We’ve got a few new authors in The Garage and there have been some questions about how to upload a pretty gallery of images so another tutorial is in order.

First, a bit of history:

In the early days of WordPress, the image management functionality was rather limited unless you were a techie. The rest of us had to rely on plugins to make our lives easier. Arguably, the most popular galleries plugin was/is Alex Rabe’s NextGen Galleries. The problem with NextGen is that while the end result looks great and works well, it is a bit of a pain in the ass to create the actual galleries. Also, it is fairly easy to create a galleries page that allows all of the galleries to be displayed.

The more recent versions of WP have addressed the functionality issues surrounding galleries and it is now no more difficult to add galleries than it is to upload single images.

Next up: To save me some typing, go here and read all of step #4. Don’t worry, we’ll still be here when you get back. Now, just for fun, upload a few photos in a test post. That way you will have something to work with. Don’t insert the images, just click “save all changes” and then close the window.

Position your cursor in the spot in your post where you would like to insert a gallery. Now, click on the “add an image” button on the toolbar again. This will bring you to the upload dialog box. If you look along the top, you will see a row of text links. You want to click on the one that says “gallery”. When you do, you will see this:

If you look down at the bottom of the box, you will see a button that says “Insert Gallery”. Press it and you will see a gallery like this:

While it looks nice, you will notice that if you click on an image, the image opens on a new blog page. If you click that image again, it will open in a blank page with a white background. That is fine if you are sharing large images like the desktop backgrounds I’ve used as examples, but if you are publishing a regular post with images, it looks nicer if the photos appear in a lightbox.

Press that add an image button again. This time, you are going to make a tiny change to the Gallery Settings. Next to the text that says Link thumbnails to, the Attachment page selection is the default. You want to select Image file instead.

When you select this one and then insert the gallery, at first it doesn’t look all that different.

When you click on a photo, the photo should now open in a lightbox*, which is like a shadowed pop out in front of the main page. It looks much nicer on the page and allows the reader to change images with the use of an arrow rather than paging back. It is a small thing, but it improves the experience for your reader.

*Bear in mind that this tutorial has been written for a new WordPress user. I am working on the assumption that your techie type or publisher will have already made sure that a lightbox type of plugin has been installed.

Ed note: GRRRRR! Bumpystick is not playing nice today for some reason and a bunch of plugins are not functioning correctly, yet other sites that are using the exact same WP install are working just fine!!! Soooo…If you would like to see a lightbox in action properly, head on over to the photography page on our BVM site.

For some readers, this may seem like an overly simplistic post, but when bringing a new writer on board there is always a bit of a learning curve if they haven’t worked with WordPress. Thankfully, WP is the standard of blogging/publishing platforms and the mechanics of writing a post hasn’t really changed much since day 1. That means that I can write this once and stop hacking it together every time someone new drops in to write.

Step 1: go to the WP login page that you were supplied with. The address should look something like http://blahblahblah.com/wp-login.php/ and enter the username and password that you were given. Be careful, as these fields are case sensitive and the smart admins out there will mix things up to keep safe.

Step 2: At the top right of your WP dashboard you will see a button that says “New Post”. Click that button.

Step 3: Once you’ve pressed the new post button, everything but the left sidebar changes. For now, just forget that sidebar is there. Move along, nothing to see here. You are concerned with the rest of the page. First and most important is the title. As this is a beginner tutorial, I’m not going to explain the background, I’m just going to tell you to fill the title in first. Yes, I know your English teacher said you could write the article and then decide on a title. In this case, she was wrong. Fill in the title before you do anything.

Step 4: Now comes the fun stuff. Below the title you will see 2 toolbars and then a big, empty box. That box is where you are going to put your story. Some old school types will write their story in Word and then cut & paste, but this is not necessary. WP is very stable and it auto saves as you write, so you can feel safe that you won’t lose your work. You may cut & paste from word, but sometimes the formatting will not transfer nicely. As a newbie, you will be writing in the default editor which is a What You See is What You Get tool. In other words, it is as good or better than word etc. Type away.

