Minimatica Free WordPress Theme
Although the Unofficial Minimatica Users Guide describes how to set up a Minimatica themed WordPress site similar to GregAitkenheadPhotography, my photography portfolio, you should be able to modify these instructions to create a look that fits your needs. I highly recommend using the Minimatica Support Forums–the members there are courteous and helpful, and usually answer your questions quickly. Daniel, Minimatica’s creator, weighs in on occasion, and the community seems healthy and supportive.
Initial Setup
- If you have already set up a hosting plan, registered a domain name, and installed WordPress onto that website, you can skip to step 3. I’ll run through the process of setting up a site quickly. I use Dreamhost–they don’t offer the cheapest hosting, but I like their intuitive control panel and their reliable service. If this is your first attempt to set up a website, I highly recommend reading Lifehacker’s Night School series on How To Make A Web Site, especially Lifehacker Night School Part IV: Choosing a Host and Launching Your Site.
- For this demonstration I’m creating a sub-domain called “test.” In the Dreamhost panel go to Manage Domains>>Add New Domain/Sub-Domain, create a name for your test site (such as “test.mydomain.com”). Then click on Goodies>>One-Click Installs. Click the WordPress icon and choose “Custom Installation,” picked the domain that you just created from the dropdown list, and then let it automatically create a database. (I have since switched to testing WordPress websites locally on my Mac using MAMP.)
- Login to your new WordPress website using the link provided in the WordPress confirmation email.
- To add the Minimatica theme to the new WordPress installation, navigate to Appearance>>Install Themes>>and search for “Minimatica.”
Now that you’re in the game, its time to put together a minimalistic WordPress website to showcase you’re photography. Minimatica acts like a static home page with dynamic flash elements–the perfect platform to get your website off the ground.
Next: The Front Page Slider, Featured Images, and Thumbnail Galleries
Tim B says:
These tutorials are awesomesauce! My site looks simply dandy. thanks for all the work! Do you know how to change what part of the image shows up on the slider or on the blog thumbnail? it currently centers it, can it align at the top or could the alignment be specified?
noflashlight says:
I don’t know of a way to change the alignment of the slider image, but I tried using the crop tool on a post’s featured image in an attempt to change the portion that would be displayed on the home page slider. To do this, starting from the post, I clicked on the featured image to open the “Set Featured Image” panel, then “Edit Image,” then tried to drag to create a crop. The selection was made, but I had no luck saving it. I tried the same operation from the media library with no effect as well. So, it seems like adjusting an image after it has been uploaded to the media library might not be an option. I would photoshop an image to the size you want and then upload that as a separate image for use on the slider. Include another version for use in the post’s gallery.
Tim B says:
Thanks for your reply. I tried something similar. Was hoping to skip the photoshop step but I can manage that OK.
In a similar vein, when images are uploaded with a post they have special properties, such as the automated gallery, etc. If they are not uploaded with the post, is there a way to give them that special designation to show up in the gallery? Or do you just upload the whole set in a new page when you want to make changes?
noflashlight says:
You can add new images to your media library any time, and use them in your post galleries, but to get the effect where the thumbnail images on your main post page (the one you get to by clicking a home page slider) lead immediately to a lightbox pop-up image, you have to upload images to your post. If you use previously uploaded images from your media library you’ll get thumbnails that lead to images displayed on their own page which then lead to lightbox pop-ups.
The workflow is convoluted, but to set this up first create a new post, give it a featured image that you want to show up in the slider, change the post format to “Gallery,” click “Add Media,” select “Create Gallery,” and then “Upload Files” to upload the images you want included in the gallery. When the files finish uploading click “Create A New Gallery,” then “Insert Gallery.” At this point, if you publish and then view you’re post you’ll see the gallery that works as expected with a collection of smaller thumbnails below. Go back to your post, click on the blank gallery holder in the post body, and then click the “delete” icon. Now your post will look blank. Update and refresh the post. You should see the gallery images on your website post page, and clicking on the individual thumbnails should lead directly to their lightbox versions.
You can add more images to the post gallery collection by following the same procedure.
Tim B says:
thanks!
Shab says:
Hi,
How can I change the color of the (currently white) arrow to the right of the home page image slider to another color?
Thank you.
noflashlight says:
Shab — since I restrict the number of slider items to four, my homepage doesn’t show the arrows. If you submit your website’s address I can have a look and try to help.
Shab says:
Hi noflashlight. Thank you for trying to help; I realized that the arrow is an image that I can change.
I do have another concern though:
My site is not yet live but will be live on the 25th of April. I’ve spent SO much time getting it perfect and then I was hit with the terrible fear, today, of what if something goes wrong and I lose all my changes and content?
) so maybe this is a baseless fear. But am I supposed to/able to back my site up somehow?
I know nothing about making websites (though I did a pretty great job with the one I fixed up
Thank you.
noflashlight says:
The fear of going live is totally understandable and having a backup plan makes a lot of sense. There are a number of ways to back up your website, but I’ve had great results with a pluggin called WordPress Backup to Dropbox. I would also recommend learning to develop sites locally using MAMP (I’m on a Mac), finding a good code editor (I use Espresso), and using a child theme. Best of luck!
Shab says:
Excellent thank so much! I’m using the WordPress Backup to Dropbox now. Phew.
Tim says:
I have managed to change my site pages, header and footer background to black and the title text is a light grey but I can’t work out how to change the menu text colour and the colour for the captions in the gallery to the same colour as the header text. Can anyone tell me what to change please? I’ve asked on the support page for the theme, but I’ll also ask here in case I do not get a response. I need this changed and have tinkered a bit without any luck.
Thanks.
Tim says:
Sorry, I should link – timsymonds.co.uk
noflashlight says:
First, I’d create a child theme (there’s a guide here), then add this to your style.css file to change your menu text colour (if by menu text you’re referring to the text at the bottom right of your gallery pages) to the colour of your header text:
a:link,a:visited {
color: #e0e0e0;
text-decoration:none;
}
For the captions, I think you can create another file in your child theme called “colorbox.css” and include this code:
#cboxTitle {color: #e0e0e0;
}
I’m not absolutely sure about all of this, but that’s the nice thing about having a child-theme to mess with — it’s easy to go back after making changes.
Tim says:
Thanks for the reply.
I’ve worked out how to do the menu text now. The captions I need to change are under the thumbnails in the post itself, rather than the colorbox popup caption. Unfortunately I can’t change the font colour for the captions in the media file options, as that would be the simple way to do it.
There’s a line or two in the style.css that deals with text for posts and captions (I changed the font size in the stylesheet a while ago) but I can’t recall which lines handle that text. It looks ok as it is and I could remove the captions (currently barely visible anyway) but I would like to keep them and make them visible if possible.
noflashlight says:
I believe you would alter
.wp-caption-text {color:???}in your child theme’s style.css file.
Tim says:
Brilliant. Thank you!
Daniel says:
Hi, many thanks for this guide.
I’ve followed the instruction to add Fast Secure Form, but I noticed /*
*/ shows at the bottom of the page I created. it’s actually sitting in the page section rather than at the footer. It will place those symbols /* */ after what ever input I placed inside the page.
http://www.daproduction.co.nz/?page_id=286
http://www.daproduction.co.nz/?page_id=2
Any ideas?
Tim says:
[SOLVED] — see below
None of this works, none of my images will upload and all I get is error messages. I’m following this tutorial exactly and it just will not work. Theme dumped.
noflashlight says:
Sorry to hear about the bad experience with Minimatica. Not the easiest WordPress theme to set up. Feel free to post a description of the problems you had with the setup if you don’t find another theme that works.
