The Morning After: Documentation
Index → Installation ⋅ Getting Started ⋅ Custom Fields ⋅ Automatic Thumbnail Generation ⋅ Home Page Description ⋅ Header Images ⋅ Latest Post and Associated Image ⋅ Featured Post and Associated Image ⋅ Recent Posts and Associated Images ⋅ Displaying Your Logo ⋅ Threaded Comments ⋅ Image Wrapping Classes + Galleries ⋅ Asides ⋅ Emailing Posts to Friends + Print-Friendly View ⋅ Advertisements
Back to Main Theme Page → Click here.
Theme
Installing The Morning After is quite easy. Once you’ve downloaded the theme and extracted the files, upload the tma folder to your wp-content/themes/ directory. Next, go to the Presentation area in your WordPress administration panel and activate the theme.
Plugins
The following plugins are included with the theme (in the plugins folder): Post-Thumb Revisited, WP-Email and WP-Print. You don’t have to install the plugins — the theme works fine without them as well — but they add some extra functionality that would be quite useful for an online magazine and I recommend that you install them. Just upload everything in the plugins folder to your wp-content/plugins/ folder and activate the plugins from the Plugins page in your administration panel. I’ve customised the plugins to suit The Morning After theme.
Recommended WordPress version: Version 2.7+
Once the theme is activated, the first thing you need to do is to create two categories called Asides and Featured. After that’s done, your home page will be displayed correctly. Now, we move on to the good stuff. For best results, please disable the visual rich text editor from the Users > Your Profile page in your WordPress administration panel.
Custom fields are very useful for extending the functionality of a WordPress-powered web site. Each custom field consists of two parts, a key and the value for the key. A lot of the added functionality provided by The Morning After is based on custom fields.
One important thing that you should keep in mind is that you only need to create a new key once, after which you can assign a value to that key for every post. What this means is, you don’t need to create the required custom field keys for every post, you can select them from the drop down list in your Custom Fields section on the Write page. I know it seems obvious, but I just thought I’d mention it for people who aren’t used to using custom fields. You can read more about custom fields here.
Version 1.4 of the Morning After theme allows for the automatic generation of thumbnails for the ‘Recent Posts’ and ‘Featured Post’ sections on the home page. To enable this new feature, you need to install and activate the Post-Thumb Revisited plugin accompanying the theme, and set an appropriate path for storing generated thumbnails on the the plugin’s Basic Options page.
This is an optional feature, and you can continue to use custom fields for thumbnails (as in previous versions). You can also use custom fields for certain posts that you want to create your own thumbnails for, and let the rest be created automatically.
To add a description of your Web site on the home page (as seen in the preview), you need to create a Page called Description. Whatever content you enter in this Page will be displayed in the blue box on the home page.
As you see in the preview, there is a thin strip with a background image just below the header with the ‘title’ of the page. You will see different background images for the home page, posts/pages, and archives. Please feel free to change the background images to suit your tastes. Make sure your images have dimensions of 965 × 70 pixels, and name them as home_banner.png (for the home page), single_banner.png (for posts and pages), and archive_banner.png (for archives) respectively. Upload them to the wp-content/themes/tma/images/bg/ folder.
As you can see, the latest post is displayed prominently on the left hand side of the home page. By default, only the title and excerpt will be displayed. For best results, please enter an excerpt for the post in the Optional Excerpt section on the Write Post page. If you want to add an image to the latest post (as seen in the preview), you should create a custom field with key latest_home_img and the value as the name of the image (e.g. latestpost.jpg). This image should be saved in the wp-content/themes/tma/images/latest/ folder. Please ensure that the width of your image for the latest post doesn’t exceed 470 pixels.
To mark a post as “featured”, just make sure it belongs to the Featured category (which you created after you activated the theme). For best results, please enter an excerpt for the post in the Optional Excerpt section on the Write Post page.
To add a thumbnail image for the featured post (displayed on the home page), create a custom field with key featured_home_img and value as the name of the image (e.g. featuredthumb.jpg).
