How To

Homepage Overview

The homepage of Postcard consists of a featured slider, latest posts, and 3 widgetized zones with lots of widgets to place on your home page.

Setting up the Featured Slider

The featured slider consists of posts that have been tagged with a specific tag. That specific tag is chosen in the theme option’s panel. where you can also set the amount of featured slides to show.

Preparing a postcard for the slider
Publish your postcard for the slider as you would any other blog post using WordPress, remember though to tag that post with your specific tag, for our demo (as seen above) we used the tag “featured”. The Postcard content on the right will be pulled from the post’s excerpt, so you can edit the text there. The large image on the left, the front of the Postcard, is added using the “Postcard Custom Settings” under the WYSIWYG editor. You can upload an image and it will be automatically resized using our image resizing script, we however suggest an image of about 440 by 295 pixels.

Setting up your Google Maps

Postcard relies heavily on Google Maps to allow for geo-tagging of posts. The theme therefore requires you to get an API Key from Google Maps, granting you access to their application to display maps on your site. You can register for a Google Maps API key very easily here – http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html

You’ll then need to enter your key in the theme option’s panel as demonstrated below. You also have the option to set the default height of the maps in the single post view.

Lastly, you can also decide whether to allow for automatic mouse scrolling on the maps. We’ve turned this feature off in our demos as the auto-scroll interferes with the page scrolling. You can test this feature and decide for yourself whether to enable or disable.

Adding a map to a post

Postcard allows you to geo-tag your posts with a location so that a site visitor knows exactly where you are, or where the post is related to. Once you’ve set up your Google Maps in the theme option’s you are ready to go – this is documented above.

When editing/adding a new post you’ll see a “Postcard Custom Maps” panel below the WYSIWYG editor. Here you can search for a location to add to the post.

As can be seen above you can enable/disable this map view on the single post page. If disabled the post will still be plotted on the “Woo – Overview Map” widget documented below.

You can specify which map view to use – map, terrain or satellite view. You can also choose your zoom, it is best to preview the post with various zooms levels chosen until you are happy.

Setting up the overview map widget

The overview map, viewable on the home page of our demo, plots your journey around the world by taking all the locations linked to the various blog posts and displaying them on one map.

Go to Appearance > Widgets to find the “Woo – Overview Map” widget and assign it to the “Home Sidebar” widgetized zone.

As can be seen in the screenshot below you can choose to only display posts on your map that have been tagged with a specific tag. By default, and if left blank it will look for all the locations linked to blog posts. You can also set the height of the widget map on the home page.

When you click on the markers on the map it will take you to the blog post linked to that marker.

The “Center Coordinates” option allows you to set the map view of the widget. By default the view of the map in this widget is centered around the last post published with a geo-location. If you set center co-ordinates the map default view will center around those co-ordinates.

Setting up the journey map widget

Go to Appearance > Widgets to find the “Woo – Jouney Map” widget and assign it to the “Home Sidebar” widgetized zone.

This widget will display a map that shows all your posts tagged with a specific tag. Please note this widget requires a tag to be specified in order for it to work properly, unlike the Overview Map widget documented above. The posts will be viewable as markers on the map, connected via a polyline (with a color of your choice) showing the route you took. The line connecting the posts will be arranged according to the blog post order.

Widgets

Custom Postcard widgets

This theme includes 4 widgetized zones and 5 custom widgets that you can add to any of them.

We do however recommend that you assign the maps to the “Home Sidebar” as they will be extremely small in the other sidebars:

• Woo – Flickr
• Woo – Twitter
• Woo – Overview Map
• Woo – Journey Map
• Woo – Search

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Page Templates

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