The only thing that might be a bit tricky is the addition of photos. Humans love photos and so do search engines, so you really want to add an image to go with each story. Don’t have an image? We’ll talk about copywrite in another post, but let’s hope you have a publisher like yours truly who has a photo archive that goes back for years. My writers never have to worry about finding an image. Your editor/publisher my not be quite so well hung!

I usually recommend using an image that is between 600 – 1000 pixels wide. That way, when a reader clicks on the image, they can see the whole thing without having to scroll around the page. Remember those 2 toolbars up above the post box? Well, the top one is for uploading media. The only one you really need to think about is the left most one, which is for loading photos. Before you click on it, make sure your cursor/text prompt is in the spot where you want the photo in your story. Then, click that button. A shadowbox will open up with the title “Add media files from your computer”. Just click the select files button and then navigate to the folder your image is in. Once you double click on your image file, an upload bar will appear and then a box that looks like this will appear:

For the sake of this newbie post I’m going to say just press the insert into post button. There is more to worry about, but I will write that in another post. This one will get you going. Once you press that button, the image will be inserted into your story and the media shadowbox will close.

Step 5: Categories. Think about a library, where they have all the car books in one aisle and all the cookbooks in another. That is what categories do. On the right hand side of the text box, you will see a heading for Categories. Given that you are probably writing in an existing blog, you can just scroll down through the existing list of categories for the one that best fits your story. This makes it easier for readers and search engines to find stories of a similar nature.

Step 6: Tags. If categories are like the aisles in a library, then tags are the shelves. Say you are writing in a blog about golf and you are reviewing a new putter. The category you chose was clubs or product reviews. You might choose tags like putter, club, greens, putting, Odyssey, 2 hole. In this case, 2 hole refers to the putter, not an old world outhouse. The field to enter tags may be above or below the categories box depending on how your publisher has set up the dashboard. You have to actually type in the tags. It can be a bit of a pain in the butt, but this is what allows readers to find your content through the search engines.

Step 7: Install a page break. You’ve seen it before: You are reading a story online and part way through there is a link that says More or Follow the jump or After the break. This is called a page break. There are 2 reasons for this: 1. So your 9,000 word opus doesn’t take up the entire front page and piss off your fellow writers because it dumped their award winning piece to the bottom of the front page. 2. It drives readers further into the site. In theory, this means they are more likely to visit your advertisers. Once you have written your story, you should go back and place your cursor a couple of paragraphs from the start and press the button you see below.

Step 7: Press Publish.

Step 8: Go to the front page and make sure everything looks ok. If not and you have no idea what you’ve done wrong, send your editor/publisher an e-mail and he or she will fix your eff up in no time!

Congrats, you have written your first blog post.

With all the excitement and hoopla over the introduction of WordPress 3.0, I have to say that I’m somewhat underwhelmed. Sure, I’m only looking at user interface stuff right now, but many of the new features are not supported by Thesis.

I’m stoked to learn the MU capabilities though, as we have another site that needs to be launched and I’m hoping to get it up and running shortly.

Oh, one bright spot is that the actual upgrade is super fast.

ClassiPress has a great rep, but it is a theme that only deals with classifieds, not a blog with classified functionality. There is WP Classifieds that appears to be rather flawed from the comments section of the developer’s own blog. Neither is what I need.

Then, there is Another WordPress Classifieds Plugin. It appears to be the most usable plugin for my needs, but it seems like I’m fighting to fix something every step of the way. I’m able to find a solution for every issue I come across, but the dev forum is disjointed and hard to follow and I have to really dig for each answer.

I’m going away from this for now and I’ll be back later to see what I can do to bring this thing together. Either that or I’m going to use the WP ecommerce plugin and go a totally different direction. At least I know it works!

We’ve played around with a few different related posts plugins but all of them seemed a bit boring visually. Then, I stumbled across LinkWithin.

The way LinkWithin works is the company crawls your site to capture categories, keywords and the like and then posts a thumbnail image & title beneath each post. You can add however many columns you like below the post. Because they are involved and the plugin is custom tailored to your site, the plugin isn’t available on the WordPress codex. You must visit their site, ask a few simple questions and voila, your plugin is ready to be installed.

