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Wed 17-Sep-2014 Tech | | Map

WordPress Lucid theme

For my first attempt at a WordPress blog I used the theme Explorable by Elegant Themes. This showed a nice google map for each post, but was very slow and had very cumbersome navigation. Because all posts were “listings” and not “posts”, we could not use a local client for posting which made the process of creating posts on the road very slow and difficult and cell data intensive.

So I changed to the Lucid theme by Elegant Themes which has most of the features I wanted such as a wide featured image at the top of each post and allowed standard widgets such as the calendar. It works well with the local client BlogJet version 3.0.7.2.

However, I did have to make some changes. Since my blog is mainly to show off my photography, I changed to a dark look with white text. This took a lot of css in the child theme. I also reduced the height of many elements.

Other changes: I added the plugin Nextgen Galery Pro (see separate post on that) to display my images and include ecommerce. I added the plugin Nextgen Gallery Geo (see separate post on that) to put maps on each page using the GPS coordinates in the photos. I programmed a short code to specify the feature image for each post so I could enter the file name and path in BlogJet. I fixed the calendar widget to show the month for the displayed blog post instead of reverting to the current month. I removed the reset button on the contact page.

As a result of these changes, Janet and I can create new posts completely from within BlogJet. For the images I use FTP then scan for new images in the Nextgen administration page.

If you want my dark css and other changes, please contact me.

 

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