Updated on
Deadwood is a magazine theme primed for publishers who want to multiple entry points to their content in a clean and clear fashion. Deadwood can transform your tubular blog into a real website.
Deadwood comes packaged with:
- Ten rotating custom header images
- AJAX-enabled sidebar on the homepage
- Multiple entry points to your posts on the homepage
- Two fully widgetized sidebars
- A fully widgetized bottombar
- Authors Archive page
- Two page templates: One with sidebars and another without
- S.E.O. optimized
- Valid HTML and CSS
- Utilizes the Blueprint CSS framework
Installation
- Unzip the downloaded file
- Upload the entire “Deadwood″ folder to your “/wp-content/themes/” folder
- Log in into your WordPress control panel
- Click the Presentation tab
- Select the “Deadwood” screenshot
CONFIGURATION
- GETTING STARTED: To get Deadwood off and running, you will need a minimum of 5 categories to populate the homepage. The main section on this page is the latest article posted in all categories. The top right section shows the next three latest posts. The section below the main section shows the previous five entry excerpts, offset by four. The bottom five section pulls the latest posts in categories 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. You will want to change these category number id’s to the categories you want to display, which is detailed below.
- YOUR CATEGORIES: In the “home.php” you will find a series of query_posts functions which refer to specific category ID numbers from my database.
You will need to change the category numbers to reflect the ID numbers of the categories that you want to display on your homepage. Category numbers can be found in your control panel under Manage->Categories. There are a total of 5 spots in the home.php file to change to reflect the post categories that you want to display on the main page. - YOUR PHOTOS: If you want your website to resemble that of the Deadwood theme demo site, you will need one small photo for each blog post. Small photos should be cropped to 150px wide by 100px tall. Upload the image to the web and copy the URL to the photo. Within WordPress’ Write Post page, scroll down towards the bottom and click on the Custom Fields section. Add a key called “small_photo” and then paste the link to the small photo into the key value field. View a screenshot of the custom fields used for Deadwood. Make sure your custom field values and keys match those in the screen shot above (but change the key value to the exact url to your images.) Custom fields are one of the most overlooked, yet powerful, tools in WordPress. Read more about using custom fields. Photos posted within each entry’s post body should not exceed 350px wide, otherwise, you will make your homepage layout look icky.
- YOUR AUTHORS PAGE: Berlin comes packaged with an author archive (authors.php), which will display some author specific info pulled from the Users page in your WordPress installation. In order for the author’s image to show up, you’ll need to place a jpg of the author titled by the author’s last name in the wp-content/themes/deadwood/images/authors/ folder. For instance, mine is Allender.jpg, sized at 75px X 75px. Here is an example author page.
- STYLES.CSS: Unlike most WordPress themes which plug all the css in one file called styles.css, Berlin utilizes the Blueprint CSS framework to help separate positioning, typography, forms and what I’ll refer to as custom or Deadwood specific styles. To edit all custom Deadwood specific styles, you’ll need to edit the style.css file located in your wp/wp-content/themes/gridline/ directory.
- BEST PRACTICES: It is best to keep your excerpt to one a one line description overview of your post. Having too much written in the excerpt field can bloat the homepage with text.
Credits
Deadwood utilizes the Blueprint CSS framework to help streamline design and development. Most major websites use some form of css framework to allow for rapid, consistent development and design. Take the Blueprint 101 course to learn about all the possibilities.
It is a very nice theme !
Can I use it in other language too ? Has it a language file ?
Thanks ?
fgy
This looks awesome! Are you sure if I buy the $99 package I will get ALL your themes you release this year (2008)? 🙂
@fgy
For using WordPress in other languages, go here:
http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_in_Your_Language
@Jay
Yes, for $99, you get all themes that I develop for Graph Paper Press in 2008. For more info, go here:
http://graphpaperpress.com/2008/01/07/get-all-themes-for-only-9999/
I love it and already buy it
Tks!
Joao Barroca
Thad, in the demo page you write: “This is the optional excerpt…” but in fact Deadwood always puts an excerpt by default, right?
What I mean by that is if I don’t put anything in the Optional Excerpt field, it still takes a certain number of characters from the article and outputs it as an Excerpt.
What if I want an article to not have an excerpt at all?
Thanks
Hi Jean-Pascal
If you don’t want an excerpt at all, than you need to open up home.php and delete:
<?php the_excerpt(); ?>from the first post query.
Thad
Thank you Thad but then the Excerpt not optional anymore — it is completely disabled! –, not to mention the fact that the first post now looks quite odd white a huge white space at its left.
