Support for Coromandel

As I’ve already mentioned, you’re entitled to do pretty much whatever you like with Coromandel, just like WordPress. That’s pretty cool! Don’t get too excited though; I don’t have to help you do it. Let me explain:

• If you want to use Coromandel I’ll do my best to assist you to personalise the theme, by email or through this website. I am unable to teach you how to use WordPress, CSS or PHP etc, or help you make advanced modifications such as changing any behaviours, but I may be able to direct you elsewhere for guidance.
• Please allow a minimum of 48 hours for me to respond to your queries. Demands or queries that do not clearly and politely state your problem and the steps you have taken to resolve it will be ignored. If this is difficult for you because English is not your first language, (well done for getting this far!) just say so.
• You can remove my credit and links at the bottom of each page. However, I believe that unless you add it at least once elsewhere or you have totally transformed the theme, that you are effectively taking credit for my work. Therefore, please don’t expect me to cheerfully instruct you how to do so. I’m pretty sure the folks at WordPress feel the same way about their credit. Whatever you decide, you can edit or remove them at the end of the footer.php file or you can re-style or hide them by adding a #credits style in the style.css file.
• You can also integrate Google AdSense or any other revenue-generating features into this theme, but again, I won’t help you. I don’t disapprove of these methods, and there are many valid reasons to use them (eg for good causes or hosting costs), but even so, you’ll have to find help elsewhere.

Customising Coromandel

Coromandel has a theme options page that you can access from your WordPress 2.7+ Dashboard, the link for which appears at the bottom of the Appearance menu. On this page you can change the background and text colours of the theme and insert your own header image. More instructions are supplied there.

Blogging with Coromandel

Coromandel has been designed to use as much of the native WordPress functionality as possible.

Setting up

• Write the Biographical Info field under Users > Your profile to add the introduction which appears at the top of the side column.
• Threaded comments (comments on other comments), available since WordPress 2.7, are disabled by default. You can enable them under Settings > Discussion. For aesthetic reasons, Coromandel only supports a maximum of 3 levels.

Writing

Coromandel supports all of the formatting features of the WordPress editor. However there are some recommendations:

• For headings, limit yourself to using the H3 and smaller H4 heading formats in your text. These are available in the format menu when you enable the Kitchen Sink mode in your editor (top right icon).
• When using preformatted from the format menu, insert line breaks (no HTML tags are required, just hit the return key in the editor) to stop the text you are formatting from knocking the right column of the page down to the bottom.
• Headings will always appear flush left, so they will drop down underneath an image rather than appear beside it. If you would like them to flow with other text alongside an image, use the HTML mode to add this attribute to your heading tag: class="clearnone"

Adding images

This section covers the image sizes that Coromandel supports and how to flow text around them using WordPress. This information also applies to video or flash movies, etc.

• Images can be any height you wish. If you are placing the image in the text with the text flowing down one side, make your images height is divisible by 18. This is how far apart the lines of text are spaced and preserves the ideal amount of space between the text and the image underneath each image.
• A full-width image in your post or page can be a maximum of 384 pixels across. If you exceed this width the side column will drop down beneath the main column, breaking the page layout.
• If your image is lower down in your text than you want it, switch to the HTML mode and make sure your image tag appears immediately before the paragraph or heading tag you wish to have beneath or alongside it.
• If you want to display high-res images, link a smaller image in a post or page to the high-res file in the same way you would link to another page.
• Sometimes you’ll want an image in the text with the text flowing down one side. You can have up to 368 pixels wide, but there’ll be no room for the text to run alongside at this size! I recommend 112 pixels. In WordPress 2.5 or greater, in the visual mode of your post or page content editor, use the edit / insert image dialogue to align the image. To achieve this in the HTML mode, add this attribute to your img tag: class="alignleft" or class="alignright". This places the image to that side and the text flows down the other. Because of the often ragged appearance of the right hand side of the text column, it is not recommended that you align the image to the right too often.