Decision made, I jumped into the latest nightly build and got cracking. To get the transition underway I would only need to scratch the surface of what’s possible with post formats but I thought sharing what I did might be helpful to others.

First off I needed to add theme support and register my post formats.

// Add post formats
add_theme_support( 'post-formats', array( 'aside', 'chat', 'gallery', 'image', 'link', 'quote', 'status', 'video', 'audio' ) );

The above code snippet got dropped into my functions.php. Since I also decided to jump into html5 support in this transition I started with the Toolbox theme by Automattic so the above code was actually added to the function toolbox_theme_setup.

Once that was done I was ready to start utilizing post formats in my template files. I knew that one of the post formats I was sure to use was that registered above called “links”. I wanted these particular posts to function a lot like Tumblr link posts in that the title of the post became the link to the off-site resource rather than a permalink to the actual post.

The next thing I need to do was open up loop.php (see Toolbox theme, loop.php outputs the loop). The standard entry title for this theme is formatted something like this:

<h2 class="entry-title"> <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="<?php printf( esc_attr__( 'Permalink to %s', 'toolbox' ), the_title_attribute( 'echo=0' ) ); ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>

What I added was this:

<?php if( has_post_format('link') ) : ?>

     <h3 class="entry-title link"><span class="permalink">&infin;</span> <a href="<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'link', true); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h3>

<?php else : ?>

    <h2 class="entry-title"><span class="permalink">&rarr;</span> <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="<?php printf( esc_attr__( 'Permalink to %s', 'toolbox' ), the_title_attribute( 'echo=0' ) ); ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>

<?php endif; ?>

if( has_post_format('link') ) Checks to see if the post has a post format attached to it, if it has the post format “link” it will use the formatting I’ve designated. You’ll also notice that the actual link is generate through the use of a custom field. So on the post admin end I enter a custom field key of “link” and value equal to the url of the actual link which then wraps the post title and creates the link to the offsite resource. (I also have to designate this particular posts format as a link, see below.)

One other rather nice thing to note is that the post_class now contains a new class .format-link which would allow you to target link posts specifically via css. (If you view the source you’ll also notice format-standard, format-quote and so on.)

That’s it, I’m now able to continue posting in a manner similar to that of my previous Tumblr site while using WordPress for various other reasons. I’ve done a few other things with it which you’ll likely be able to pick out, but for the purpose of this article I’ve kept it short and just touched on the basics rather than go into everything I’ve done. You can see it in action on http://jeremyjaymes.com.

Good news, I’ve also just upgraded to the stable 3.1 release and everything seems to be in good functioning order.

Yesterday evening, along with launching a new venture called Papertree Labs, I released Full Foto a portfolio theme for WordPress.

Neat, What is Full Foto?

Full Foto is a WordPress theme originally built with the idea that it would be used as a portfolio theme of sorts, specifically, for photography. Since first creating it as a child theme of The Charlene Theme, it has undergone quite a transformation. So much so that I decided to break away from Charlene and develop it on it’s own but basing it on the same code structure.

Full Foto, in it’s current state will have quite a few more unique uses I believe, keeping in mind that the typical user will be looking to create a portfolio of sorts.

Full Foto now allows for the insertion of video in place of the large full width image. (Video is currently limited to the new iframe embed codes from Vimeo and YouTube.)

Full Foto also allows you to create a dedicated “Portfolio” page using a combination of custom post types, custom taxonomies, a few custom templates and the great jQuery Masonry plugin from David DeSandro. Have a look.

Overall I made sure to keep it simple, easy to use and focused on your content.

Some History

A few articles you may be interested in if you are wondering how Full Foto started.

• The Beginning: Full Foto, A WordPress Child Theme
• A Sneak Peek

Get Full Foto

You can demo the theme and read more about it at Papertreelabs.com. If it seems like a good fit, go ahead and grab a copy for a special release price of $15!

I dedicated quite a bit of time to the creation of both Full Foto and Charlene and have therefore decided to attach a modest price tag to the theme. Sales of the theme will allow me to dedicate more time to support and development of both Full Foto and Charlene.

Enjoy!

Full Foto a theme for WordPress, finally! It has taken me a lot longer to get around to completing this theme than I had hoped. (Almost done, not quite ready, I promise.) It’s also taken me quite a bit longer than planned to figure out how I am going to go about releasing it. We are almost there – Full Foto will be released via Papertree Labs, a new little “add-on” I’ve had in the works and it will be released as a parent theme rather than the earlier planned child theme of Charlene. During initial development several factors came about, making it clear that parent theme might be the better route. Look at the bright side, this means you can build child themes off of Full Foto. The theme will however run off of the same basic “framework” and is still born from Charlene so if you are hesitant about purchasing it you can always give Charlene a run to see if it meets your standard.

