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.
i think i never had the cache activated in the first place. switching it on/off and clearing it doesn’t change anything.
also i’m not using any category plugins. i tried disabling all plugins but it didn’t change anything.
the latest post is called testpost2 here’s the link http://2groove-concept.net/blog/2012/04/testpost2/
i noticed that the frontpage is now called “Home page / Archives” at the Site Stats tab from jetpack. it was always only called “Home page” i wonder where the Archives comes from? might that be related to it?
well, i figured it out i guess.
the problem is that you have to upload a new image for the new article. choosing an already uploaded images results in not recognizing it and therefore it won’t appear, since mansion needs a thumbnail/featured image to show the post.
i always used already uploaded images for my testposts, hence the problems….
weird, but ok. glad it works again.
however, one last question: i uploaded a fresh install of the theme, so the changes i made are gone of course.
the only thing that still needs to be changed and i cant figure out is the underlining of the text in the nav box.
i want to use the code “text-decoration: none;” but i dont know where to put it.
it belongs in the style.css right?
/* Navigation styles */
#nav {padding: 10px; font-size: 13px; position: relative; padding-bottom: 40px;}
#nav li a {color: #ddd;}
#nav li a:hover {color: #fff;}
#nav .pagenav, #nav .categories, #nav .subscribe {padding-top: 10px; }
#nav span.navtitle {text-transform: uppercase; color: #999;}
#nav li ul, div.search {margin-left: 10px;}
#nav li.search, div.search {position: absolute; bottom:10px;}
#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;}
#s:hover {color:#ccc;background-color: #444;}
where? 🙂
thanks for your great help so far! i hope it’s the last time tho…my nerves… 😉
That’s odd – I could have sworn earlier versions Mansion had a fallback image that gets shown in case there’s no image in the post. But you’re right, version 1.2.3 excludes posts from the front page if they don’t have an image. Ah well, guess now we know.
You’re right about how to remove the underlining from the menu – put this at the end of your style.css file:
.menu a {text-decoration: none;}Properties at the end of the style sheet will re-define and overwrite existing ones. Hope everything is back to normal at 2 Groove Concept 😉
yep, everything back to normal, thanks again! 😉
i was playing around with sidebarwidgets and was wondering if its possible to change the width of the sizebar. its currently at 200px, i tried changing that value in the stylesheet.css but the results were rather weird i.e. the widget appearing at the bottom of the post etc…
i guess i missed something?
but its not that important, so if you don’t really know how to do it dont bother wasting your time on this.
So how many images can you have ‘featured’ at any given time? Obviously only one image is ‘leading’ on the frontpage but there are other leaders within the other categories that you’d like to make bigger too, no?