Tim says:
Hi. After spending ages trying to set it up, getting frustrated and dumping the theme, I did a bit more reading, reinstalled and found a solution. Images were not uploading but a change to the functions.php file fixed it. Solution here
http://www.onedesigns.com/support/topic/how-to-fix-issues-with-media-uploader-with-minimatica-in-wordpress-3-5
So your tutorial has been a great help and I’m almost there… but I can’t see a way to change the footer and header text colours. Using the dashboard’s Appearance options tab appears to be able to control things like this but it doesn’t work. I suppose editing the .css is the way to go – can you help please? I want my header and footer to be black and the pages themselves too, as I’m using the template as a fairly static gallery and simply adding to my initial posts as I go. There will be no text to read.
Thanks for the tutorial, without it I would still be sitting with an empty wordpress blog.
Tim says:
Sorry my comment is not clear. I want a black background to header and footer, with light text and preferably a smaller and different font for the header and menu texts. Thanks.
noflashlight says:
Thanks for writing back — I know others have been frustrated by the WordPress uploader problem, too.
To change the header and footer color, you’ll have to dig into the code. First create a child theme (see this link). In the child theme’s style.css file add:
.home {background:#000;
}
to change the background to black for the header and footer on the home page only. If you want to change all page backgrounds, use:
body,.paged {
background:#FFF;
}
The rest of the changes to your theme’s style can be included in style.css as well.
I use Google Chrome as my browser, and use the “Inspect Element” feature to mess with my code without making permanent changes. Firefox and Safari have a similar feature. I’m a Mac user, and use MAMP to create a local wordpress site that I can use for testing purposes — there are ways to do this on Linux and PC, too.
Have fun!
Tim says:
Thanks. That’s a little intimidating at first glance, so I think I will leave it as it is, although I don’t like the way it looks. I thought it would be a simple change to a line of code without going into child themes etc…
I have a couple of other questions if I may?
I appear to be unable to add images from the library to an existing gallery post. If I upload an image to the library, they will only embed in the post itself and do not show as a thumbnail. This is a problem as I have a couple of images in the library that I want to add to a gallery and it doesn’t appear to want to let me do this without deleting the image completely, editing the post and using the “upload image” option. I see you cover that in the tutorial but for some reason it won’t allow me to add to the gallery from the library itself.
Second question – is there a way to remove “image x of y” from the pop up image viewer? That gets in the way of my text. I have used Google to look for solutions but can see no way to edit lightbox.js as suggested (can’t even find the file!)
Thanks and sorry for the questions..
todd says:
I’m getting an error when trying to set featured image as well.
Junior says:
Figured it out! Appearance>Theme Options> Toggle “Home Page View” to ‘Gallery’
Junior says:
Ugh! What am I missing? I’ve created the four new posts to test out this theme but the Front Page is showing the new posts in Blog format and not the lovely Front Page Slider.
cloc says:
So i recently uninstalled and reinstalled wordpress so that i could create a child theme for minimatica (i did not do this a few days ago when i first set up my website). my child theme appears to be working, but i have only a style.css file for my child theme. now i want to add a slide to the front page slider. the codex on wordpress was not helpful when it came to adding functions.php to the child theme, it merely told me what not to do (namely, copy and paste). so how can I edit minimatica now through my child theme? For the record, I have figured out how to add a slide to the slider, i just dont know how to do it under the auspices of my child theme such that my slider (and the rest of my website) will remain unchanged in the event of an update. Thanks in advance for any advice!
noflashlight says:
Have you activated your child theme in Appearance >> Themes? When I go to Appearance >> Editor I’m able to access my child theme’s style.css file — that’s where I would make changes, but I haven’t made any yet. So, what you see at GregAitkenheadPhotography.com is a website running a child theme of Minimatica with no changes to style.css and no function.php added.
Also, this might be more than you need, but this book, Build Your Own Wicked WordPress Themes, helped me figure out child themes.
Taylor says:
I’m getting an error when loading images. Have you had this issue? Did you have to repair the code? Is there a plug-in I’m not aware of?
Cool photos btw!
Taylor
noflashlight says:
I haven’t had troubles loading images — what kind of error are you getting?
Sterling says:
Help!!!, I am in definitely a novice when it comes to wordpress and this particular theme. I am having trouble with how to configure the image sizing for the slider images on my homepage. The images are being cropped out when placed in the slider. It also doesn’t give the slider effect when clicking on each picture that I have seen in other websites using this theme. So if someone can please give me some tutelage on minimatica
thanks, Sterling
noflashlight says:
Some people have had luck using the Ajax Thumbnail Rebuild plugin for resizing images (I’ve used it myself), and I usually crop my slider images so that they have a long side of 800 pixels (some of the image sizes on the front page at GregAitkenheadPhotography.com are 800 X 571 and 800 X 533.) And to get the slider effect going you have to have at least three images (or was it four?).
Tominator says:
Hi
Does anyone know how to order images that are displayed in each gallery? If I use the ‘insert gallery’ feature of WP I can drag and drop to any order. However, I am using the built in lightbox gallery as I like the way it displays the images and then allows you to click on the greyed out area to return to the page.
It appears that the images are displayed in the order in which they were uploaded (oldest first). This is not practical for me as I wish to choose the order. I have tried naming the images in case they with display numerically or alphabetically but this hasn’t helped.
I am running WP 3.5.1 having just upgraded in case there were any additional options.
Many thanks for your help!
noflashlight says:
Same problem here.
Karen Frair says:
I’m a novice WordPress user but after seeing your site wanted to showcase my images via Minimatica. I started following your guidelines and noticed that I no longer have a “Home” listing on my navigation bar. You don’t seem to have that problem so I must have done something wrong. Any suggestions on how I can get “Home” back? (It’s not there if I change themes back to 2011 or 2012 either). Thanks for any assistance you can provide.
noflashlight says:
When you create your first menu it’ll toss the default menu and leave you with a blank slate. I recreated the “home” button with a custom link containing my website’s URL, and then moved that menu item to the top of the list.
Karen Frair says:
Thank you so much! Can’t begin to tell you what a valuable resource you are.
noflashlight says:
Thanks for stopping by…good luck with your website!
Tanya Peila says:
I need help with limiting the four featured images on the slider. I would like to assign a category and only have the slider use posts in that category. Because everytime I add a new blog post it shows on the on the home page.
Any suggestions?
noflashlight says:
Have a look here at the heading “Restrict the Home Page To Four Slider Windows.” Is that what you’re looking for?
Wow — cool looking website, by the way.
adam says:
Anyone know how to center align content in blog posts? I can do it in Chrome when I “inspect element”, but don’t know where to add the CSS in the style sheet. See http://www.lvactionshots.com/wordpress/basketball/. I want the juicebox gallery centered in the available space. Thanks!
adam says:
Oops, try http://www.vegasactionshots.com/wordpress/basketball/
noflashlight says:
Apologies to Adam and Ken for the extremely long delay in getting your comments posted.
Adam, I see that you figured out how to center your juicebox element. And Ken, I’m assuming that you’ve already found the answer, but I believe that you just need to remove widgets in Appearance >> Widgets.
Ken says:
The theme uses a slider to go to a post with usually 30 photos. The photo thumbnails are three column and all the stuff with links on the right shows like:
Search
Recent Posts
Archives
Categories
Meta
How do I get rid of them?
Ken says:
I dont know what the URL of the main slider is. I want to link the Home menu option back as a custom link.
