Modularity is a multimedia theme framework for Wordpress. The theme design was developed with users who appreciate visual browsing and prefer a minimal layout, with their photos and multimedia featured front and center. But, the theme can been used to create everything from e-commerce sites, music review sites, portfolio sites, and everything in between. Homepage designs can be turned on and off at the click of a button on the Theme Options panel. Subscribe to Graph Paper Press' feed or follow us on the bleeding edge of development by following us on Twitter.
Here is a brief list of the major features:
If you want to make changes to how this theme looks and feels, than create a child theme. Never make changes to the original theme files. Why? Because when a new version of this theme is released, all of your changes will be lost when you update. Plus, making a child theme is incredibly easy. Here is how you do it.
If you've performed a clean install of Modularity and are having problems, make sure that the following conditions have been met:
Modularity is a 950px wide, one or two column theme, depending on options you have chosen. We need to set up your default image and thumbnail sizes to allow for easy posting and consistent design structure. Click Settings - Media.
Post thumbnails are generated automatically by the functions contained in this theme. This theme uses the new Post Thumbnail feature available in WordPress 2.9. Read more about this new feature here. If you need additional instructions on uploading photos, inserting photo galleries and using the Wordpress interface, please view this screencast or watch our video tutorials, if you are a member of our site.
This theme has seven optional homepage designs:
Please activate each option and view your new homepage design. Remember, less is more.
The navigation contains a listing of all your pages and posts, your contact info and the search bar. You can set or remove the contact info from the Theme Options panel. For further reading, please see these instructions.
Modularity has a built-in HD video player that plays FLV video files. You are no longer restricted to pixelated YouTube videos.
To add a video, upload the FLV file to your server using your favorite method, like FTP. Copy and paste the link to the file into a custom field called video. Next, add a video thumbnail. You can do this the exact way that you add regular thumbnails, except, you will want to add an image large enough to fit the maximum size of the video player, for best results try an image that is 950px wide. Add the video thumbnail to a custom field with key value video-thumb.
For multiple videos within a post or page, try different values for the same video key which mean you can have 2 or more instances of video key. Same goes for video-thumb. Note that each thumbnail should be in the same precedence as that of video for them to match. You can also add other multimedia, which can include virtually any media with embed capabilities. Enter "multimedia" as the key value and paste your YouTube, Vimeo, or any other html embed code into the value field. You can read more about using custom fields here.
By default, thumbnails are auto cropped by Wordpress. In WordPress 2.9, you can now change the crops of your images after uploading them into WordPress. This is the order in which the theme attempts to grab an image to use as a post thumbnail:
If your thumbnails or images look squished, then you need to follow these steps:
There are a total of three/four widgetized areas on this theme, depending on which options you activate on the Theme Options panel. Three widgetized areas appear on the bottom and there is one sidebar widget. You can add and delete widgets by clicking Design - Widgets, from within your Wordpress admin panel.
This theme has two built-in spots for advertising: One in the sidebar, which measures 310 pixels wide, and one underneath the main post, which measures 590 pixels wide. You can add your adversing code on the Theme Options panel.
This theme uses jQuery javascript to do lots of fancy stuff. If your theme looks broken, than you likely have a plugin that uses a conflicting javascript library. Deactivate your plugins, one-by-one, to determine which plugin is conflicting with jQuery.
Still having trouble? Consider becoming a member of Graph Paper Press so you can get access to our private, well-groomed support forum, tutorials, and additional themes.
Last Revision: March 19th, 2010