This image should be saved in the wp-content/themes/tma/images/featured/ folder. Please ensure that the thumbnail image for the featured post has dimensions of 64 × 64 pixels.
Version 1.4 of the Morning After theme allows for automatic generation of thumbnails. This feature is handy if you wouldn’t like to create thumbnails for every post.
The ‘Recent Posts’ area on the home page displays the next five latest posts (after the very latest one, in descending order). To add a thumbnail image to each of the posts, create a custom field with key thumb_home_img and value as the name of the image (e.g. featuredthumb.jpg). Please be sure to add this custom field for all posts (except asides).
This image (for each post) should be saved in the wp-content/themes/tma/images/thumbs/ folder. Please ensure that the thumbnail image has dimensions of 48 × 48 pixels.
Version 1.4 of the Morning After theme allows for automatic generation of thumbnails. This feature is handy if you wouldn’t like to create thumbnails for every post.
By default, the theme displays your web site’s title and description in the header. If you want to replace that with your logo, it’s easy to do. If you look at the source code for header.php, you will see the following:
<div class="title">
<div><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/"><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a></div>
<div class="desc"><?php bloginfo('description'); ?></div>
</div>And below that is:
<!--<a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/" title="<?php bloginfo('description'); ?>" class="sitelogo"></a>-->Just delete the first block, and uncomment the second block of code (remove the <!−− at the beginning and −−> at the end), so you’re just left with this:
<a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/" title="<?php bloginfo('description'); ?>" class="sitelogo"></a>Save your logo as sitelogo.png and upload it to the wp-content/themes/tma/images/bg/ folder. Please ensure that the width of the logo doesn’t exceed 400 pixels, and that the height of the logo doesn’t exceed 90 pixels.
As of version 1.4, the Morning After theme supports WordPress’s in-built threaded comments functionality. This function is only available for WordPress 2.7+. To use this feature, you need to enable it on your Settings > Discussion page. Recommended comment nesting level: up to four levels deep.
As of version 1.4, the Morning After theme supports WordPress’s in-built image wrapping classes and image galleries.
An aside is basically a very short post, more like a note. It could be an interesting link that you want to share with your readers, or just a quick opinion about something. To publish asides using The Morning After, just write the short post as you would normally, and make sure it belongs to the Asides category (which you created after activating the theme). That’s it. Asides are displayed on the home page below the featured post.
If you installed and activated the WP-Email and WP-Print plugins, you should be able to offer your readers the option of emailing posts to friends and a print-friendly view for every post. The respective links will can be viewed below the title of the post. You might need to update your permalink structure after installing the plugins.
You can play around with the settings for the plugins in your administrative panel. The WP-Email plugin will create an extra tab in your header navigation called, well, E-mail, where you can tweak the settings under E-mail Options. For the WP-Print plugin, you can go to Options > Print.
If you are using the latest version of the Morning After theme, you can also use a widget (included in the theme download) to display the most emailed posts in your sidebar.
There are two main advertisement ‘blocks’ in The Morning After theme.
On the home page below the ‘Recent Posts’ section: This block accommodates a 250 × 250 pixels advertisement (maximum width, can be less than 250px as well; height can exceed 250px, but should preferably be 250px or less). To display an ad here, open ad_home.php and simply paste your advertisement code in the file. Save and upload, obviously. You can also add the advertisement code in the ad_home.php file using WordPress’s in-built theme editor.
On the sidebar below the list of categories: This block accommodates a 180 pixels wide advertisement (maximum width, can be less than 180px as well; no restrictions on height). To display an ad here, open ad_side.php and simply paste your advertisement code in the file. Save and upload. You can also add the advertisement code in the ad_side.php file using WordPress’s in-built theme editor. This advertisement will appear on the sidebar for all pages. To customise the display of your ads (show certain ads only for certain categories/posts, etc), you might want to look into conditional tags.