Papertree Labs isn’t quite ready and the demo site isn’t all that it needs to be but I can share a few details and even let you see a few shots. As mentioned above the theme will not be a Charlene Child theme. The theme will have a special custom post type and the ability to create a portfolio page because of it. The theme will still have the full width images that you may have seen in that post oh so long ago but it will be a slightly modified format from what you may remember. All images will run quite easily off the built in WordPress “thumbnail” functionality. Finally I have decided to add the option to add a navigation menu if you so choose. I mean, how else are you going to get to that portfolio goodness I mentioned above?

The sneak peak screen shots:

Nice large full width images in each article, optional of course but the same Full Foto you might remember from a while back.

The new portfolio page option.

Finally I struggled with exactly how I would go about releasing this now that it was separate from Charlene. Papertree Labs was the first step. The second step was to decide on pricing as the plan has always been to release with a moderate price tag attached ($12 to $15) – right now I am leaning towards $15. This will help to compensate me somewhat for the time put into both Full Foto as well as Charlene, it will also help me to focus on improvements and support for both themes, both of which I view as extremely necessary to a successful theme.

Would love to hear your thoughts below.

Also in regards to Full Foto please read this:

→ Full Foto is now available at Papertree Labs

The new version of Full-Foto is near release ready, I am looking for a photographer/artist that is interested in displaying their work on the theme demo pages. If you are interested please contact me at jeremy[at]papertreedesign.com. This would of course include full attribution and a free theme.

As always get back to me with any comments, questions or quirks you find in the theme, thanks!

Let’s just say a large site, a few weeks and the inner workings of Expression Engine have taken over my life. All is not lost I have continued to work on Charlene, getting in all of the planned updates as quickly as possible. I want to say thanks to the few people that have emailed me looking for the theme, I appreciate it, it’s coming soon and it’s still free!

Moving on…

After careful consideration and a boat load of request I have decided to add thumbnail support to the coming release of Charlene. It will be a theme option, disabled by default and as of right now you will need to edit the size and run the regenerate plugin should you decide that the default 150×150 I have set is not to your liking. I hope that this helps out a lot of you who have asked for thumbnail support, it may get better in the future.

Coming soon I promise! (If you have any questions you can email me at themesupport[at]papertreedesign)

That said I suppose I need to let everyone know when they can expect an update to Charlene. Upon digging in to what I had planned to be a minor upgrade to take advantage of a few 2.9 and 3.0 features as well as a few requests, I came to the conclusion that I just wasn’t happy with where it was at. Since I first released the theme, not only has WordPress improved drastically but so has my skill with WordPress. The theme needs to catch up and thus what was once a minor upgrade will become a major upgrade.

The new plan is to launch the update as soon as possible and no later than next week! Trust me it will include welcome improvements and updates.

Immediately following the update I will be launching Full Foto. After long and careful thought I have decided that Full Foto will be released as a child theme bundled with Charlene with a price tag of $12, a very modest price but one that will help allow me to continue development on both Charlene and Full Foto. The details to come later, both will remain licensed under the GPL.

That out of the way, Papertree Design will also be launching a very very small venture into the commercial theme world with just a few other themes I have on the drawing board. More details to arrive on that as well.

That’s all for the update, if you have any questions please feel free to drop a comment or shoot me an email.

→ Full Foto is now available at Papertree Labs

Of course it wouldn’t be fair not to mention that I owe a large part of this sudden exposure to Best WordPress Themes. Thanks to Best WordPress Themes for picking up Charlene and putting it in front of so many people.

I also want to thank everyone that has left a comment or suggestion on the theme, as well as those of you who have come to me via email for support. Every question leads to an improvement for future updates.

Speaking of which I have obviously been keeping an eye on the coming WP 3.0, trying to figure out how all of that will effect Charlene, and yes I have started working on updates.

In addition to these updates, I have also started in on making the theme available for easy translation. This will be my first time around trying to tackle localization, so if anyone has a few pointers they would like to lend please leave a comment. I am slowly struggling through it.

Finally I received yet another comment regarding the Charlene Child Theme Full Foto. That’s about the 4th or 5th request so I have promised to start working on something similar for release by the end of May.

Thanks again, as always your comments are welcome.

Oh yeah, the improvement, well here is a screenshot. The new “Privacy On” notification I noticed today when I upgraded to the latest nightly. This let’s me know that the state of my privacy settings and will be especially helpful for those of us that develop WordPress sites. Last thing you need to do is forget to set the proper privacy settings and get yourself knocked out of Google.

Like I said maybe it’s just me.

On that note I am really interested to see if the issue mentioned in this recent post concerning the wpautop function will be addressed in the coming release. I noticed that it is something that has been mentioned previously in Trac and I think it would go a long way in adding support for HTML5 moving forward.

So many things to look forward to in WordPress 3.0, so many new ideas to explore.

I tried to focus on two areas for this update, improvements in base typography (at least in my opinion) and additions/changes that will make the creation of child themes based on Charlene a bit easier moving forward. (see Full Foto – A WordPress Child Theme Built on Charlene)

Please see Theme Update 0.2, posted on Papertree Themes for full details regarding the update. Please direct all comments to that post or feel free to drop me an email with any questions.

Full Foto will be released as a child theme in the near future, other additional child themes are planned. Just for fun.