I've always been enthusiastic about photography. My dad has owned a Canon AE-1 Film SLR from ever since I can remember. The only thing that held me back for the longest time was the expense of films...something that has been done away with in this digital age.
DSLRs are still quite expensive but the costs have been coming down and a lot of the big names have extremely capable entry level DSLRs. After previously owning a Canon Powershot S1 IS, I decided to take the plunge and I purchased the Canon Rebel XSI a few months back. All I can say is, WOW! While there are a ton of things I like about DSLR's, the one thing that was most important to me was the ability to take high ISO images in low-light situations without needing a Flash. I love the candid snaps I am able to take and of course the easy control over depth-of-field that a DSLR allows for.
In any case, I don't want to bore you with any more text. Photography after all is about images! Click on the image below to proceed to my photoblog. I have a collection of my favourite images on the site, and some thoughts/comments on some of them too. I hope you enjoy them!
PS - If you like the WordPress theme that I am using on my Photoblog, Head on over to my customized edit of the Reflection WordPress theme (which is an excellent theme created by David Moxey).
Hello Sudeep.
I have couple questions for you regarding your theme.
First thank you so much the theme is awesome I really loved it
Second, I’d like to ask you if it’s possible to add advertising banners if I am not using the widgets, I am trying to fit the theme on the screen so that you don’t have to scroll to see the whole thing and that’s not possible when you use the widgets, so what’s your solution for advertising?
My second question is how can you make a drop down menu instead of a horizontal one. Let’s say I want to add a new page and call it “For Sale”, I want when the user hover it, a menu drops down giving the user the option to choose “buy nikon cameras’ and another one let’s say “buy canon cameras” and when he clicks on any of these, he will be directed to another page to buy nikon or canon. Is that possible? if it’s not possible I tried to create a seperate php page called it buycanon.php, included in it the header and footer and put in between some html and tried to link to it but i keep getting the following:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function get_header() in /home/myusername/public_html/wp-content/themes/
any idea?
Thanks a lot I appreciate your help
Bob
Hi Bob,
I’m glad you like the theme. Regarding your questions, I’m not sure I completely understand your query regarding placing ads in the theme. Are you trying to put in horizontal banners or a vertical Box like ad?
If it doesn’t work in the sidebar, then you will need to insert it into your template files. You will need to edit header.php and insert it at an appropriate spot within (after the navbar div). However you will need some basic HTML/CSS knowledge to figure out how to go about doing this. The other issue though is that this theme is really meant more as a Photoblog so it isn’t really designed around having ads in it. Due to the dynamic AJAX loading of pages, it means that even if you did have an ad on display, hitting next/prev will only update the image and not the ads which means that the ads will remain static for the most part on the site. This could probably be hacked so that ads are also dynamically loaded but that will take a fair bit of work and you would either need to figure it out yourself or get someone to do that for you.
Regarding Drop Down menus, that is something that isn’t incorporated into the theme at the moment. Again, since this is more photoblog oriented, that wasn’t a feature I was very keen on. I might try to implement it in some future release but I’m not sure when or if at all. If you’d like that functionality, it should be do-able but you would need to handcode the nested navbar yourself. What might be easier is for you to create a page titled “For Sale” from within WordPress (not a separate php file) and link to your Buy Canon and Buy Nikon pages from there. Then if you enable “Display Pages in Navbar” from the theme options, the “For Sale” page will show up in the header. You can even create the Buy Canon and Buy Nikon pages from within WP and then set them to “hidden” so they don’t show up in the navbar. Then you can link to them from the “For Sale” page by providing an explicit link to these sub-pages.
If you must create a separate php file for your page, you can include a link to it in the navbar by finding the navbar Div (id=”navbar”) in header.php and inserting code similar to what I’ve listed below:
PS – In pages, it is simple enough to include Ads. You should be able to use any of the Ad managing plug-ins that let you insert ads into the page text by using shortcode within the page text area in WP. The reason this won’t work as well in posts is that the post text is hidden by default. It would only show up when the person clicked on the “Info” bar.
Sudeep.
Thanks for the long reply I appreciate it.
I figured out a way inspired by what you advised me and it is now working like a charm.
However, one thing is happening. if I click on categories and for instance it’s called Nature and has some sub categories as in the example below:
Nature (7)
|_ Flowers (2)
|
|_ Trees(3)
|
|_ Forests (2)
Now if I click on Nature, I see 7 pics displayed, so clicking on a tree picture let’s say starting from the most left picture, takes me to the first tree picture, now two things are happening now:
– instead of having Next, I am having Prev so it looks like right to left justified, starting from the most left picture, I should have had the next option instead of the Prev one, I am wondering how I can fix that
– another thing is that clicking on the parent category and then clicking on a tree, and then navigating prev or next does limit you to the trees subcategory even you selected the Nature parent category. So is there a way to make this work in a way that if you select the parent category then you select a picture from it, you can still navigate thru the other subcategories?
Thanks again for your efforts
Hey Bob,
Glad things are working for you. If you check out the ReflectionMod page, I do mention somewhere towards the end that Sub-categories aren’t well supported by the theme. The Category browsing gets broken due to sub categories and that was a WP limitation (as of 2.7.1). I don’t know if things have been updated to implement it now with the new WP installations. Unfortunately I am in between moving houses right now and I hardly have any computer/net access :). I’ll take a look at it and see if I can make any suggestions. For now I’d suggest not using hierarchical categories and instead just using a one-level category system. Also if you add multiple categories to a same pic, then it breaks the in-category browsing since the theme won’t know which category you wish to browse within once it comes across a pic with 2 categories.
Cheers
Hello Sudeep, hope you’re doing well.
I just wanna know if you have any update on the above. I also wanna know if you can advise on the fact that when you click on category and you start from the most left image, you should click next to move to the next image, in the theme though, you are given the option of clicking previous instead of next so it’s as if you reached the last picture although it’s the first picture, any idea why?
Thanks again
Bob
Hey Sudeep,
Hope you’re well. You’ve created a great mod here. I have what may be the simplest question ever: how do I change the “CATEGORIES” name to “PORTFOLIO”? Is the code that needs editing in the header.php?
Thanks Sudeep!
b
Hi Brian, just change this code in header.php:
to:
Forgive me.. As for your photographs, absolutely stunning. I have taken many photographs of same for subject to paint, but none with such eloquence as you.