Photocrati – home page

http://www.photocrati.com/

General instructions

The Photocrati WordPress theme comes with a large number of customizable variables. When you login to the WordPress Dashboard, the topmost section on the menu of choices is Theme Options.

Under Theme Options:

• Quick Setup – contains some very general instructions on how to get the Photocrati theme up and running, as well as how to customize it.
• Choose Theme
• Customize Theme
• Gallery Settings
• Ecommerce Settings – looks like a very self-explanatory setup process using your PayPal account; you shouldn’t have any trouble with this
• Other Options
• Help & Support

Working with image galleries (e.g., the slide show headlining the home page)

Since the only gallery we have set up on Action Sports Photo at this point is the slideshow on the Home page, we will use that as the example below.

On the main Dashboard menu, select Pages. This brings up a listing of each page currently set up within the site, as well as Drafts of pages not yet published.

Since our gallery (slide show) is on the Home page, choose Home (under Pages) to display the contents of the Home page.

Switch to the Visual view, if it isn’t already. You can view any post or page in WordPress in one of two ways:

1. Visual view. WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) – close to how it will appear on the live web page

2. HTML view. This is the view that shows some of the HTML code; very useful for editing ALT tags, TITLE tags, adding images that float to the left or right, and much more. (I almost always use the HTML view and virtually never the Visual view; you will probably use both.)

In the Visual view, the location of any gallery or album on a page is shown in a green box. You can see the green box representing Gallery (ID) #1 at the top of the page.

In the HTML view, galleries/ albums are indicated by HTML code that looks something like this:

<img id=”phgallery-5_1 3″ src=”http://www.actionsportsphoto.net/photos/wp-content/themes/photocrati-theme-v4.07/admin/images/gallery-placeholder-1.gif” alt=”photocrati gallery” />

Immediately under the editing window you will see Edit Photocrati Galleries/Albums.

If this area is represented only by a horizontal bar, this means the section is currently collapsed (not expanded). To work with Galleries/ Albums, expand it by clicking the small up/down arrow at the right side of the bar (the same way the menu items such as Pages, Theme Options, etc. are collapsed and expanded).

Once expanded, the Edit Photocrati Galleries/Albums section shows the galleries/ albums that have been created so far (only one). It shows gallery #1.

For each gallery/ album there are two options:

1. Edit Gallery. Make changes to the gallery/ album

2. Delete Gallery. Trash the gallery/ album

Go ahead and choose Edit Gallery. This opens a lightbox-style window on the screen which allows you to set theGallery Type and edit the gallery/ album. You can add or remove images, add/edit the meta data (ALT tags, captions) for each image.

After making the desired changes, be sure to Save Gallery.

I hope that helps. To learn how to do other things on Photocrati and/or WordPress, please check out the links below. I have added the main links for getting help with Photocrati issues as well as WordPress issues.

Let me know what else you need – in the meantime I will be finishing the Photocrati installation for the nature photography site.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011