Index
- Introduction
- Setup & Installation
- Uploading Media
- The Photos Shortcode
- The Videos Shortcode
- The Audio Shortcode
- Comments and Feedback
Introduction
ThemeSmith uses a very powerful functionality that comes included with WordPress. These are called shortcodes and can become a great tool for your publishing needs. Shortcodes are small pieces of text you add to your WordPress posts and pages that adds simple, or complex, functionality into your post.
The ThemeSmith plugin addes three unique and ground breaking shortcodes for WordPress for you to start using in a matter of seconds to enhance your theme, improving your content and taking care of the “heavy lifting” in terms of creating photo galleries, mp3 players, video players and video embedding.
Setup & Installation
Download the ThemeSmith plugin and transfer it to your server, into the /wp-content/plugins folder. Then activate it via your WordPress backend.
This plugin can also be downloaded via the WordPress backend, see how to here.
Adding Content
Uploading media such as Photo, Videos and Mp3 had been made very easy with the current WordPress backend. ThemeSmith shortcodes will add all the uploaded media in a “loop” fashion to the post content. For example: If you have uploaded 10 mp3’s to in your post… you only need to add one audio shortcode. The plugin will add all of them into the place of the shortcode.
Arranging your uploads is very simple once you understand attachment ordering using the orderby parameter. A popular default is just orderby=”date” and order=”ASC” to completely reverse to order. This can be set in the default setting so to avoid manual usage.
Photos
Once you have uploaded some photos/images into your WordPress post, you must decide where you want to display them. Enter the shortcode below into your post content, save and view the shortcode at work. All images that are uploaded will be resized by the WordPress image resizer. Ensure you have set them to your default WordPress media dimensions before starting any uploads.
Basic
[photos]
Photos, like all the other shortcodes, has default options that you can set up. In most cases you would not need to to use the advanced usage of the shortcode because you can set the global parameters. Here are the a list of all the available parameters that you can use for this shortcode.
Advanced
[photos order="DESC/ASC" columns="4" size="thumbnail/medium/large/full" source="thumbnail/medium/large/full" max="10" captions="on/off" orderby="date" id="1234" itemtag="dl" icontag="dt" captiontag="dd"]
Videos
The WordPress uploader will accept any video file format, but ThemeSmith can only play .flv format.
Basic
[videos]
This shortcode’s properties can be manually overridden with the following available parameters.
Advanced
[videos order="DESC/ASC" orderby="date" id="1234" width="200" height="120" link="on/off" poster="http://url-to-image.jpg" captions="on/off" repeat="none/always" volume="50" auto="true/false" skin="http://url-to-skin.swf"]
If you are hosting your videos on another service like YouTube or Vimeo, you can just attach the custom field with the embed code in to the short code via the “embed” parameter. Please note that most parameters will not work and will only output the referenced shortcode when using the embed parameter.
Embedding
[videos embed="custom_field_name"]
Audio
The WordPress uploader will accept any audio file format, but ThemeSmith can only play .mp3 format at this time.
Basic
[audio]
More available parameters.
Advanced
[audio order="DESC/ASC" orderby="date" id="1234" captions="on/off" link="on/off" width="200" height="200" repeat="none/always" volume="50" auto="true/false" skin="http://url-to-skin.swf" poster="http://url-to-image.jpg" ]
If there are any questions, please comment below.
Thanks
Hi!
I uploaded a new song on my WordPress site, but when I upload it on my site, the first time it played 2.07 min, then I refreshed the page, it played 3.17min and after that 2.57min or something. It didn’t play the whole song. What’s wrong?
Hi Roel.
Interesting error indeed. I will have to investigate and come back to you on this one. Perhaps try it with smaller songs and try verify that they were all correctly added to the server when you uploaded them. Thanks
I already tried it ha! It’s on your own website too btw!
Hi. This bug has hopefully been fixed. Read more here
Hey, I was wondering if there was already a way, or if there’s a plan to get the caption to link to the file. i.e. let the caption of the mp3 player link to the file being played.
Otherwise sir, you have created a killer plugin
Hey Alex,
What you are asking for is very possible! I know that there is some built-in function on the Flash player to provide a download button, but it was not working at the time of production. Keep an eye out for the update soon.
I’ve added the functionality for you in the new update. Read more here
Baie cool plugin, tx!
Thanks for the great plugin.