I’ve installed it here in BumpyStick and at Foodies so far. I know that it takes a while for the crawlers to take in the whole site, so I’m being patient. It looks great, but it has been active on Foodies for a couple of days now and there is very little rotation of related posts.

Also, I’m a little bit concerned about their crawlers. How much info do they crawl? Do they somehow store the info? Who are they? The LinkWithin site has no actual human information. I’ve sent them an e-mail to ask these questions and nobody has responded. I know that most plugins are developed by individuals or small teams and people take days off. That said, given that I’m in front of the computer constantly and most of us who work online carry a smart phone of some sort, I tend to get a little pissy when I get ignored.

I’ll wait until I hear from them before I install LW on either of our automotive blogs, but I’m really liking the way it looks at Foodies. It looks pretty cool here too so far. I think we’ll have to change the html to have it appear at the end of a post though, as I don’t like the related posts showing up on the front page.

And the winner, for our purposes is…..ThinkTwit

It is the only Twitter plugin I was able to find that A. allows the use of multiple Twitter feeds and B. uses php4 on their server. We needed to use php4 as that is the way our server is set up for now.

Anyway, like most modern plugins, setup is easy and you can have it up and running in a matter of moments. Of course the standard text settings suck, but they can be adjusted. It would be easier if you didn’t have to go into .css to make the changes though.

You can see it at work at the top of the right sidebar of The Garage where we’re hosting live tweets from the only all Canadian team at the 2010 Rolex 24 at Daytona.

I’m really excited to say that I have installed Thesis on The Garage and modded it to resemble the previous version. I’ve done it. Me. Techno no mind! The more recent versions of WordPress are so user friendly, that when combined with a killer theme like Thesis, even a guy like me can look like a pro. I didn’t have to hassle my IT guru once through the process!

The previous version of TG used the Cutline theme with a bunch of hard coded mods. This was done a long time ago, before plugins etc became so easy to use. The problem with that setup was that we were using hard code. In other words, I couldn’t make any changes myself, so I had to bother Jaimie and wait for help.

Not now!

The design elements of Thesis are manipulated by a bunch of super simple drop down menus for the most part. Some stuff, like header images has to be coded using CSS, which is enough to make a new guy like me cry. Fortunately, there is a super network of developers who work with Thesis and most offer tutorials for just about anything you might want, complete with cut & paste code, along with instructions on where to put said code. Very cool and very easy!

The breadth of available plugins for WP has grown so much over the past couple of years that you can accomplish just about anything you might want. We’ve been using Nextgen galleries for some time now, but now that the theme is free’d up I have been able to add a galleries page to keep all of our cool photos in one place for our readers. I’ve added in Contact Form 7 to make it easier for readers to contact us and I’m really excited about Flickr Feed Gallery which draws in content from our Flickr group pool. I’ve never been convinced that Sociable was the right plugin for TG and have replaced it with Sexy Bookmarks, which looks…well…sexy.

This new revamp is going to be a work in process over the next couple of days. We have some more ad spots to put in place and I’m going to be adding a big fat footer for our blogroll and maybe a spot for featured videos. I also need to start working with the SEO features of Thesis, but I need to get the visual and functional in place first.

Overall, I’m perfectly happy with Thesis. It has truly opened my eyes to what I can do and is already opening some doors for me.

Another test of images. The previous one used the standard WP image function, this one is using the Thesis image management. The image is uploaded as you would normally, then you add the image link url to a post image box further down the post editing page.

Edit: I must be tired because this makes absolutely no sense to me. The text says “Finally, there are certain areas around the theme where full-size post images cannot be displayed. In this case, Thesis will automatically crop your post image into a thumbnail” but this does not happen. The image ends up being published at full size and takes over the post. At this rate, the combo of WP with the Lightbox Plus plugin seems to be easier to use.

I’ll read up on the Thesis forums tomorrow.

I shot this photo of Marco Andretti at the 2009 Honda Indy Toronto.