A Category-Style site is one where the main navigation menu displays only portfolio categories. See screenshot above.
Step 1To use Category-Style mode, in Theme Options, make sure "Use Category Mode" is checked.
In wp-admin, create your portfolio "categories". In the screenshot at the top of the page, 3 categories were created, called "category 1", "category 2", and "category 3". Obviously, call them something appropriate, like "web sites", "art", "photography", etc. The category names will appear in the main menu.
The categories will appear in the menu sorted by Category ID number. You need to find out what the smallest Category ID number is, and in the Theme Options, type it in the "ID of First Portfolio Category".
Tip: to find the Category ID number, in wp-admin, in the categories section, mouse over a category name, and you will see the ID in the status bar at the bottom of your browser window)
Full Path To Images. Edit: This is no longer needed, and this section has been removed from the Theme Options page.
To post a portfolio item, simply create a new "Post". Type in your Title and body text. The body text will appear in the "detail" page, so you can add as much text as you want there. For the slider, you want to keep it short so it fits. So for the Slider text, enter text in the "excerpt" section.
If your image is in a 3:2 ratio (600x400, 900x600, etc) then you only need to add one image. The theme will take care of resizing it down to fit the detail page, slider, and slider thumbnails. The original image will be used for the large "lightbox" view.
To add the image, at the bottom of the Post window, add a Custom Field called "Image". For the value, type in the file name, without the FULL path. If you uploaded images through WordPress, then it probably put them in a subfolder structure based on year and month. So if you uploaded an image in May 0f 2009, then you would need to enter something like this for the file name: 2009/05/yourfilename.jpg. If you upload manually via FTP, then you MUST upload to your "uploads" folder. If you don't put it into a sub-folder off of the "uploads" folder, then you would enter something like this: filename.jpg
If your image is not in a 3:2 ratio (for example, a portrait oriented image), then you will want a cropped version of the image to show for the Slider and Slider thumbnails. If you don't then the image will get squished vertically and will look bad. So for images like this, you will need to specify a secondary image. In your image editor, crop your image to be in a 3:2 ratio, for example 300x200.
To add the secondary image, at the bottom of the Post window, add a Custom Field called "Image_Cropped". For the value, type in the image file name only, without the full path.
Here is a sample Details page:
On the Slider, when you click the "Read More" link, the user is brought to the portfolio detail page (which uses the Wordpress "single.php" template file. Here, the full text for the post is shown next to a larger image. If the image is clicked, the full size image is shown in lightbox view.
Many people do not want a details page because they don't have much text to go with the image. They will just want text on the Slider, and nowhere else.
To disable the details page, you simply don't show the "Read More" link on the slider. You hide that link on a post-by-post basis. To hide the "Read More" link for a post, add a Custom Field called "No_Read_More" with a value of "true".
Note: you can disable/hide the 3 column blocks under the slider. To do this, uncheck the "show 3 columns?" setting in the Theme Options page.
This content is controlled via the Theme Options page. This theme has special support for a small "About Me" block, and a "Testimonials" block. Plus there are 3 "miscellaneous" blocks where you can put whatever content you want.
In the Theme Options, you can place each block in any of the 3 columns, plus you can duplicate any of these blocks to be also in the sidebar. (The sidebar is shown on this theme's regular "pages")
For example in the screenshot the "about me" section is on the left. You can actually have it in the middle, or the right side. You can also disable it altogether, and also include a copy in the sidebar.
In the screenshot, the middle column is actually one of the 3 "miscellaneous" block sections. This text is set in the Theme Options under "Miscellaneous 1", "Miscellaneous 2", or "Miscellaneous 3".
In the Theme Options, you can include or exclude the Testimonials block. As mentioned above, you can locate it in any of the 3 columns under the slider, and you can also include a copy in the sidebar.
Before adding your first testimonial, you need to create a category called "Quotes". In the Theme Options, type in the Category ID number for the Quotes category.
You add testimonials by creating a regular "Post", but without a Title. If you want to add a source for the quote, in Custom Fields, add a Custom Field called "Quote_Source", with a value of the person's name that said the quote. Also add a Custom Field called "Quote_Website_Url", with a value of the website address from the quote author. For example (http://www.example.com).
The Contact Me page uses a small Wordpress contact form plugin. Download the plugin here:
http://green-beast.com/blog/?page_id=136
After installing, follow the instructions from the link. When you get to the part where it says to type in <!--gb_contact_form--> into a "Page", make sure you're in HTML editing mode, and not Visual: (it took me hours to figure this one out!)
The About Me page as shown in the live preview is just simply a WordPress "Page". Add whatever you want to it.
If you add too many categories, there won't be enough room in the menu bar to display them all. So you will need to decrease the font size and padding to accommodate more categories.
In style.css, to change the font size for the menu:
#slidermenu { fontsize: xxxx; top: xxxpx}
#slidermenu li {padding-left: xxxx;}
(notice you'll have to adjust the "top" value so the menu stays where you want it)
A "featured" category is simply a category just like any other. Just name the category appropriately, and have it be the category with the lowest Category ID number. Because the menu is sorted by Category ID in ascending order, that will make your Featured category the first in the list.
When you make a portfolio post, you would assign 2 categories to it; one for the Featured category, and another for whatever category it's in.