James says:
Hello,
I am trying to add next/previous buttons onto my posts page just like these ones on this website: http://eminebergsoj.com/the-new-mercedes-actros/ But cant figure it out. The next/previous images are from the home page slider. Any way that you could tell me which part of the code from the loop-slider.php that I can insert into the loop-single.php? My website is http://www.colorclipper.com
By the way, your user guide has been very helpful!
Thank you in advance!
James says:
I have updated WordPress and now I am not able to upload photos! I looked it up and the suggestion is that I make a child theme for Minimatica to fix this problem: http://pastebin.com/gY3mTPJ7
I dont know how to make a child theme. Can you tell me how to do this?
noflashlight says:
Child themes are a great idea, and easy to build with for the Minimatica theme. There’s a how-to here — I believe all of the information is still current.
josef says:
Hi James, did you figuritout, i am having the same probleam in wp 3.5 and minimatica. do you have any ide from where its came from?
josef says:
OK jest in case i found the answer in the onedesign forum
noflashlight says:
James — I had a look at Emine’s website but I’m not sure how to add the previous/next arrows. If you figure it out please consider responding here with the how-to. Thanks.
John says:
Is there a way to delete all those side menus (recent posts, recent comments, archives, meta…)? I’d like to have clean pages with no, or minimal side menus. Thanks
noflashlight says:
I talk about removing some of those items here, and you’ll find more information on the Minimatica Support Forums here.
John says:
How do i delete the text/page description under each photo on the homepage? I just want the category or page title to show. Someone suggested unclicking the “excerpt” option under “screen options” but that did not work. Any other ideas?
noflashlight says:
The front page slider on GregAitkenheadPhotography is built from four posts, and the text that appears at the bottom of each slider image is comprised of the post’s title and whatever is written in the body of the post.
Portfoliobuilder says:
Hi!
Great tutorial! worked wonders for me and my deadline.
I dug through your tutorial but I’m still stuck with one problem;
How did you center out the thumbnail gallery in a post? My thumbnails are now centered to the left because of the ”widgets” toolbar.
How did you fix this?
Thanks!
noflashlight says:
I don’t think I adjusted anything to center my content area, but I did add a fourth thumbnail column to my gallery (instructions here). Here’s my CSS in my child theme’s style.css for the content area:
#content { float: left; width: 940px; margin: 0; margin-right: 20px; }Portfoliobuilder says:
Thank you so much, it worked!
What I did (wrong) to make a 4 collumn is this: I went to a post and ajusted the amount of collumns in the media gallery, this didn’t ajust the width of the post.
How you did it is the way to go!
Thanks again, my website is now exactly how i want it to be.
(sorry for the bad english)
Stefano says:
Great article, thanks.
I had the problem of the non-clickable header, that now, thanks to this page, is ok.
The wordpress site i’m working is still under construction, and i use a plugin to redirect the non members to a specific page. With your code in header.php if i clicked on the header i would be redirected to that page, instead of the actual site root.
So i did this, that can comes handy in case like this, or if you prefer a non absolute url (working locally, etc)
Here the code
Deborah says:
Hello Greg,
Great site and article. I was wondering how you changed the background image to be fluid (fits the screen on comp and on iphone). Every time I seem to change something in the css it seems to be overwritten by the WordPress “background” menu area. Is it because you set up a child theme?
I am currently editing my site on a local server so I can’t show you the site but any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Deborah
Deborah says:
I just downloaded a plugin to make it work. Never mind
adam says:
@Deborah, which plugin did you use?
noflashlight says:
I am using a child theme, but I’m not sure if that would fix your problem. Still, they’re easy to set up.
Sheryl says:
I am so glad I found this site! I love the theme, but need to make some changes. Social media buttons appear horizontally on each post. I did not add a plug in so assume it’s part of the theme. Where can I edit the css for these? I would like them to run horizontally down the left edge of the post.
Thanks!
noflashlight says:
I’m not sure — this isn’t happening on my website so I’m assuming that it is not a default feature. I’d suggest using Google Chrome’s “Inspect Element” feature (right click on element on your page >> inspect element). The main inspect element area lets you look through your website’s code. CSS attributes are shown on the right.
GRANT says:
HI GREG,
FIRST OFF WANTED TO SAY THAT YOUR TUTORIAL HAS HELPED UNDERSTANDING THIS THEME!
HOWEVER I’M A NEWB AND I’M HAVIG ISSUES ITH THE GALLERY. I HAVE ADDED THE PICTURES THAT I WANTED AND IT LOOKS GREAT HOWEVER MY IMAGES ARE DUPLICATING WITHIN THE GALLERY. I HAVE SEARCHED ALL OVER THE NET AND STILL NO SUCH LUCK. I’M NOT VERY GOOD WITH CODE SO IM REALLY STUCK… I HAVE FALLOWED YOUR TUTORIAL STEP-BY-STEP AND I CONTINUE TO GE TTHE SAME RESULT… CAN YOU PLEASE HELP?
THANK YOU,
GRANT
GRANT says:
ok I’m a complete dork, I just read below and figured this whole thing out…. wow do I feel like a idiot! one more question while im here… how do you set up your categories? I like how they redirect to a page, I would love to learn how to do this.
thanks again!
-Grant
GRANT says:
just to make sure you know what i’m talking about, i was referring on how do you set up the home blog website menus? ive been looking over this for a while now and im going insane…please help
noflashlight says:
If you’re referring to how the “Blog” menu item at the bottom of the page redirects to my blog page, I use Michael Clark’s Ultimate Category Excluder — I explain how to use it on this page of the Minimatica tutorial.
Bert says:
Hi Greg,
There’s a serious issue with minimatica on iPad. I did a quick and dirty trial setup, it worked fine with sliders, links and layouts – except, it doesn’t work with Safari on the iPad. Instead of opening the slider and show the related text, on iPad/Safari it immediately jumps to the linked article. Try it on the Greg Aitkenhead Photography website, similar problem. (iPad 3 with IOS 6)
noflashlight says:
I’m getting the same behavior using Nexus 7 and Chrome. Hopefully development will continue with Minimatica and issues like this will be addressed.
adam says:
I addressed this by editing loop-slider.php. I deleted line 32 (overlay class). If you just do this, the title is still a hyperlink. This may cause a new problem, where users don’t know they can continue with a second click.
To make it a little more obvious that you should click on it to continue, I added [code] →[/code] to line 34, before the end of the hyperlink. Though I’m still working on several aspects of the site, you can see the result at http://www.lvactionshots.com/wordpress/. I’ve tested on iPad (Safari and Chrome) and PC (Chrome, Opera, Firefox, IE9, Safari).
I’ve considered using something like mobile-detect (https://github.com/serbanghita/Mobile-Detect/blob/master/Mobile_Detect.php) to give more control, but I don’t want to keep up with all the possible mobile browsers.
CRee says:
You rock, this article rocks, now that I know what I’m doing it all rocks together!!!!! Thank you
Nathan says:
Greg,
Thanks for the tutorial, is a great reference. I have a quick question, maybe I am not understanding something. I want to keep the front page of my site clean, just four pics, but would like older posts to kick down to one of the pages. So, for example, whenever there is a new post you can enter from the featured image, but to access older post you would go through the page tabs on the lower part of the screen. I am going to dig through the guide, but thought you may have been explaining this and I just got confused.
Thanks again!
noflashlight says:
I think you’re describing the theme’s default behavior (if you want the new posts to show up as one of the four images on the front page slider). The Minimatica tutorial is really about trying to circumvent that behavior so that only four posts would exist in the slider and those posts would lead the viewer to four galleries. If you’re creating posts the normal way you could assign a category to your individual posts and then create a menu item based on that category to display your older posts.
