Recently, I had been getting into photography again, and thought I’d start up my own photoblog.  I thought I’d use Wordpress and was looking around at a couple of photoblog themes, but many of them required the creation of multiple images, usage of custom fields, etc.  I really didn’t want to have to do all of that for every photo though.  I just wanted to upload one photo, write a description, slap on some tags, and be done with it.

After a bit more searching, I found a wonderful plugin called “Yet Another Photoblog” plugin that managed to do a lot of the heavy lifting (thumbnail creation, image caching, etc), complete with it’s own functions for creating photoblog templates.  So I thought I’d create my own YAPB plugin based theme, so:

Now introducing, Phloggin‘!

Features

• Upload a photo and let the “Yet Another Photoblog” plugin do the heavy lifting of resizing the images for you!
• Images are cached for faster load times and less strain on your server
• Widget sidebars on the right side on the index page, archive / search pages, and in the bottom footer
• Easy navigation through pictures instead of just post titles

Installing the Theme

Installation of the “Phloggin’” theme is the same as any other Wordpress theme except that it requires the “Yet Another Photoblog” plugin to work.

This plugin not only adds an extremely quick and easy picture upload bar to the Wordpress administration panel, but it will also do the boring work of resizing your images for you.  This will give you the ability to easily upload any image straight from your computer without having make multiple sizes of the same image for each post.

This theme includes the 1.9.18 of the plugin, but it can also be downloaded from the official Wordpress Plugin Directory here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/yet-another-photoblog/

Directions to install “Yet Another Photoblog” plugin
From WordPress 2.7 on, you may do that directly via the WordPress Admin Interface:

1. Just go to Plugins/Add New
2. Enter the term “YAPB” and start the search
3. Click on “Yet Another Photoblog”
4. Click on “install”

On WP 2.6.5 and below, you have to do that manually:

1. Unzip the content of the zip-file into an empty directory
2. On your server, create a directory “yet-another-photoblog” below your “wp-content/plugins” folder
3. Upload the unzipped files directly into the new folder

After everything is installed,

1. Go to “admin panel/plugins” and activate YAPB
2. Under Settings, go to the YAPB Options Panel, then click “Automatic Image Insertion”.  Disable “Activate automatic image rendering in general.”
3. Finish!

After you’ve activated the plugin, you’re all set to install Phloggin’! Just unzip the Phloggin’ theme into your
wp-content/themes/ folder and activate it in the administration panel under the Appearance tab!

How to use

The Yet Another Photoblog plugin creates a nice easy, accessible photo image upload field right above the content of every post in the Wordpress admin.  Just upload your photo there, and the theme will take care of the resizing and placement for you.

The theme is a fixed width of 960 pixels, so I would suggest uploading images that size or larger for the full effect.  Smaller images are ok, but do not make as strong of an impression in my opinion.

Once small thing I discovered while creating this theme was that apparently the default settings for a PHP install is to refuse uploads more than 2 MB.  If you do want to upload larger files, and have access to your server, the easiest solution is to create a .htaccess file in your wordpress base directory and add this line:

php_value upload_max_filesize 10M

This would allow file uploads up to 10MB in size.  Just replace the “10M” with whatever size you need.

Also, the right side of the index page, archive and search pages, and the bottom footer have been wigitized, and should be able to fit most standard widgets without any trouble.

Limitations

Feel free to use this code however you please.  All we ask is that you please support us by leaving our link in the footer. So go out there and get photobloggin’ already!

If there are any suggestions, bugs, etc, please feel free to email or post in the comments below.  I hope you enjoy the theme!