May

6

(2008)

monotone photoblog wordpress theme

Filed under: general. Tags: , , , . 

I just installed the development version of the monotone theme over on my mindfulseeing.com photoblog. What a cool theme. It adapts the colours of the post page based on the colour palette used in the first image on a post. AND, it provides a great archives page with thumbnails from each post. Very cool. This is exactly what I’ve been looking for in a photoblog theme.

Because it’s not an officially released theme (yet) you have to check it out via the subversion repository, but that’s a pretty simple call to svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wpcom-themes/monotone/

Here’s a snapshot of the post page, with background colour pulled automagically from the photograph:

And, the archives page with date selector:

 

Thanks to Weblog Tools Collection for the tip, and Automattic for creating the theme!

Update: The monotone theme uses a function called image_scrape() which does some cool stuff for the post display on the web, but had the nasty side effect of yanking images from the RSS feed. I fixed my copy of functions.php to avoid the problem, and allow full images in the feed. Here is my trivial modification to the image_scrape() function:

// remove image tag from post_content for display
function image_scrape($entry) {
	// don't scrape the image for the feed
	if (is_feed()) { return $entry; }
	//remove image tag
	$entry = preg_replace('/<img [^/>]*src=(\"|\').+?(\1)[^>]*\/*>/','', $entry); /* */
	//remove any empty tags left by the scrape.
	$entry = str_replace('<p> </p>', '', $entry);
	$entry = preg_replace( '|< ([a-z]+)[^>]*>\s*|i', '', $entry );
	$entry = preg_replace( '|< ([a-z]+)[^>]*>\s*|i', '', $entry );
	$entry = preg_replace( '|< ([a-z]+)[^>]*>\s*|i', '', $entry );
	return $entry;
}

Comments

22 Responses to “monotone photoblog wordpress theme”

  1. David Esrati on May 6th, 2008 9:40 pm

    Hey, D’Arcy-
    The only thing about this new theme- the RSS feed doesn’t include the pix anymore :-(
    So- now I have to click in to see.

  2. dnorman on May 6th, 2008 9:47 pm

    @David AAAAH! Oh noes! I hate having to click through. Sorry! I’m poking through the theme now to see if I can figure out what’s doing that. That just ain’t right. It should honour the setting for the feed (which is set to include the full post!)

  3. dnorman on May 6th, 2008 10:32 pm

    @David I found the problem. The monotone theme was filtering stuff a bit overly aggressively. I think I’ve fixed it, and posted my fix in an update to the blog post in case it comes in handy for anyone else.

  4. Noel Jackson on May 8th, 2008 9:17 am

    D’Arcy, thanks so much for the fix! I’ll get it committed into the Automattic svn!

  5. dnorman on May 8th, 2008 9:23 am

    @Noel No problem at all! Thanks for rolling it into the theme!

    Any ideas on how to best expose EXIF metadata for the image in a post? I’ve been struggling with that.

  6. Matt on May 8th, 2008 2:38 pm

    Here’s what I use on my blog:

    http://pastebin.com/f5bffee18

  7. dnorman on May 8th, 2008 3:08 pm

    @matt how is the EXIF data getting pulled? I don’t see it in the database at all. Is it cracking open the file? I’m looking through the wp_postmeta table, and am only seeing values for image_tag, image_size, image_url, image_md5, etc… I’m not seeing any values for _wp_attachment_metadata. Is there a trick to getting that stored in the database? I’m using WP 2.5.1 and the new media widget to add the images.

  8. Matt on May 9th, 2008 1:52 am

    Ah, you have to have the EXIF stuff enabled in PHP. I didn’t have it compiled in originally. Patches to that part of the code are welcome. IMO it shouldn’t put everything as a serialized array in that one bit, they should be individual postmeta rows.

  9. dnorman on May 9th, 2008 8:24 am

    hmm… that’s strange. Now I’m getting the _wp_attachment_metadata records in wp_postmeta, but the associated post_id value is wrong (off by one). If I manually correct the post_id value to match the ID of the post, the exif data shows up. SWEET! Thanks!

    Now, to figure out why wp_postmeta records are being stored incorrectly… I’ll post back if I find anything.

  10. weishun on May 24th, 2008 12:52 pm

    hi dnorman, this is really a cool theme, but unfortunately i got a “getimagesize() [function.getimagesize]: URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration in…” problem when i use it on my host(dreamhost).
    DH wiki tells cURL is a recommended solution, but i have no conception of this. So could you help me to fix it?
    THX!