Nathan says:
Many thanks for the reply, is greatly appreciated. Think I wanted to find a way that no more than four post/ pics would appear in the slider. I was trying to avoid the arrow leading to another slider. Will tinker a bit more. Thanks for the help!
am7357 says:
Wow, I so glad I found your website!!! I was ready to give up on trying to figure out how the Minimatica theme worked… You really made my day. Thanks a million!
Rosa says:
Hi! Thanks! This information is very useful!
I’m trying to set a different color for some words in my menu, but I don’t know how to do it. Do you have any idea?
Thanks again!
noflashlight says:
I’d start by creating a child theme (see this article), import your style.css, and then change the “color” values in “.nav ul li a.” On GregAitkenheadPhotography those values are found on line 1100. Here’s what it looked like when I checked out my menu’s code using Google Chrome’s Inspect Element feature:
Svetlana Kluz says:
Hi!
Thank you so much for the Minimatica tutorials. I wouldn’t get far without them. There is still one issue I’m trying to resolve. How do I delete the menu items on the bottom of my pages? Thank you so much in advance!
noflashlight says:
To delete menu items go to Appearance>>Menus, find the item you want to delete in your menu, click on the small down arrow on the right of the entry’s box, then select “Remove.”
Mari-Liis says:
Hei!
I actually solved the problem of picture order accidentally. You don’t have to number your posts. You need to change the dates of your posts. So it shows posts in chronological order.
noflashlight says:
Thanks for the tip — I’ll give it a try!
cdclewis says:
Hi, a quick question if I may — how to centre a custom header image above the image slider instead of the default left alignment? I’m guessing a line of code for the style.css? Many thanks for all your help!
noflashlight says:
It worked for me when I added text-align: center; to #site-title which for me is line 405 in style.css. Make sure you’ve set up a child theme before you start tinkering!
If you haven’t tried it before, if you’re using Google Chrome you can right click on the element from your website that you want to adjust (in this case, the title), and then choose from the menu “Inspect Element.” You’ll find your css for that element on the right and you can add new code just by clicking below the existing code and typing.
Crystal says:
Beautiful template, but having trouble!
((
I am confused on the main menu bar on the home page. Do you have to set them up as categories? Can they be linked to pages not blogs?
toby says:
Hi Greg,
thank you very very much for your tutorial, I think it’s the most easy-to-follow-instruction on the web concerning this topic.
do you have an idea?
I’m very excited about the thumbnails in four columns. I changed the code the way you say, but unfortunately the thumbnails keep staying in three columns
Lisa says:
Thank You, Thank You, Thank You! This is my second WP website set-up, and I learned so much from your tutorial! I find if it doesn’t work the first time, read it again! Especially as I gain more and more understanding about the set up. Still have a bunch more tweaking, and about to start populating my images, but wanted to express my appreciation for the work you did posting this extremely helpful post!
Cheers,
Lisa
noflashlight says:
Thanks–and great looking website!
Amanda says:
Hi, Greg –
I have tried setting up the category blog page and it just shows up as completely white. I’m really stuck. Any thoughts? Thanks.
noflashlight says:
Amanda, it’s hard to say what’s going on without knowing more about how your blog is set up, but when I navigate to Settings>>Category Exclusion I have “Blog” checked under “Exclude From Main Page?” Under Appearance>>Menus my menu item for the blog was added by clicking “Blog” under Categories, and all of my posts that show in the blog are saved after clicking the blog category. Feel free to write back with more info — glad to help if I can.
Amanda says:
noflashlight: Thanks for the response. I, also, have it setup the same way. It was working but then something happened and I think it’s broken. The rest of my pages are showing up just fine. The site is http://www.josephsandpottery.com. Any insights are greatly appreciated!
P.S. I’m fairly illiterate with code, etc. so I need to be walked through any fixes.
thanks!
amanda
noflashlight says:
Amanda — I’ve been alternately getting a white page or a HTTP Error 500 page when I try to visit your blog. If you’re getting the white page, you might try deactivating your plugins, or have a look at this page for more help.
Amber DeGrace says:
I had a hell of a time trying to figure out how to change the header dimensions (940×100 was just not very image friendly). Thanks for your great page of tips here!
Jen says:
I have one question about the website. I wanted to use my own titles on the slider images and remove the one that is supplied with the template. How do I get rid of the post title and dark bar at the bottom of the image? Do I have to go into the code and delete something? Thank you so much for your help.
noflashlight says:
Had a look at your site — looks like you got it, and it looks great! I did notice that it is hard to get back to your home page after navigating away. You might consider creating a clickable header. Scroll about 1/2 way down this page of the Minimatica User Guide to see how.
Matias says:
Hi, thanks for the great tutorial.
I have a question which i cannot seem to find an answer on anywhere.
How did you get rid of the gray line at the bottom of your gallery after removing the comments section? There are 2 gray lines atm. on my page – one shorter than the other. (the two lines just above the menu).
Thanks in advance!
Steve says:
Hey Greg,
Thanks for the excellent info. It’s solved several frustrating Minimatica roadblocks.
I have one critical question regarding the home page gallery slider (which I’ve duplicated for ‘posts/pages’ as well): How do I get the slider images to show full-frame 3:2 horizontals? No matter how I re-size my images (currently 800 pix long side), they come out horizontally cropped into a roughly 5:4 aspect ratio. The embedded post information is cropped too.
Can’t seem to get this changed. Very frustrating.
Please,
Thanks,
Regards.
noflashlight says:
I think that you’re problem will be solved when you add at least four posts to the home page slider. One other suggestion — I noticed that you have a “HOME” menu item below the slider. Since you’re header is set up to act as a home button, and since you have two rows developing on the main menubar, you might eliminate “HOME.” Your site is looking great so far. Dig the color scheme. Good luck!
Steve says:
Super thanks for the prompt reply Greg! Deep gratitude. It does indeed seem to correct the problem. Sigh. After days of head-banging. Off to check my blood pressure now.
Emine says:
Hi! Thanks a lot for your indications! Here is my website: http://www.eminebergsoj.com
I would like to know how to delete the text on the slider, but not the title? I dont like the fact that when I have a long description, the slider overlay all the picture… Thanks a lot!
noflashlight says:
I believe that’s just a matter of including less text in the post…I haven’t played with this yet, but I wonder what would happen if you placed a page break in longer text?
Steve says:
I found the answer to this: In the upper right corner of your post’s edit page, you’ll see “screen options”. Click on that, and check of “Excerpts”. Then you’ll be able to manually enter a text selection that’ll show atop your home page slider image. Write it to length.
Luck with the struggle.
Papa Trout says:
First of what will surely be many stupid questions… once I’ve uploaded a picture and Updated the page, how do I then remove one or more shots from the page?
noflashlight says:
In WP, navigate to the post with the gallery, (Posts>>click the post you want to adjust>>Edit). Then scroll down to your featured image and click on it to open the “set featured image” window. Click “Gallery,” then “Show” on the image that you want to remove. Once the image information shows, click “Delete.”
Priyank says:
I loved the theme and I am trying to create a fresh site based on the help available over the net. After going through almost all the links… One problem which many of us are facing is “Getting slider on the homepage or 1st landing page”. In my case aswell when i click on gallery I can see the entire slider however on the home page there is no slider. Please help as i saw this questions at many places but no answers. However the guys using sites have fixed it. And I am still struggling to find how. F1 F1 F1
noflashlight says:
On Settings>>Reading I’ve got my “front page displays” set to show “your latest posts.” I use four post to represent the four categories that I want to use, and then leave those alone. If you want to set up a blog for frequent posts, check out page 6 of the Minimatica User Guide, and scroll down to “Restrict the Home Page to Four Slider Windows…”
moketti says:
Hi,
I’m using the minimatica theme, and I would like to ask you, what can I do to change the number of the pictures inside the slide gallery?
