slideshow Page as a sub page to the Photos page. Publish this page. You can have infinite groupings and even infinitely nested groupings. The List Sub Page template can be used for grouping any kind of content including videos, illustrations, virtually anything you add to the page. The diagram below illustrates the main points just explained.

  8. Slideshows for Clients

    The Slideshow for Clients page template acts exactly like the regular Slideshow page template, with two important differences: First, the image titles are shown in the caption so clients and buyers can specify the unique ID during review or purchase. Second, if the post is password protected, so is the slideshow. This allows you to password protect specific galleries. You can password protect specific pages by editing the Visibility option in the Publish area on each page.

  9. Blog Archive

    This theme contains a special archive template specifically for Blog posts. To utilize this, create a category called Blog and assign all blog posts to it.

  10. Video

    Photo Workshop has a built-in HD video player that plays FLV video files. You are no longer restricted to pixelated YouTube videos. To add a video, upload the FLV file to your server using your favorite method, like FTP. Copy and paste the link to the file into a custom field called video. Next, add a video thumbnail. You can do this the exact way that you add regular thumbnails, except, you will want to add an image large enough to fit the maximum size of the video player, for best results try an image that is 950px wide. Add the video thumbnail to a custom field with key value video-thumb. For multiple videos within a post or page, try different values for the same video key which mean you can have 2 or more instances of video key. Same goes for video-thumb. Note that each thumbnail should be in the same precedence as that of video for them to match. You can also add other multimedia, which can include virtually any media with embed capabilities. Enter "multimedia" as the key value and paste your YouTube, Vimeo, or any other html embed code into the value field. You can read more about using custom fields here.

  11. Post Thumbnails

    By default, thumbnails are auto cropped by Wordpress. In WordPress 2.9, you can now change the crops of your images after uploading them into WordPress. This is the order in which the theme attempts to grab an image to use as a post thumbnail:

    1. Looks for an image by custom field called "thumbnail".
    2. If no image is added by custom field, it checks for a post image (WordPresss 2.9+ feature).
    3. If no image is found, it grabs the latest image attached to your post using the Add Media icon.
    4. If no image is attached, it can extract an image from your post content (off by default).
    5. If no image is found at this point, it will defer to a default image.

    If your thumbnails or images look squished, then you need to follow these steps:

    1. Make sure you have your Thumbnail, Medium, and Large image sizes set to the correct dimension on WordPress' Settings -> Media Settings page.
    2. If you have switched themes or uploaded images with incorrect dimensions, you will likely need to "regenerate" your thumbnails to the new dimensions. To do this, you need the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin.

  12. Widgets

    There are a total of five widgetized areas on this theme, depending on which options you activate on the Theme Options panel. You can add and delete widgets by clicking Design - Widgets, from within your Wordpress admin panel. We have also packaged two custom Widgets into this theme: Hire Me and a Workshop Info widget.

  13. Common problems

    This theme uses jQuery javascript to do lots of fancy stuff. If your theme looks broken, than you likely have a plugin that uses a conflicting javascript library. Deactivate your plugins, one-by-one, to determine which plugin is conflicting with jQuery.

    Still having trouble? Consider becoming a member of Graph Paper Press so you can get access to our private, well-groomed support forum, tutorials, and additional themes.

  14. Recommended plugins

    • All in One SEO: Automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines
    • Fancybox: The best lightbox plugin available, currently seen on Apple.com.
    • WP Super Cache: This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

  15. Credits