  11. dnorman on May 25th, 2008 3:05 pm

    @weishun Dreamhost blocks some PHP functions for security and performance. I know curl is unavailable (I used DreamHost for a couple of years, but recently switched to a different host that offers full PHP and better performance).

    Not sure the cleanest way to rewrite the theme to work on DreamHost…

  12. Roopak Suri on May 26th, 2008 5:41 am

    Hi,
    Do i need to use the svn client to download the theme files from http://svn.automattic.com/wpcom-themes/monotone/ ? Because, i downloaded all these files through right click > save link as…and uploaded everything into the themes dir. I got theme installed, but facing following problems -
    1. Archive, About, Comment links give a 404 error
    2. How do you guys configure a home page (which always shows same START screen?)

    For instance while submitting a comment, i’m taken to http://www.sitename.com/wp-comments-post.php And all i see is some html code. Also i dont see wp-comments-post.php a part of the theme dir (i have wp-comments.php). Any ideas? Howz it working for you guys….will appreciate your help
    my site (still transferring from blogger) - http://www.ambigramartwork.com

  13. dnorman on May 26th, 2008 2:59 pm

    @roopak you should be OK manually downloading each file, but using the subversion client makes it soooo much easier to grab them and keep the files up to date. Could the files have been scrambled on download from svn, or upload to your server?

  14. Jennifer Wilson - Agent Solutions on May 26th, 2008 3:25 pm

    Hey D’Arcy,

    I was just curious (and this may be a silly question) but can this theme be used with a self hosted blog (Wordpress.org)? If so how would I go about doing this?

    Great theme!

  15. dnorman on May 26th, 2008 4:00 pm

    @jennifer I’m using it on a self-hosted blog on my mindfulseeing.com photoblog - it currently means you have to check the development version of the theme from the subversion repository, but it works pretty well on self-hosted servers. I love the theme, too. It’s the first one that “feels right” for my photoblog :-)

  16. Jennifer Wilson - Agent Solutions on May 26th, 2008 4:08 pm

    Thanks D’Arcy,

    That wouldn’t be problem if I undesrtood what the subversion repository was. ;-)

  17. Jennifer Wilson - Agent Solutions on May 26th, 2008 4:13 pm

    I see it there…but what do I do with it to load it onto my blog?

  18. Roopak Suri on May 27th, 2008 6:46 am

    I fixed all my probs by enabling Permalinks and de-activating Authimage plugin

  19. Roopak Suri on May 30th, 2008 3:49 am

    I have one more problem - how do i make a front static page in my blog. I need a page (not a post) for that and as i’ve come to find out, i’m unable to insert images properly in the pages…they aren’t displayed ?!?….any ideas?
    I’m using a wordpress.com hosted blog http://www.ambigramartwork.com

  20. guzfrie on May 30th, 2008 11:14 am

    Hi, D’Arcy.
    I use Monotone for my gallery, but with some problems: 1) I couldn’t find sidebar.php in the download repository, but my blog is running well as I commented out such a code that calls sidebar.php. Do I still need sidebar.php? 2) I have to change image size manually (i.e. with Photoshop) to get images which fit to the layout width. Is there any code that does it automatically as in WP.com? 3) I want to display photo’s metadata on my blog, like yours. I tried by copying the code Matt pointed out, but I don’t know how to use it. Could you help me please. Thank you

  21. dnorman on May 30th, 2008 11:30 am

    I can’t really offer any support on the theme - I didn’t build it, just installed it on my site :-)

    @jennifer the theme developer will release a .zip download of the theme when it’s final - it’s still under development so it’s remaining in the source code repository for now. Might be safest to wait until an official release.

    @roopak doesn’t the theme honour the WordPress front page setting?

    @guzfrie sidebar.php is there now - not sure if it went missing for awhile or not, but grab a fresh copy :-)

    I manually resize the images myself - I’ve decided to do that anyway, because I’m not happy with what the PHP resize code does to the images (it really messes up the saturation, sucking much of the colour out - see this post for more).

    And my EXIF display is a TOTAL hack. I tried implementing Matt’s code, but it looks like the new image uploader actually creates a separate post for the upload, so the EXIF isn’t directly associated with the post itself. I had to hardcode a reference to ($post->ID) + 1 but that’s not reliable. I’m hoping the documentation gets fleshed out a bit so I can implement it the right way…

  22. Timothy West on August 9th, 2008 4:00 am

    I have it all working really well and love it… i am proud to say that its monotone really.. please check it out and comment on any things that you may like
    http://trcwest.com/photoblog/

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