Optional Excerpt is a standard WordPress feature and IMHO, a Premium theme should not remove this very useful feature but make it even more customizable and visually appealing!
I would appreciate if you could come up with a professional solution for this.
Thank you.
Jean-Pascal
Let me to try summarize what I think it is you are requesting:
You want the entire left side to be optional. If there is no excerpt, then the content will float to the left. Correct?
This is very easy to do, but it requires knowing a little bit of WordPress and CSS. One of best solutions is to NOT use the excerpt, but rather a custom field, to populate the area. It would work similar to how Monochrome Lite handles “pullquotes.” Open up home.php and replace this:
<div class="column span-5 append-1"><div class="home-excerpt"><?php the_excerpt(); ?></div><h3 class="byline">by <?php the_author_posts_link(); ?></h3></div><div class="column span-9 last">With this:
<?php if(get_post_meta($post->ID, pullquote, true) != "") { ?><blockquote cite="<?php echo get_permalink() ?>" class="ex-pullquote"><p><?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, pullquote, true); ?></p></blockquote><?php } ?>You will then need to delete one of the closing DIV’s right below the <hr class=”space” />
Then, create a custom field called “pullquote” and put your text there. Your content will float to the left if there is no “pullquote.” You will need to add some css styling to make the pullquote and content areas float left. Add this to style.css:
blockquote p {
padding: 20px 0 0 20px;
}
.ex-pullquote, .pullquote {
background: url(‘images/quote.png’) .5em top no-repeat;
float : left;
width : 170px;
border : 0;
color : #ccc;
font-family : georgia, palatino, ‘times new roman’, serif;
font-size : 1.2em;
font-weight : bold;
font-style : italic;
margin : -5px 0 5px 10px;
}
.pullquote {
width : 250px;
margin : -25px 0 0px 15px;
}
Thank you for your last response!
I do have another question regarding the section below the main section that displays the previous five entry excerpts.
Some of our posts content will be only an audio player (we’re using the Audio Player plug-in) but for a reason that’s unclear to me, the players won’t show up in that section. I guess it probably has to do with the
setup_postdata($post);line in home.php.Thanks in advance for your help!
Hello Thad, I added the next_posts_link() tag in home.php (just below the MORE NEWS section). How can I have the linked page (page/2/) use a different template than home.php? I basically want the page to display a simple list of posts. Thanks!
i like this theme, and made the changes to the excerpt that you discussed with jean-pascal.
I do find that even using the pull quotes throws off the layout a bit.
My main issue right now is that I understand I need to use a small-image with every post (otherwise there are blanks where people would expect to see an image), but when I have the small image and a larger image in the last post, the home page looks wrong
It looks very cluttered with them both.
Is there a way to have the preview of the last page at home, only show the images in the post (and not the small image) when a larger image exists?
I hope that my explanation isn’t too unclear…
Found another bug in the theme. The bio pic under a post is trying to grab the author pic from:
/wp-content/themes/visualization/images/authors/LastName.jpg
I guess that ‘visualization’ is from another theme.
Is there an easy way to update this to the correct url for the deadwood theme?
Also above in your configuration section (point 4) you mention “YOUR AUTHORS PAGE: Berlin comes packaged…” Is Berlin another theme and this is a typo?
I’m having another problem that the about page and archive page are both going to 404 error pages even though I created these pages.
Please can you let me know if this and the 2 issues I have listed in previous posts here are due to me using WordPress 2.5 ??
Would be nice if you can reply back to these questions because I am really needing to finish off my site today.
Thanks
Hi, I buy your Template: DeadWodd, it’s Fantastic and profesional. But I wan more tutorials, jeje
Good Job 🙂
Ive Been Looking At THis Site, cabinet curio free plan, cabinet curio free plan, oojp,
why i can not show my image in category? i have put custom field and the image don’t show. why?
not as enthusiastic about this one though
hi paperpress,
pretty nice themes you ot on your site. i’m thinking to buy this theme for the relaunch of http://www.deuseror.de werewe have pretty muh cotent which isn’t displayed at all on the site. the deadwood theme looks pretty good. i ask myself if there will be any problems with:
– importing old content. all pics and embedded videos have a width of 350px. do i have to create thumbnails for every post?
– there is a site videoclips on the blogs very the sidebar is diabled to show the whole videoplayer. do you have any concerns embedding this one?
– moving the categories ar from the bottom on a higher postion?
best,
chris
is there a deadwood demo site available?
the demo link on this page does not work.
thanks,
ryan
The demo page seem to be off line.
Is it compatible with wordpress version 2.8.1 ?
Hello, I love your theme and will use it for my association
but I don’t know how to creat the about page, can anyone help me?
merci!