Using Mimbo theme

Photofiltre is a small program among many, that allows you to batch process a whole folder of images automatically to carry out several optimizing operations and make a new folder of website ready images. They still need fine tuning, to crop and resize them to fit our theme front page template, but the heavy optimization work has all been done. Please refer to PhotoFiltre’s batch processing guide for more details. Ideally we want all our raw images to be in JPG format and in the region of 500px wide (max) by 500px height (max) and compressed to about 100kb (max) These figures should provide a reasonable quality image in most cases. Also remember to remove EXIF/IPTC data, as it adds unnecessary information to the image.

In the following section, I’m assuming all your images have already been locally optimized as suggested above and ready for basic website use.

Let’s start with the ImageManager installation and configuration.

1. Install image manager in the usual way. Activate and go to the Options page. 2. Because we are using this tool specially for the theme front page images, I would configure it to default to the following to save unwanted changes later.

Align- Not set Insert as -image

3. The Mimbo theme needs to pull it’s front page images using Custom Fields. For this to work, images must be stored in the /images/ folder of your theme, or a subdirectory of it. One method is to upload them there via FTP, or go to Options→Miscellaneous in your control panel, set the correct path, and upload them through the Upload panel below your Write→Posts editor. If you use this method, you must prepare the images for size and dimensions before hand using a photo tool as described above.

4. We are going to use the ImageManager plugin instead of WordPress default image plugin, but we still need it to upload the images to the /images/ folder of your theme. Let’s start by Making your settings in the ImageManager options page to something like the following

Base image directory: ../wp-content/themes/mimbo/images/ Base image URL: ../wp-content/themes/mimbo/images/

Make sure this directory is writable by the server, ie 777. Ouch! I don’t like doing this either … there is however, a way to protect the directory.

The directory can be protected via .htaccess on apache or directory permissions on IIS, check your web server documentation for further information on directory protection. If this directory has to be publicly accessible, remove scripting capabilities for this directory (i.e. disable PHP, Perl, CGI). We only want to store images in this directory and its subdirectories.

On apache you can create the following .htaccess file in your base image directory to prevent unauthorized public access

	<Files ^(*.jpeg|*.jpg|*.png|*.gif)>
	   order deny allow
	   deny from all
	</Files>

The plugin is now configured enough for the theme to pull images as required, although you may setup the other options to suit your your other requirements.

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