monolit

monolit

• is a simple photoblog theme based on WordPress and YAPB. It's designed to be minimalistic and to focus on what's important - the photo.
• depends on the Yet Another Photoblog plugin.
• has a fixed width of 900 pixels. It will scale down larger images.
• has inline comments and no popups
• is based on the default WordPress theme, but has also borrowed stuff from the grain theme and the monochrome blog with permission from the authors.
• free to be used or modified by whoever chooses to do so

monolit is not

• a photo gallery.
• feature-rich - you will not find EXIF-data (yet), syndication, or thousands of options. It will not make you coffee.

Installation and configuration notes

Installation

1. Download and install WordPress
2. Download and install YAPB
3. Download / checkout monolit and put it in your wp-content/themes/ folder

Configuration

1. In the YAPB configuration menu, disable automatic embedding
2. In the Presentations menu, enable monolit as your theme
3. In the Options / Reading menu change the 'Show at most' to the maximum number of thumbnails you want to show in a single archive page. By default I recommend this number to be a multiple of 6, eg. 6, 12, 18, 24, etc. This is the default number of thumbs per line and can be changed through the MONOLIT_SET_THUMBS_PER_LINE value in the config/config.php file. If you change this value, remember that the 'Show at most' value should probably also be changed.

If you wan to enable archives

• Create an 'archives' page through Manage/Pages. Remember the title and be sure to select the 'Arcives' template under 'Page Template'.
• in the config/config.php file
  • change the value of MONOLIT_SET_ARCHIVE_WP_TITLE to the title of the page you just created
  • change the value of MONOLIT_SET_SHOW_ARCHIVES to 1

If you want to enable an about page

• Create an 'about' page through Manage/Pages. Remember the title.
• in the config/config.php file:
  • change the value of MONOLIT_SET_ABOUT_WP_TITLE to the title of the page you just created
  • change the value of MONOLIT_SET_SHOW_ABOUT to 1
  • to show the timestamp on the about page set MONOLIT_SET_SHOW_ABOUT_TIMESTAMP to 1

Changing the copyright notice and other settings

• Copyright: Change the MONOLIT_SET_COPYRIGHT to whatever you want the copyright notice to say.
• Change other configuration values in the file if needed. They are pretty much self-explanatory.

About photo sizes

The theme automatically resizes images to a max width of 900 pixels and a max height that is customizable through the MONOLIT_SET_MAX_HEIGHT value (default is 600 pixels). If you want wider images the layout will break unless you change the stylesheet (look for the 'inside' class). Also you can configure the thumbnail sizes through the MONOLIT_SET_THUMB_WIDTH and MONOLIT_SET_THUMB_HEIGHT values. If you change these values - especially the width, you might also want to change the MONOLIT_SET_THUMBS_PER_LINE and 'Show at most' values as previously explained.

About language and messages

Language and messages can be configured through the lang/lang.php file. It might take some skill to figure out which message goes where :-)

Todo / some future version

• a smarter way to control the configuration, ie. via the admin page
• use imagemagick to resize and optionally sharpen downsized photos

Requests from users

• optional support for EXIF-data (currently being developed but it will take a while)
• syndication support (not likely to happen in near future)