This readme was first written on August 23rd, 2008. Last revised on December 27th, 2008.

Ocular Professor Operating Manual

  1. About
  2. Installation
  3. Uploading Pictures and Galleries
  4. Featured Posts
  5. Special Formatting
  6. Widgets
  7. Questions, Comments, Feature requests
  8. Special Thanks

  1. About

    Ocular Professor (OP) is a WordPress theme designed expressly for photobloggers. OP is the evolution of Professor, a theme designed to showcase written content that wound up being used predominantly for photoblogs. Because of its focus on text, Professor had a number of shortcomings when it came to displaying photos. With the release of embedded galleries in WordPress 2.5, Ocular Professor was born (or branched, as the case may be).

    In addition to a clean and simple design, OP also features:

    1. A widget-enabled footer with special styling for all default widgets
    2. A "Featured Post" section that, when enabled, allows posts to sit outside the normal flow of blog posts
    3. Special formatting, such as drop-caps and image captions
    4. Author comment highlighting
    5. Threaded comments for WordPress 2.7+

    OP was tested with WordPress 2.6.x and 2.7, and I'd recommend upgrading if you haven't yet (not only for security reasons, but for the improved image handling and gallery support). OP has been tested with Firefox, Safari, Camino, Opera, and Internet Explorer 7 on both OS X and Windows XP. Internet Explorer 6 has not been tested, nor are there any plans to do so (my apologies, but really, it's time to upgrade).

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  2. Installation

    Ocular Professor is installed in the same way as all other WordPress themes. Simply place the extracted theme in your themes directory (usually /wp-content/themes). Log-in to the WordPress administration panel, go to the "Design" section, and activate OP. If my explanation confused you, or you haven't installed a theme before, more detailed directions can be found in the WordPress Codex here.

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  3. Uploading Pictures and Galleries

    OP uses the WordPress media uploader and gallery embed tags to handle all images and galleries. If you upload images via other methods, most of this won't apply to you. Just remember the maximum width that can be displayed before breaking the layout is 740 pixels! Larger images will run under the metadata tags, and then just out of the layout entirely (which might be your bag, I'm not one to judge). If you use the WP uploader, images wider than 740 pixels will be automatically resized depending on the size setting you choose (thumbnail, medium, full size).

    Okay, I'm going to just go ahead and admit it, the image uploader and gallery embed really confused me at first, so I'll to document what I know for posterity, and maybe it will help some of you out. If you already know how to use it, skip to the next section now, or just start photoblogging!

    The uploader is available for both posts and pages (herein referred to only as posts, since repeating "post and pages" gets tiresome), and can be used to upload various media in addition to photos, such as video and audio, though only photos will be covered here. Before getting into the how-to of uploads, it's good to know how WP handles images and galleries. When an image is uploaded to a post, the image is then linked to the post (whether or not the image is inserted into the post or not). When more than one image is linked to a post, WordPress gives you the option to embed all linked images as a gallery (more on that in a minute). It's important to remember that uploaded images are linked to one post *only*, and cannot, as far as I know, be cross-linked. This becomes crucial to remember when creating galleries (and where I got really hung-up). Because galleries are created with only the images linked to a post, you must upload all images you want in the gallery, even if you already uploaded it to a different post in the past.

    Uploading and Inserting Images

    To upload an image, go to Write -> Post. In the upper-right of the post box you will see "Add Media:" with a list of icons to the right. Hovering over the icons will tell you what each one does. Choose "Add an Image", and an upload screen will pop-up. Since OP was tested with the uploader, we are going to be uploading images from our computer, so, under the heading "From Computer", click the button "choose files to upload". As soon as you select your image and click "okay", your image will begin uploading. Once uploaded, you will be presented with an options screen for your image. Go ahead and set the options for your image, and then choose "Insert into Post". Your image will be inserted and is ready to be published!

    Inserting Galleries

    Inserting a gallery is similar to uploading an image, but in this case you must upload more than one image to the post. Once you've uploaded all your images you will be in the upload screen menu as before. Go to "Gallery", where you will see a list of images linked to the post. If you need to change any options, go ahead and to that. At the bottom of the list is a button labeled "insert gallery into post". Click on that, and it should insert the gallery shortcode into your post ([gallery]). Save your post. That's it! My explanation was probably a little dicey, so you should just go play around with it to get a better idea of what it does and how it works.

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  4. Featured Posts allows the author to make a post outside of the regular blog timeline, ensuring that it will always be at the top of the post list. This is especially useful if you post often, but have a particularly important photo or piece of information that you want people to see immediately.

    To create a featured post, you must first create a category named "Featured". Once you have a featured category, any post assigned to this category will be displayed at the top of the page. The Featured display will only show the latest featured post. Older featured posts will shuffle down into the normal blog post timeline.

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  5. Special Formatting

    Since OP is a photoblog theme, the special formatting is minimal, but you might be interested in using it. Special formatting must be done through the HTML editor, not the visual editor.

    Captions

    Adding a caption to an image requires the addition of a caption class to the paragraph, like so:

    <p class="caption"> This is a photo of us at a picnic, the bears look hungry but were quite nice. </p>

    Drop-Caps

    Drop-caps are used to make the first letter of a post larger than the rest of the body copy. To use drop-caps, place a span around the first letter of a post, like so:

    <span class="dropcaps">O</span>nce upon a time...

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  6. Widgets

    Ocular Professor is a widget-enabled theme, though instead of the traditional sidebar, widgets are displayed in the footer. All default widgets are supported in OP. There are a large number of third party widgets, and unfortunately I cannot test and support them all. Apologies for this.

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  7. Questions, Comments, Feature Requests

    I'm always happy to get feedback, so feel free to shoot me a line or ten at themes@andreamignolo.com. It might take me a while to get back to you depending on my schedule, so please be patient!

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  8. Special Thanks

    Special thanks to Scott Allan Wallick's inspirationally detailed readme files. They are incredibly awesome. Thanks also goes to the WP forums, especially to all the people frustrated with the poorly documented gallery function. Thanks for hashing out what you did, the extra functions, and the explanations. And an extra special thanks to Mal, the best duck ever, who makes an appearance in this theme as Mal the Error Duck.

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