When using the photo gallery option there is trouble with the full view of the image. After I click on a thumbnail it brings up a full-sized image, but the header part of my theme is in front of the image. I am using the theme Arclite.
This is indeed a error on the part of he theme author by the sounds of it. Can you provide me a link to your website to I can look into a possible fix for you? Thanks
Great plugin! Is there a way to use this hard-coded in a WordPress template? For instance, I have an intro MP3 I would like to place either in the front page footer or the sidebar of a website…
Swell idea. Let me maul it over for a few days and I’ll get back to you on a solution.
Thank you!
Any update regarding this function? This is the only feature that stops me from using your otherwise flawless plugin!
Very very soon. Please follow us on twitter.com/themesmith for updates. Thanks
Hi-nice n simple plugin that works without much tinkering. Just wondering if
1- we can create playlists so that songs continue to play one after the other in a list
2- if there’s a way to make the song name appear next to the audio player instead of below it (takes too much space- please see http://www.ziadrizk.com – page=Music.
3-if I can create multiple groups of songs on one page. For example, I want one group of songs under classical, another under dance. Right now, when I put the tag [audio] it will pick all that are attached to the page. The only thing I can think of is to create 2 sub-pages and group by page.
Please advise
Thank you!
Ziad
(ps- any player similar to myspace..?) thanks again
We are looking into the suggestions. Thanks
I added a photo and the tag but nothing shows up. Is there something else I need to activate?
Awesome!
I think perhaps including an align code part within the advanced code. I lengthened the player to fit within the padding of my page, but if it wished it smaller and centred then I’d be in a mess.
Easy now looking back but I’m not that smart with computers being self-taught.
Stuggling with the skins though, but thank you for the plugin.
hi there
for some strange reason the video or the audio dose not work with me i deactivated all plugins just to be sure but still , is there something im doing wrong ?? the photos are working tho
check the link
http://arts2art.com/new/?page_id=47
It would be great if the title of the audio could be a link to wherever you specify. For instance, to the band’s home page.
Or better yet, make the caption a link. So for instance, if I make the caption http://www.myspace.com/myband – that’s where it would link. It seems like that’s the only way it would be able to work, where it converts the caption text into a URL.
Hello
How do I distribute the photos in different categories in different posts?
Grateful.,
Luiz, what do you mean excactly?
Beginner question that I can’t seem to figure out. Installed plugin, think it’s exactly what I need for photo gallery. Love the formatting and how the thumbnails look! How do I format so I can click on a thumbnail and they come up in popup window and you can click through all the images? Do I need a 2nd plugin or what am I missing?
Figured out my problem and installed Slimbox2 so it’s now working. Is there any way to create a link for each title/caption on thumbnail? Love how everything looks if I could just link the titles! (I see people asked about it for audio and video – I would love it for the photos.) Thanks for great plugin!
Hi, I love this plug in! I am probably just doing this wrong, but on my blog I have 4 posts showing on the main page. The first 2 posts have photo galleries and they are linked so that when you click on a photo in the first post, you can continue clicking through the photos, through to the second post. I would like to keep these separate so you only see the photos associated with the post you are reading. Is this just the way I’m coding it? Thanks!
Hi,
I am trying to figure out something as simple as adding a “margin-right” so that when the images are display, they aren’t right next to each other.
I have tried editing the themesmith.css but it only seems to be applied if existing values are changed. It never applies the margin-right.
What am I missing?
Thanks!
Nevermind… I figured it out. I was editing .themesmith-photos img instead of .themesmith-photos .themesmith-photos-item.
Great plugin! It would be cool if there was a way to edit the margin in the admin setup.
Thanks!
Currently using 2.9, tried uploading few photos to a post, then use themesmith to view the photos inside the post itself pointing ID to itself. It does not work. Any idea what I’ve done wrong?
Andrie, it should still work. Make sure you have the correct syntax as per the documentation. I will look into it further.
Can I get rid of the title in the light box? I just want to display the image and no information. I tried to play around with it but had a massive syntax error! Thanks in advance for any help!
You can try edit the Lightbox javascript file. Otherwise you will have to wait fro the next update. Thanks
Can I make the thumbnail size smaller?
Chris, you can resize thumbnails by setting their size in the wordpress backend under Settings > Media. This will only work for thumbnails uploaded AFTER the you have changed the setting.