How To

Important installation note

Please note there is an important first step after installing the Briefed theme. You need to navigate to Settings > Permalinks and click on the “Save Changes” button, even if you haven’t made any changes. This is to register the custom post types and custom taxonomy used in the Brief theme.

The Briefed home page layout

Briefed is a revolutionary Tumblr-like WordPress theme that allows you to very easily publish snippets of content, whether they be images, videos, audio, articles, quotes or links. Not only that, but you can also showcase your portfolio pieces via some nifty custom post type and Dribbble integration.

Below is a screenshot of the Briefed home page with each of it’s modules explained. More detailed documentation below.

Once you have installed the Briefed theme on your WordPress 3.+ website you’ll see a custom panel called “Briefed” in your WordPress backend menu, with the theme options, etc. within that panel. You’ll also see a custom post type panel that appear in the backend menu – “Portfolio”. This custom post types is used to display portfolio content on the home page and portfolio template.

Setting up the Portfolio

This theme includes a portfolio section in the home page layout which can showcase your work or products. You can also highlight and showcase your latest Dribbbles’ should you use the social sharing application.

Add the Portfolio link to navigation

1. Add a new Page in WordPress (Page -> Add New)
2. Add a title to the page e.g. “Portfolio”
3. Select the Portfolio page template in the Attributes panel on the right
4. Publish your page!

Adding portfolio items to your WordPress backend

The portfolio section also uses a custom post type called “Portfolio”.

1. Add a new portfolio item in WordPress (Portfolio -> Add New)
2. Add a title to the portfolio item
3. Add some text in the content to describe the portfolio item
4. Upload the Portfolio image in the Featured Image area in the right sidebar. Remember to setup Dynamically Resize Post Thumbnail in the options panel for the portfolio image to be sized appropriately. Alternatively you can upload the image using the Custom Settings field and enable Dynamic Image Resizer (thumb.php) in the options panel.
5. Add a video embed code in the embed field in the custom settings panel if you want to show a video on the portfolio single page. You will still need to add an image for your portfolio item which is showed on homepage and portfolio page template.
6. If you want the portfolio item to display in the homepage slider then tag the post with a specific tag, that you must then designate to the slider under “Homepage slider” theme options documented below below.
7. Publish the portfolio item and repeat for next portfolio item

Implementing the Dribbble portfolio module

The Dribbble portfolio section of the home page will show above the normal portfolio posts (if you have any, documented below). To setup your Dribbble stream, download and activate Dave Rupert’s Dribbble plugin.

After activating the plugin, go to Appearance > Widgets and add the widget to a sidebar and set the options exactly like our screenshot. After setting up the widget, remove it from the sidebar.

Please note: The dribble feed (row 1 in demo) will show before the portfolio, if you have the Dribbble plugin active.

Setting up the Featured Slider

The unique home page featured slider can be used to display noteworthy content from your portfolio posts. It pulls only portfolio posts that have been tagged with a specific tag. The number of slides is set under the “Homepage Slider” theme option’s panel. You can set the animation speed, effect, auto start and slide interval under the theme options.

See the “Adding portfolio items to your WordPress backend” on how to tag portfolio posts with the tag chosen in the theme options – in this case “featured”.

Setting up the Blog/Tumblog

First you must dedicate a page to your blog so that you can have a “Blog” menu item in your navigation, and a page reserved for blog posts. Just follow the “Add the Portfolio link to navigation” section documented above – the same process applies as adding a portfolio page -> Create a new page, assign the “Blog” template to it and publish the page.

You then have the option to use standard WP blog posts or use the tumblogging features of WordPress 3.+. This allows you to distinguish between posts, not only by category, but also via post formats/custom taxonomies. If you view our demo you can see our blog posts have an icon under the date badge specifying whether it is an image post, video post, note post, etc. You can then click on the icons to view more posts of that format.

To activate this functionality you must enable it under “Tumblog Setup” in theme options.

Once you have installed the Briefed theme, and enabled the tumblog. You must decide whether to use post formats or a taxonomy for the tumblog. If you use a taxonomy it creates a new option in the WordPress backend under the “Posts” panel. You will now see “Tumblogs”. This is new functionality, thanks to WordPress 3.0 that allows you to create a new type of post.

Explaining the Tumblog post format content method

The preferred method of tumblogging is via post formats, which WordPress 3.+ recently introduced and supports. With Tumblog enabled and post formats content method chosen you’ll see a new widget next to the post editor where you can choose the most appropriate post format for your blog post, i.e. if your blog post contains a photo/image you might want to assign it as an image post.

Explaining the Tumblog taxonomy content method

Custom taxonomies are useful when developing/customizing themes as you can create custom templates for specific taxonomies, i.e. we could have a specific template for blog posts, and a specific template for tumblog posts.

As can be seen above the “Tumblogs” taxonomy is different to categories. You can now assign a post to certain taxonomies AND categories, so it can be very specifically filed away in the archives.

Using the Tumblog dashboard facility

Once you have setup your categories, as documented above, you can now start using your Tumblog dashboard publishing facility to publish content.

Publishing content using this is quite self-explanatory. Click on the button of the type of content you are wanting to publish and then fill in the fields with the corresponding content. Once you hit the “Submit” button the post will be published to your website. Easy as that!

When you click this an area will load below the editor which will allow you to set the Post Status, Post Date/Time, assign the post to multiple categories and to multiple tumblog taxonomies (it is by default assigned to the relevant tumblog type). This is great for using the Dashboard Tumblog widget to draft posts and post date them even.

Widgets

Custom Briefed widgets

The Briefed theme comes 5 widgetized regions – 4 dedicated to the footer section and 1 to the sidebar. It includes 8 custom widgets that you can add to your widgetized sidebar.

The custom woo widgets included are:

• Woo – Search
• Woo – Twitter Stream
• Woo – Adspace Widget
• Woo – Flickr
• Woo – Tabs
• Woo – Blog Author Info
• Woo – Embed/Video
• Woo – Subscribe/Connect

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Page Templates

Portfolio Page Template

The theme comes with a Portfolio page template, which simply shows all your portfolio items. You set the total number of items to show per page in Settings > Reading.

Follow the instructions below if you need help adding the Portfolio page template.

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