I’ mean…I made 7 pages and the slide gallery is divided in two parts–one of 4 pictures, and the other of 3 pictures.
I would like all them inside one slide gallery.
I looked at how to reduce the width of the pictures in the gallery , but I don’t know how to make all of the images fit in only one slide gallery.
Thank you in advance for your help!
Wonderful theme!
gregren says:
Hi,
After installing the Ultimate Category Excluder I excluded my Blog category from the Main Page and the other four Image categories from my Archives and Feeds. Then in Theme Options I clicked Category View>Blog and left Home Page View>Gallery. This solved the problem of keeping the Slider intact and keeping any Blog posts from showing up on the Slider.
Now, though, for some reason my Blog Posts don’t show up on my Blog Page. They show up in the Archives widget in the Sidebar that leads to a separate page but not on the main page. How do you get your blog posts to show up on the Blog Page in the Main Menu?
Also, any idea on how to get rid of the —
“Written by ____ ” on May 12, 2012
Filed under Blog,
Uncategorized
Edit
— info that shows up at the top of each Blog Post?
Thanks,
Greg
gregren says:
Hi,
I found where to eliminate the—
“Written by ____ ” on May 12, 2012
Filed under Blog,
Uncategorized
Edit
— by going in and searching for the text in the Editor and deleting between the tags.
I’m still stumped, though, on how to get my current Blog Post on to the Blog Page and not just the Archives. Any point in the right direction would be great.
It’s coming along!!!
Thanks for your help.
Greg
gregren says:
Hi Greg,
This has been a HUGE help. It seems so counter-intuitive that in order to make a static site you have to click Settings>Reading>Latest Posts and NOT Static Page.
I am still having some issues with the number of images that show up in my Galleries. If I select Static Page>Posts Page>Blog I get my full selection of images but this screws up my Minimatica Front Page to only show a blog format. But if I select Latest Posts I get the proper front page but I am limited to only four in my images in my Gallery.
Any suggestions?
Also, what did Plugin you use for that great Gallery Display in your Western Landscapes portfolio?
Thanks!!!
Greg
gregren says:
Hi,
I figured one of my questions out. I was perusing your site and followed your link to the Minimatica Forum on keeping categories separate. Buried in the comments was a question that Daniel misunderstood and gave the solution to the limitation on 4 posts instead. Funny. The question directly addressing this issue on the forum never really gets answered.
There is more useful information on your few pages than on all 39 pages of posts on the forum (not including comments) combined!!!
Thanks!!!
Still would like to know the Gallery Plugin you used.
Greg
noflashlight says:
Hey Greg, no gallery plugin — just using the theme’s default functionality. When I create a post I am, however, setting the format to “Gallery.”
gregren says:
In the end I wound up using Simple Lightbox because for some reason I couldn’t click off the picture to get back to the gallery and I didn’t want to be bound by the Back Button.
Suepek says:
Hi,
On my homepage slider, the grey box with the titles of each picture is not the same length (some are wider that other). Do you know where to set up their width in order to homogenize them?
thanks!
cdclewis says:
Hi Greg, Just want to say thanks for the help provided by your website – it was invaluable in helping me work with Minimatica. I still have some tweaks and improvements to make, but it would have been so much harder to get this far without this resource. Thanks!
noflashlight says:
My pleasure! You’re site looks amazing. Great shot of Wayne Coyne!!!
Maurice Rashad says:
Dude…. THIS TUTORIAL WAS AWESOME – I’ve needed these for a LONG Time. Time to create awesomeness… (mic is dropped and hits the floor with force and definition)
noflashlight says:
Thanks — nice website, by the way.
KD says:
I have created a site using your same approach, four images fairly static, so that is set. Then I created a subdomain for a blog but cannot get the blog option to come up on my menu on minimatica and I am pretty sure I am doing exactly what you explain,apprearance-menu-custom link. But no luck. I imagine I am missing a very obvious step but I need help figuring it out. Thanks for all of this intel by the way.
noflashlight says:
KD, the only thing I can think of is that you have a typo in the address. The custom link for PhotoHow2′s blog menu item uses “http://blog.gregaitkenheadphotography.com” in the URL box. Have you tried the link with and without “www?”
Scowsh says:
Please excuse…my question was premature. My solution was categories in gallery view. Still, thanks for everything.
Chelsea says:
Do you know if it is possible to expand the width of the entire theme? Basically what I want to do is have the margins be closer to the edges of the page, therefor possibly making the slider images wider.
chelseastratso.com
noflashlight says:
This link might help: Topic: How to change the width of the page?
IVS says:
Hello everyone!!
I love this theme and I tried to solved some problems I have. it should be easy but I cant.
Slide effect has problems with internet explorer 6-7, when u click in the arrow any image appear anymore
Moreover, the slide effect crash sometimes, I do not know exactly which are the pixels necessary to dont have problems. Ive tried many but when is one slide alone it has problems. It needs at leeast 3.
Are those problems connected?
site: doc.semes-cv.com
Thanks!
noflashlight says:
Anyone — sorry, no IE to test from my end. Nice job on the website, by the way.
Chris says:
Im trying to get a line of text on the front page below the slider any ideas? A few people have asked this in the support forum but no one seems to have come up with an answer that works? I wondered if there as a way of adding the slider to a post or page and then setting that page as the front page. I have tried adding php to the home.php file but this either throws up errors or just doesn’t work at all. I love this theme but I’m on a tight time schedule and if I cant sort it I’m going to have to find a different theme I think!
noflashlight says:
This tip comes from Mark @ Canadian Camaraderie:
I’ll post the code Mark sent on page six of the Minimatica User’s Guide.
Miguel says:
Hi to whoever wants to help;I built my front page slider gallery thanks to the tutorials and comments and mistakes posted here in this blog but now I don’t know hot to link the images on the slider gallery to show the rest of the images when they are clicked.
when I click on the image says
Bad Request
Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.
please help
thank you !
noflashlight says:
I’m wondering if you’ve included images in your gallery post, or just a featured image?
Miguel says:
Thank you for replying Greg I did include like 10-15 images for each post and I selected as gallery on the post and insert as gallery when uploading from my computer,I don’t know if I have yo link each category to each post?
but according to your tutorial it is automatic,I installed the YAPB PLUGIN
and Light Box plugin and no luck could you please take a look to better understand?
http://imaginephotographysite.com/word/
thank you so much!
noflashlight says:
Try deactivating YAPB (and maybe even all of your plugins) to see if there’s a conflict.
Miguel says:
I deactivated all plugins still no luck I’m thinking do the feature gallery have to point to a specific page per category or they are created automatically when we upload the pictures and select view as gallery in the posts?
Mark Carlson says:
Hi Greg, thank you very much for putting together this detailed tutorial, it was instrumental in getting my website running.
I’m stuck with one thing, and I am hoping for some help. Designing my website (www.canadiancamaraderie.com), I want to remove the sidebar, and extend the texts in my posts. Could you please walk me through how you did this?
