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Writing and manging content in Worpress using Mimbo theme
- Required: Wordpress 2.3 - Mimbo theme installed, active and configured. - Image manager plugin installed and configured. - Basic image resizer software such as PhotoFiltre
The Mimbo theme makes extensive use of front page images. It does this by utilizing the powerful wordpress ‘custom fields’ feature to add exclusive images to excepts displayed in the front page of the site. There is no auto-resize feature in this process and in order for the page to look presentable, these images need to be correctly prepared and optimized to load quickly and fit into the layout dimensions of the template. Image preparation can be done locally using an ordinary and free image/photo manipulation software such as the gimp or http://photofiltre.free.fr/ In addition, Wordpress has an excellent browser based image manager http://www.soderlind.no/archives/2006/01/03/imagemanager-20/ that provides all the cropping, resizing, compression and formatting required. We will make extensive use of this tool, as it simplifies the whole process.
NOTE If you are going to use pictures generated from original high quality digital photos or artwork, you do need to add an extra step in the process. High quality images usually provide excellent resolution and dimensions. This is essential for print and artwork display, but is quite unsuitable for website use. A web page has to display images by transferring digital information to your browser. Put simply, the more digital information the image has, the longer it will take to render that image in the browser. Original digital images are often many megabytes in size, which is way too big and would take several seconds to load on a page. Likewise their dimensions are often far to large for the web page template. Many people make the mistake of resizing their images into a smaller dimension, without optimizing the digital data. This means, the images are still too large and render slowly on the page.
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May 2, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Tim W
Great article on a great theme. I loved the Image Manager plugin which I guess has been somewhat superseded now we have the new Media Gallery (although still no way to file images neatly into folders)
If all that image resizing and custom field tagging is spoiling your enjoyment of MIMBO then you should check out the VIVA THUMBS plugin from Mediatricks. It takes the first image you upload (using WP Add Media - not Image Manager) and automatically thumbnails it on the fly to any size your theme needs.
It can also display a defautl category linked image if there is no image uploaded with a post.
The demo site has a fully working version you can login and test: http://www.mediatricks.biz/demo
Viva Thumbs makes Mimbo, Revolution, Unstandard and all the new ‘picture perfect’ themes a snap to administer.