This post consists of some miscellaneous items of interest, about the Unnamed Tabloid theme, that it might be important for you to know.

Archive Page Template:

Unnamed Tabloid comes with a template for an archive page, called archives.php. This is a custom archive page that displays your posts by month and also as just a list of all your posts in descending chronological order. It looks something like this:

I’m actually not all that thrilled with it, so I hope to improve it in future releases of the theme. But, be that as it may, if you want to use the theme’s custom archive page in its current form, here’s what you need to do:

• Make a new page. You can call it whatever you want, though “Archive” or “Archives” seem appropriate to me.
• Under “Page Attributes >> Template” on the right-hand side of the page-edit screen, choose “archives” from the dropdown list of templates.
• Publish the page.

That should be it. You should have an archive page that displays the way I’ve outlined above.

Using Images in Posts:

You shouldn’t have to do anything fancy as far as images in posts go, but just know that I’ve modified the way images look, especially ones with captions. Basically, I took away the border and decreased the font, and tried to make it a bit more newsy-looking.

In terms of size, I find that for individual posts, a width of about 190 pixels or so looks the best with the rest of the layout. (You can see an example here. This post has an image inserted into it with a width of 190 pixels.)

But, of course, this is just my opinion. You can certainly go bigger than 190px wide and it won’t kill anything, as you can see here.

Related Posts:

This is no longer true. See this post.

This is kind of important. The way the single.php template is set up (the template for single posts), you need to have Yet Another Related Posts Plugin installed. Otherwise, the single.php file will generate an error and won’t display your post at all.

The related posts are displayed in a neat little list within individual posts, and they can also be displayed in a list below each post (you can set your options in the plugin’s settings panel). Within a single post’s body, the related posts look like this:

Now, I realize that for some of you, this might well suck, in that you may not want to install the plugin, and you may not want to show related posts at all anyway (“Related posts? Who cares?!” This is an example of what you might be saying.). I am working on the code to make it optional for you to include the plugin, and it will probably end up being one of the options you can adjust in the options panel in future releases of the theme. But for now, you need to have it. Again, you can get it here.

Twitter/Facebook Share Widget Thingee:

Just above the related posts box, you will also notice a small widget that displays links allowing readers to submit the post to Twitter or Facebook. It looks like this:

Personally, I find this to be a helpful feature, and I probably included it because I use it myself on my satirical news site, and I like having it there. Plus, most news sites seem to have some version of this functionality on their article or post pages, and I’m basically imitating a newspaper layout.

Again, I realize that you may not want such a thing. As of now, it’s in the single.php file by default. In future releases, you will be able to easily opt out. But for now, just be aware that it is there by default.

The “More News” Section:

When I explained how to format the front page’s layout using the options panel, I neglected to talk about the bottom half of the front page, namely the More News section. It looks something like this:

Not mentioning it earlier isn’t really a big deal, as you are not required to actually do anything to get it to work. The More News section will simply display the latest three posts from the categories you selected to be featured on the top half of the page (the above example isn’t really accurate because the site it’s taken from only has one post in each of its categories).

So, if you selected a post from Category 3 to be the primary featured post on the front page, and posts from categories 1, 2, and 5 to be secondary featured posts in the center column, then the More News section will display the most recent three posts from Category 3, Category 1, Category 2, and Category 5. As of now, you cannot change which categories are displayed in the More News section. This may well change in the future.

I think that’s it for now. I’ll probably think of more later.