Thank you very much,
Mark
Chris says:
Mark – how did you get text below your slider? Loads of people are asking this q on the support forum but no one has come up with an answer that works! This is just what I’m looking for!
saikrishna says:
thank you very much for your greatest tutorial
At first on seeing this theme,I felt that it was impossible to edit this but on seeing your tutorial and im very happy and thankful to you.
ps:
please considering writing about removing “comments are closed” also.
noflashlight says:
saikrishna–thanks for your comment. To turn off comments on posts go to “All Posts,” then mouse over one of your posts and click on “Quick Edit.” Unclick “Allow Comments.” I’m pretty sure that removes “Comments are Closed.”
Connie says:
Hi Greg, thank you for all this advice, I would not have got the slider gallery running without it.
If you look at my website you will notice only half of every photo showing, while this looks very mysterious I would still rather have the whole photo showing.
How can I fix this?
noflashlight says:
Mysterious indeed! My first thought was that I haven’t had much luck with the Minimatica slider and vertical images. If the image is over 600 px wide it should fill the whole slider window, but it will also zoom into the subject arbitrarily (you might be able to choose the part of the image that shows in Media>>[pick the photo you want to adjust]>>Edit>>Edit Image>>Thumbnail Settings — but I’ve never tried this). If your image is already over 600 px wide, then you might try the Ajax Thumbnail Rebuild WordPress plugin.
Alex says:
Greg, thank you so much!
Bob says:
Never mind!
I’ve got it working now!
I had to do it a little different then you had it described in your tutorial.
First I added the pictures, then I clicked Save on the bottom save button. And finaly I removed the ‘box’ in the message…
Then it worked.
Bob says:
Hello,
I just started working with WP and I’m using the Minimatic theme.
I’m using my site as an online portfolio and therefore I want to show all my photo’s in a gallery style.
Unfortunatly my page shows all the photo’s TWICE!
I’ve followed your tutorial but I’m still having the same problem.
The way you show your photo’s on your site (http://gregaitkenheadphotography.com) is the way I want my photo’s to appear on my site.
Can you please help me getting the problem fixed?
If you want to visit my site so that you can see the problem yourself, you can go to http://www.bapro.nl/portfolio
Thanks in advance!
Bob
cdclewis says:
Thanks for your help. One last question if I may? I notice that when I click on a slider image to enter the gallery view, the URL contains the date the post was made, eg: website.com/2012/02/18/slugname/. How can I remove the date, or post without the date — website.com/slugname/?
noflashlight says:
If you navigate to Settings>>Permalinks you can make changes to the way URL’s will look on your site. I’d also recommend checking out this post on the WordPress Codex site, and this page about Pretty Permalinks.
Pingback/Trackback
Zen Minimatica | Greg Aitkenhead Photography
Tina says:
Hi,
does anybody know how to resize vertical lightbox images?
When I upload an image with the size of 600 x 900 px, the theme resizes it to 353 x 558 px in the lightbox and I don’t know how to change that.
Happy about any idea
Thanks,
Tina
cdclewis says:
Hi, this tutorial is an incredibly helpful resource – my thanks.
I’m having trouble looking for the right php to edit to remove the edited by and time stamps and the link you recommend is no longer working. Would you mind explaining or pointing to another page that shows how to make the change?
Many thanks!
noflashlight says:
Try this link: http://www.onedesigns.com/support/topic/removing-post-details
Jenny says:
Perfect! thanks for help!
Sarah says:
Hey Greg,
Thanks for the information, I stumbled upon minimatica recently and wanted to use it for my website as well. What I want to know is, how did you remove all the content to the right side of a page and post? like the search form and the categories columns and all that stuff? I’ve managed to get rid of comments following your instructions but I can’t seem to figure out a way to remove the stuff they have to the right of every page, I’m hoping you could help me get a clean look for a page and post like you have for yours.
noflashlight says:
The easiest way is to navigate to Appearance>>Widgets, remove (drag and drop into “Available Widgets” area) all items from “Sidebar,” and then drag an empty text box into the Sidebar area and hit “Save.”
Bronwyn says:
Hi! This tutorial looks fantastic. I seem to be struggling with something rather basic though…the actual slider on the home page seems to be failing me and I’m sure I’ve missed something obvious. When I set the post format to Gallery I get two triple images on the blog post…yikes! Any ideas? Having text on that expanding preview would be so great too.
noflashlight says:
Bronwyn–I had a look at your website (great photos, by the way), but couldn’t figure out why your slider image is only covering about a third of the slider space when it reveals. I had a look at the actual image using Chrome’s inspect element, and the long side of the slider image looked like it was 600px–the recommended size. I didn’t see what you meant by two triple images–could you pass on more info? Also, I’ve always used the Gallery format for posts, and adding text to the post body gives me text in the slider.
Tina says:
Hi Greg,
first of all, thank you so much for this perfect tutorial!
I had no idea of webpages, but with your help it worked out well and I am very happy with the result.
But still I have two little problems on which I can’t find the answers:
the horizontal pictures in the lightbox appear a bit blurry even though they are very sharp in original and the vertical images should have the size 533 x 800, but in the lightbox they appear too small.
Do you have any idea how to solve that?
Best regards,
Tina
noflashlight says:
I’ve used AJAX Thumbnail Rebuild in the past and it has worked. Daniel, Minimatica’s creator, recommends it in this WordPress Forum post. Hope that helps–and thanks for checking out PhotoHow2.
Tina says:
Thanks for the quick answer, but AJAX doesn’t help, tried it out already. The problem is the picture size in the “lightbox”, not the thumbnail size. But thanks anyway
Jenny says:
Hi! I noticed in your about page you have put a photo which is framed and bordered neatly, could you let me know how you did this??
noflashlight says:
I just put my cursor at the beginning of the page’s text and used the page’s “upload/insert media” button. I added an image from my library, added a caption, and then chose to align the image “left.”
Linda says:
Hi, I’m new to web design and loved the minimatica theme. It was pretty easy to follow. However, when I try to go on the site through internet explorer, I get a blank screen. But if i go on it through Firefox, my site shows up. Any idea what’s wrong with it? Thanks.
noflashlight says:
Linda–had a look at your site–very nice. I’m working on a Mac and can’t test IE. Hopefully someone here can give you advice, or this post on the WP forum might help: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/minimatica-ie-issues. Good luck–let me know if you figure this out.
lRlevolution says:
Hi, maybe you can help me. Im trying to have my blog directly on my page instead of redirecting to a different link. Basically I have 4 post right now all under the category of feature that are displayed on my main slider page. now, what i want is that the rest of my post are directed directly to my Blog page within the site. kind of like this(http://aerialadvantage.com.au/Blog/) any suggestions?
noflashlight says:
Very good question–I’ve been racking my brain, trying everything I can think of to make this work on my test site–no luck. Anyone? There has to be an elegant solution.
noflashlight says:
raicesrootsridas–figured it out (and I like the way it looks–I’m going to start using this instead of a linked blog on a sub-domain). 1) go to Posts>>Categories and create a category called “Blog” 2) go to Appearance>>Menus and add the Blog link to the menu by navigating to the “Categories” section, clicking on “Blog”, and then “Add to Menu” 3) use the quick edit option and check the “Blog” category 4) go to Appearance>>Theme Options and change “Category View” to “Blog.” That’s it–can’t believe this worked me over so hard. PS: checked out your site and saw that you figured it out before I did! nice website, by the way. Thanks for the question.
Matthew Fickett says:
Greg,
Thanks for writing this tutorial, and for your comments on my site ( http://www.matthewfickett.com ) while it was in progress. I wound up going in a slightly different direction, but the careful walk-through you’ve posted here helped me get a handle on how Minimatica (not to mention WordPress!) works.
