Integrating a WordPress site

Once you have completed the design of your PhotoDeck website, you can export it as a WordPress theme. This way, your blog will appear to be completely integrated into your website.

The resulting WordPress theme is based on WordPress’ default Twenty-Twelve theme, which is part of WordPress 3.0 (and above) distributions. If the Twenty-Twelve theme is already installed (which is normally the case), all you need to do is install onto WordPress the custom PhotoDeck theme (zip file).

The theme has multiple widget areas, so it is easy to customize it with blog archives, linkrolls, tag clouds and any other WordPress widget.

Note that for best results, the block that normally contains the images on your website should be at least 950px wide.

How to install your theme on your WordPress blog

Once you have downloaded your custom WordPress theme, log onto your WordPress blog as an admin and go to: Appearance / Install Theme / Upload.

WordPress limitation: if you want to update a former custom WordPress theme, you will have to delete it first. (If it is active, you have to switch to another theme before being able to delete it).

NOTE: www.wordpress.com does not allow the installation of custom themes. Most website hosting services offer full-fledged WordPress blogs, though.

Note to Safari users when downloading your custom theme

By default, Safari automatically opens downloaded zip files, whereas WordPress requires the theme zip file. To work around this, you have 2 options:

  • Re-create a zip archive of the downloaded folder (“PhotoDeck-WP”)
  • or change Safari’s behavior so that it does not open the downloaded file: Safari > preferences > General > uncheck “Open safe files after downloading”