A slightly new look

On the recommendation of a good programmer friend I’m using WordPress to host this blog, and I’m extremely happy with it so far. I ended up using the default theme (WordPress Twenty Ten 1.2) with fairly little customization. To post pictures I upload them to my Photoshelter account, and then use the awesomely-easy Photoshelter WordPress plugin to put them in the posts.

But one minor annoyance I’ve had is that the maximum image I could post was around 600 pixels wide, which is a bit smaller than I’d like. So, I talked to my programmer friend, and she told me how to make the theme wider. I thought I’d share the changes here, in case anyone else wants to do it:

In the style.css document (accessed either by going to /wp-content/themes/twentyten/style.css or the “Appearance / Editor” menu item in the WordPress Dahsboard) change:

  • The “width” characteristic of #wrapper to be wider (its default is 940; I upped it to 1040; this is in the /* = Structure area of the file)
  • The “width” characteristic of #access to be wider (its default is 940, I upped it to 1040; this is in the /* = Menu area of the file)
  • The “max-width” characteristic of .wp-caption to be wider (its default is 632, I upped it to 732; this is in the /* = Images area of the file)

You’ll need to upload a new header image that’s the new width of your page. To allow yourself to do that, you’ll need to edit the functions.php file (/wp-content/themes/twentyten/functions.php) so that the width of your header image is different.  This line did the trick for me:

  • define( ‘HEADER_IMAGE_WIDTH’, apply_filters( ‘twentyten_header_image_width’, 1040 ) );

That’s it!

If you happen to see anything weird with the new layout, please let me know.

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