-Matthew
Brian says:
Nick -
I came back to this site when I realized that I was not getting the lightbox effect as well. I double checked and saw that it was supposed to be a “gallery” post. What frustrated me, was that all my posts were gallery! So I managed to get it work, and wanted to share since noflash really helped me get off the ground with this site! I had to install an additional plugin called “Lightbox Gallery”. Once I installed that, everything just started working! I was able to change the size of the lightbox and all kinds of stuff. I hope that helps you. This site has been such a blessing to get my wife’s website up.
Cheers,
Brian
Nick says:
Thanks for all the information on this theme, it’s perfect for what I’m after.
Just a quick query (hopefully), I’ve added the 4 featured images and started to add thumbnails which has worked fine but I need to add the next level of images which would appear as the lightbox slideshow. How do I add this next level to the post? Sorry if I missed something in the above guidance.
Many thanks
noflashlight says:
Nick–if you add images into a post and choose the “gallery” format for that post, the thumbnails that you get, when clicked, will automatically start the lightbox slideshow. Clicking on the individual lightbox image will move you through the slideshow.
Lucian says:
Hi Greg,
Thank you for your tutorial.
It was the most helpful tutorial for me. Still, I’m having a problem in my gallery ( http://www.onelook.ro/special-moments/10/ ). I can’t figure why I’m having duplicate pictures on it. Can you help me with a hint?
Best regards,
Lucian
noflashlight says:
You’re site looks great–I had a look and it seems you’ve resolved the multiple image issue. Since you have quite a few images in your “Special Moments” gallery, I’d recommend displaying thumbnails in four columns. It takes a little coding, but you can find the instructions here.
Lucian says:
I managed to change my site color. If you want to update your tutorial with this info, please write me on email. This is how I can thank you for your great tutorial.
I still have problems displaying thumbnails in four columns.
Best regards,
Lucian.
Lucian says:
Now, I’m displaying thumbnails in four columns, but I can’t figure how to remove the sidebar, witch can be found in bottom, after thumbnails!
Brian says:
Just wanted to say thanks for this guide! Helped me set up my wife’s photography website.
Cheers!
Brian
Melissa says:
I would like to adjust the code..and change the size of the boxes that the photos go in on the home page. What am I looking for in the code..and what exactly should I change?
noflashlight says:
Melissa–by using Chrome’s “inspect element” (a good way to play with changes to your page before commiting) I can see that the dimensions for the slider box are found in style.css under #slider. Changing the background box’s dimensions would be easy enough, but I’m not sure about how one would change the size of the slider. Not much of a coder…you might try throwing this question out to the folks at the Minimatica forum (the second entry in the FAQ discusses stylesheet changes to the slider.). Good luck.
Chris Leigh says:
Now sussed that
using the plugin Frontpage Manager works.
Happy Days
Chris Leigh says:
oops I sorted again by re installing…..
Is anybody prepared to share how to restrict the home page to displaying 4 posts. I know quite a few people have been asking
Help gratefully received
Chris Leigh says:
Hi There,
another problem re posts and categories.
Non of my posts are viewable unless you access via the gallery on the home pages. The catagory titles appear at the bottom but I get a page not found error
Pingback/Trackback
Minimatica Users Guide–Updated Links
Chris Leigh says:
Good support site. Theme problem is driving me crackers
Cant get the home page to display a gallery. Cant get it to remove the ‘continue reading text’
noflashlight says:
Chris–welcome to the start of things. George Steck, a famous backcountry hiker in the Grand Canyon, once explained that finding your way off trail was easy because “The route unfolds as it goes.” Keep at it–your site will come together. To get the home page to display slider images simply post four posts with featured images. Create a menu in Appearance>>Menus and start adding the items you want to appear in the menubar. The major trick to remember with Minimatica is to choose “Gallery” as your post’s format when creating your posts, and to not hit “Insert into Post” when you select your images. If you get duplicate images in your post, go to Posts>>All Posts, hover over the post you want to fix and choose “edit,” and then click on the image or gallery that shows up in the body of the post itself. When you click on the funky box representing the images you get the option to delete–do it and you’ll have just a gallery with no extraneous photos. Hope that helps!
Chris Leigh says:
Thanks for the direction… I reinstalled, started again and it works !
bsanchez says:
Hey Noflashligt,
Worked like a charm! Really appreciate it!
bsanchez says:
So, I kind of screwed up my site and had to re-make a bunch of stuff. The link I put in that last post won’t work. However, this post is a good visual example of what I was talking about though:
http://forty2kay.com/the-hangover-2/
Thanks!
bsanchez says:
Great tutorial! I was able to pretty much build my entire website because of the help I got here. However, there’s one thing I cannot seem to figure out. I created my four posts (I used the “Audio” post format), and the featured images show up great on the homepage. However, when you click on the post, the picture only stretches about two thirds of the way across my page. The content (like the words in my post) on the site is built to be 940 px wide, I believe, but it looks like my picture is only allowed to be about 700 px wide. I tried importing larger pictures and I looked through a bunch of different places in the actual HTML and CSS of the design, but still can’t figure it out. My website isn’t done yet, so don’t judge ha, but here is a link to the future home of my “About” page.
http://forty2kay.com/wordpress/about/
Notice that the content is able to be wider than the picture? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
noflashlight says:
bsanchez–I see what you mean. You might want to have a look at this post. It referes to using AJAX Thumbnail Rebuild to fix a similar problem. I’ve used a different thumbnail rebuilder for another website–you might also try the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin.
Hope that helps. By the way, the music on your website rocks!!! 1st great snow, then Rocky Anderson, and now Forty2Kay–I’m starting to like SLC! I look forward to downloading the mixtape.
Edward McCrea says:
Having difficulty with the slider – it picks up the first 4 images at the correct size but as soon as I load more than four images, the images and text get cut when you scroll to the other images. Any idea on how to fix this? I have formatted the images to 800px wide.
noflashlight says:
I think you’re images are the right size, you just need to publish four posts at a time to fully populate the slider. Minimatica’s kind of weird that way, but I haven’t found how to get around it. My solution was to just publish four posts that represent four different categories, and then create a separate blog with a sub-domain for changing content. Your blog looks great, by the way.
Paul Mycroft says:
Hi guys,
I hope you can help. I have spent a couple of hours trying to get featured images from 4 posts to show on the Home page but to no avail. I am almost embarrassed as I have installed many WordPress themes but cannot get this one to work. I am almost laughing with embarrassment.
1. Blank “Home” page created
2. 4 posts (set as Image) with 4 featured images created in one category
3. “Home” is set under Settings/General to be the Home page
Nothing appears on Home. Any ideas??
Thanks.
- Paul
noflashlight says:
Paul,
Here’s how my site‘s set up: In Settings>>Reading I have “Front Page displays>>Your Latest Posts” marked. I don’t have a “Home” page created, but I have a custom link in the menu named “Home” that points to my domain name. If you created a page called “Home,” I would delete that for starters. In Settings>>General I have my main domain name set for both of the URL options.
Can you create a subdomain on your host for testing, upload WP and Minimatica, and then just start the new page with four posts–they should fill your home page slider automatically. That might help you figure out how to rearrange your site the way you want it.
Paul Mycroft says:
Hey Noflashlight!
That was it! After I set my Reading setting to be “Latest Posts”, it worked. Wonder why I couldn’t see that solution anywhere else as it’s a basic requirement of Minimatica.
I also created a “Blog” category and manually added it to the menu.
Thanks so much. Appreciated.
- Paul
babyd says:
Good tips in the article, thanks.
