I wanted to use Mansion for my Miami Beach Huts website. It was ideally suited, however all my images are portrait instead of landscape. Some tweaks were necessary which I thought I’d share with you for endless hours of fun.
I wrote this for Version 0.2 of this theme. A few things have changed since then, especially the documentation. Keep that in mind while I’ll talk you through some tips and tricks of MANSION.
Since we’re playing around with the thumbnail sizes and orientations, the first thing you want to do is install an invaluable plugin called AJAX Thumbnail Resize by Junkcoder. It does exactly what it says on the tin: resize your existing thumbnails. This way you don’t have to worry about posts from the past – they’ll still look great when you upgrade to a new theme like this.
Picture Sizes
For each picture you upload, WordPress automatically creates three different sizes on the fly: Thumbnail, Medium and Large. These are saved with your original image file.
Mansion uses the Thumbnails to generate all pictures on the home page and then links each picture to the post it’s embedded in. To make them look good, the default thumbnail size needs to be set to 200×150 pixels (under Settings – Media). Make sure the box “crop tuhmbnails to exact dimensions” is ticked.
So far so good. If you’re writing a new post and you’ll upload a few pictures with it, all thumbnails will resize correctly. If you’ve previously used a different thumbnail dimension you can use the aforementioned AJAX Thumbnail plugin to rebuild them all to fit Mansion.
The readme file also suggests sizes for medium and large images (495px and 960px) – we’ll see how that affects single posts and pages a bit later.
Orientation: using Portrait instead of Landscape
For my project, all my pictures are portrait instead of landscape – so instead of 200×150 thumbnails I’d like to use 150×200 ones. Changing the size alone and rebulding all thumbnails creates rather big black gaps in between them, so we need to tweak the style.css file a bit.
Find the following code and tweak the WIDTH value to your own needs. Say you have 150 pixel wide thumbnails, set it accordingly.
/* Logo description styles */
#header {background: #333; width: 200px; float: left; }
The Height of the Nav-Box
You may have noticed that when you use a different width for your thumbnails, this will have an effect on the Nav Box. Let’s make sure it’s exactly twice the height of your thumbnails and the front page should have a good grid layout again.
Let’s look at style.css one more time – find this near the previous piece of code:
#header .menu {min-height: 150px;}
#header .logo {height: 150px; position: relative}
These lines together effectively make up the size of the nav box. The bottom one sets a size for your “Logo” (in this case just the text), and the top line will dynamically expand depending on how many pages and categories you’re showing.
Play with these values depending on your thumbnail size. In my case, if you’re showing 8 items in the list, 99px for the “Logo” works fine.
You can also make this size static by replacing “min-height” with “height”, but you may find that if you add more items (categories or pages) some of them won’t be showing. You could then just make the box bigger in multiples of your thumbnail height.
The Width of the Search Box
The integrated search box is made for a 200 pixel wide nav box. Since we just made that a bit slimmer, part of it now gets cut off. Fear not, for help is at hand – take a look at this piece of code in style.css (under Navigation Styles):
#nav #s {background: #2c2c2c url(images/search.png) 1px 3px no-repeat; border: 1px solid #222; width: 157px; color: #666;font-size: 11px; padding: 4px 4px 4px 16px; font-family: "Lucida Grande",Arial;}
The width value is the culprit – set that to something like 110px for 150px wide thumbnails. Feel free to play around with it to find a size that suits you.
Thanks Davina!
I’ve had a look at your source code and it looks like there’s no call for an image anywhere in the nav part of the site. Make sure you place the full URL of your image above or below your headline (assuming that’s where you’d like it to show up). Make sure the call to your image is below the line <ul id=”nav”> (which is the first line in nav.php). Please note that copy and paste from the articel above may not work, make sure your code looks like what you see in the article.
To remove the underlined Nav Items have a look for this line in your style.css file:
#nav li a {color: #ddd; text-decoration: none;}The text-decoration parameter is not there by default, you need to add that. Hope it helps 😉
Hi Jay,
Your notes were quite helpful.
I am having another problem though, the homepage has black spaces instead of a complete grid. And it transfers more images towards the end, instead of filling out the blank spaces.
Is there any way to specify images in the grid ? Appreciate any thoughts you may have.
Regards
Rahul
Hi Rahul,
that’s a WordPress thing: by default it displays 10 posts per page, hence when the grid comes to post 10 it stops displayig pictures. You can change this under Settings – Reading.
Hi Jay,
thank you for your great work it helped me alot!
But I still have some questions:
How can I shorten the text that appears under the Picture of a “blog-post”?
Why can’t I write Bold?
And Is there a possibility to set the right Sidebar at the side of the Browser Window? I Mean not in a static position more like an automatic position i.E.: always 10px from the Browser window apart.
I hope you understand what I mean!
So Regards
Lexadus
Hi Lexadus,
some lovely photographs you have there – loving the ones of the Train Graveyard. Superb stuff!
To shorten the text underneath the headline the theme uses a function called the_excerpt(). This is a “teaser” display of your post which you can set in addition to the actual text in the post. If no custom excerpt is present, the first words of your actual blog post are used. When you write a post, scroll down to Excerpt and put a shorter version here – that’s the part that will be shown on the front page.
Writing bold is – for some bizarre reason – not defined in the CSS. But there’s an easy fix if you place the following line in your style.css file:
#content p strong {font-weight: bold;}Not sure about the sidebar float. If I understand you correctly you’d like the sidebar on a single blog post to float at the very right hand side of the browser window, no matter how big the window is, correct? And then be say 10px away from it. I don’t think it’ll work because the sidebar in our case floats next to the content area. If this was possible, I’m not sure if this would be an ideal bworsing experience on larger monitors.
Hope this helps 😉