I have one problem, the slider on my home page and the images all have dimensions that i have not set. The slider has a width of 3688px and the 4 fotos on the slider are showing as 922px wide each, again i have not set the widths to this.
The 4 images that display in the slider are all feature images with dimensions 688×370. I used this dimension as it seems to be the dimensions being used in the minimatica demo.
Any help appreciated. Thanks.
noflashlight says:
babyd–sounds like you are uploading full sized images to your WordPress site. I usually size my images so that the long side measures 800px before I upload them, and then just pick a featured image without changing the settings. It looks like the Minimatica theme then cuts the slider images down to 600x400px. It also looks like the images on your slider are stretched out–I think thats related to choosing 688x370px.
Uploading the edited images should also help speed up the website.
Anna says:
Greg, probably you know how to add a music player and video to Minimatica?:)
noflashlight says:
Anna, you might try the MP3-jPlayer or Audio Playlist Manager with Autoresume pluggins. I’ve worked with both of these and they seem to have potential for Minimatica. You might also have a look at either this or this Tuts+ tutorial. Good luck!
Iain McGonigle says:
Hi mate, your tutorial is extremely useful and offers much more advice than the official version. I was dissapointed with the support forum as the specific question I need answered has been asked several times with no response.
Was wondering if you could help. I need my front page to be static i.e. 4 featured images posts that will act like the link to their prospective blogs and gallery. So I would have 4 categories:
Reviews
Technology
Blog
Gallery
The first three would be their own independant blogs and each one would have a seperate post representing it on the home page, once clicked will bring the user into a list with the most recent article at the top, hope that was clear.
The gallery would then just be a simple gallery like one of your own displaying mostly short clips and videos.
I hope you can help. Iain
noflashlight says:
response by email–did that help?
Liepke says:
Thanks Greg, for the clear guidelines, I had no clue how to get my galley working and thanks to your work now I just managed to set it all up. Very exciting! I’ll be back for more
THANK YOU.
wave says:
Hi first let me say this has been very helpful Im almost to the point where i can say Ive got it and its easy and i love the theme. One problem tho…. I added pictures to my galleries and I keep getting doubles Ive tried a few different things and maybe Im doing something wrong do you have any ideas?
noflashlight says:
Sounds like you’re hitting “insert into gallery” when you set up your photos. If you’re post is set to “gallery” format, then all you should have to do after uploading photos is hit “save” and then “update.” Hope that helps.
Anna says:
Hi Greg,
I’ve just installed the theme but I don’t see any pictures on the main page (should there be any demo pics?) I don’t understand how to make my photos appear on the main page.
noflashlight says:
A fresh install of WordPress comes with the “Hello World” post and a sample comment, but Minimatica doesn’t come with any demo pics to fill the home page slider. That’s a good idea–I think it would help alleviate some of the confusion first time users feel. Have a look at Page 2 of my Unofficial Minimatica Users’ Guide–it covers the process of setting up your front page slider.
noflashlight says:
Early on I installed two plugins: Yet Another PhotoBlog (YAPB) and AJAX Thumbnail Rebuild. I’m kind of wondering if either of these is helping me out, but I’m not sure.
I set up a test site with Minimatica and when I open the default theme the “Hello World” post does not show an image. I went to EditSet Featured Image on “Hello World” and uploaded an image from my hard drive via the flash uploader by clicking “select files.” After upload I choose “Use As Featured Image” and then “Save All Changes.” I didn’t change any other options–just clicked the “X” to close the window. When I preview changes (or publish) I get a post with a single image (I have the format set to “Standard”) and when I navigate to the home page I get a slider with one slider window and the new image visible.
Then, I added a new post, clicked “Set Featured Image” again, and ran through the same steps as above. I selected “Gallery” as the post’s format (to get the lightbox style thumbnails that I want on this post). At “select files” I uploaded 7 images, choose one as the featured image, and hit “Save All Changes” again. I didn’t change anything below this button. I closed the “Set Featured Image” window, and back on the post itself I clicked “Publish.” Same results as before–the slider now has two images with the latest post to the left of the later.
The test site has all of the default features and no added pluggins, and I’m getting it to work properly. I wonder if the problem folks are having relates to the changes they’ve made to the default theme, like added pluggins, or to changes made to settings (especially after uploading image–the options below the “Save All Changes” on the flash uploader window).
So, Maureen and Gerrie, if you just installed the theme and can take it back to square one, I’d starting over. At the very least I’d deactivate any newly installed plugins and try a fresh post. Also, I upload all of my images from my computer after resizing them with a long side of 800px (the short side varies–I use Lightroom or Photoshop)–the problem could also stem from setting images from a URL or not having them in .jpg format.
Hope this helps.
Charnel says:
Hi Greg,
Thanks so much for giving so much quidance on how to customise the minimatica theme. This is the first time I have ever tried putting together a website so I am going through quite a learning curve. So thanks again for you help.
I do have a question though and am hoping you can help. I noticed that you inserted a number of photo’s into a gallery however, when I try and put together a gallery only 4 images are shown even though I have inserted 10 or more.
I use a page and then uploaded all images from my from my desktop, saved, the ordered them, linkeds some as featured image and then saved again followed by clicking insert into post.
What have I done wrong? Anyway, hoping you can help.
Thanks again
Charnel
noflashlight says:
I’m uploading images from my hard drive in bulk–one of the test posts had 6–and then clicking on the one that I want in the slider and clicking “set as featured image.” When you say “Page,” are you creating a page or a post? Let me know if you get your galleries working. Seems like a common problem.
Charnel says:
Greg,
Thanks so much for your advise. I downloaded both plugins you suggested and they seem to have made a difference. Also I think what I was doing wrong was using a ‘page’ rather than a ‘post’ to show a gallery. the page format does not seem to be compatible with showing a gallery.
However, I have now encountered a futher problem. If I use a post (with a gallery setting) I can only select one featured image while i’d like four as I’d like the slider to show four images when one clicks on that specfic category.
Here is a link to the start of my website www.http://pointcropshoot.com. What I want is for someone to be able to go to a category in this case ‘People’ and see the slider with four images (each of which have a naration) and then be able to click on the sub-folder again in this case ‘people’ to see a gallery of images related to the same subject. Is there a way to do this?
Thank you so much for your help. I am enjoying learning new things but at times feel quite out of my depth as I really don’t know what I’m doing so your asistance is greatly appreciate.
Charnel
noflashlight says:
If you don’t mind, tell me if I have this right. Basically, you’d like to have a front page slider with panels that link to another page with a slider, and you would like the second slider to have panels that link to galleries?
charnel says:
I apologize but my explanation is not that clear. Basically what I’d like is to have a front page slider that contains 4 images. Each one of these images has a post behind it, thereby allowing me to give a brief description of each image in the front page slider. Then as a separate sub page (ie. in the case currently on my website it will be the people page within the people category) I’d like a gallery showing a number of other images that are of the same type of image as that in the front page slider.
Visually something like this:
Category: People – shows slider with 4 images (each attached to their own post)
Sub-category: People – a gallery of a number
of images related to the main category
I really appreciate you trying to help me.
Charnel
Charnel says:
I think I know what I need. I need to be able to break the link between the slider and some posts which I intend using as galleries but still maintain the link for those posts that I want featured in the slider.
Scowsh says:
This please. Canadian Camaraderie has a gallery post in their front page slider that links to another slider. Your help has been vital to bringing me to this point.
maureen says:
Hi Greg, Thanks for this great tutorial. Unfortunately I am following your instructions to the T, and the images are just not showing up on the home page. Any idea what’s going on? It seems like a problem other people are having, but no one has a solution.
Thanks!