Theme company spotlight: Graph Paper Press

You have probably noticed there a lot and I mean a lot of commercial WordPress theme companies out there. It seems like a new one is popping up every month. Let’s take a quick look at one of the veterans, Graph Paper Press.

Graph Paper Press specializes in photography focused themes so the grid paper metaphor and minimal use of text is prevalent in most of their themes. So you’ll see a lot of big photos blocks and less emphasis on text. The great thing about GPP is they give away most of their themes away for free use along with some light documentation. If you need support, then you’ll have to pay of course.

Let’s take a quick look at two of my favorite themes: Workaholic and Berlin.

workaholic-gpp.png

Workaholic is a photography/art portfolio theme that I use at my SGVPhotos.com site. It has a home page intro and rows of 3 across thumbnails. When you rollover the thumbnails, it reveals the title and category. It’s perfect when you think pictures are worth a thousand words.

When you drill down to an inner page, there are tabs that will allow the visitor to see multiple photos on the same page via AJAX. There’s also an automatically generated list of similar photos to the right. As a testament to the solid code behind it, I was using a version of Workaholic that is several versions behind the current version and I recently upgraded the site from WordPress 2.8 to 3.04 and the site still works beautifully with the older Workaholic theme.

berlin-gpp.png

Berlin is a deviation from their usual that’s meant for both photos and text. It has a large article block in the left column and there’s a smaller right column that can be used to show posts or other widgets. It’s very easy on the eyes and it’d be great for a magazine or news blog. I haven’t used Berlin myself so other than seeing the front end, I don’t know about the workflow and backend usability.

So hats off to the Graph Paper Press folks for giving back to the WordPress community in such a big way with a ton of polished free to try themes.

Get it: Workaholic | Berlin

11 Replies to “Theme company spotlight: Graph Paper Press”

  1. On your SGVPhotos site, I noticed that you were able to change the intro text in the workaholic theme. I would very much love to know how this is done as I have spent a couple hours now browsing all the files and have yet to find it.

  2. Hi Noel, you have set it up great,
    How do I go about creating a menu item for eg: Places on SVGPhotos site, then attach thumnails to that and a post under that?

    1. hi Clinton, I am using a really old customized version of Workaholic. I think in the old version it automatically populates the top menu by showing all active categories + active pages.

      I can’t remember how I did everything but I think you attach photos to each post by uploading images but not necessarily embedding them in the actual post. My custom version of the theme moved the pagination to the top right corner. Sorry I don’t remember much so I can’t help that much.

      And the home page is automatically generated by the theme depending on your posts.

      I think if you were able to get the newest version from GPP it would support the native WP 3.x menu bar builder (Appearance -> Menus).

      Here’s my customized version of the Workaholic theme if you want to use it:
      http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4016505/workaholic-custom.zip

  3. Hi Noel. Your sites look great
    I’m working with workaholic but am struggling to get the row of 3 porfolio thumbnails to show (I just get a raw list with no thumbnails) – I cant work out what I’m doing wrong!
    Thanks!

    1. Hi Ben, welcome to the site. You’re using the latest copy of Workaholic and up to date WP 3.2x? How big are the images that you are uploading as the “featured images?” What’s your URL?

  4. Hi Noel,
    Nice work using the Workaholic theme with your photos. Looks a like a great way to get a lot of visual content on a site,without using too many thumbnails. I like the fact you can integrate a slider with each portfolio post.
    I am also not getting my third row to show. I’m not using the “featured image” method as per their readme file. Just using “insert image”…not sure if it makes a difference. I’ve adjusted my Media settings accordingly as well.
    I noticed you are not using any footer widgets…so perhaps that has something to do with it? How did you get rid of the default content for the footers; did you just clean up the PHP files as well? Thanks for your help!

    1. Hey Matt, thanks for the compliment. Are you using a newer version of the theme? It’s been a long time since I worked with it. Are you resizing your photos before hand to something more web friendly resolution (1280 wide)?

      As for the footer area yep I just edited the foote.php file.

  5. Just downloaded the theme yesterday, so I imagine it is fresh.

    I am basically letting WordPress do the resizing.
    These were my guidelines, taken from the installation file:

    In WordPress, click on Media Settings. Set your thumbnails to 270 x 150. Set your medium photo size to 570. Set your large size to 950.

    It’s not the end of the world, I’m going to try to hack my functions.php file so I can insert a logo or small banner at the top. Also not a huge fan of the formatting for the menu.

    I’m using the free download, but would really like access to the forum; maybe I’ll fork over the money and get access to all the themes, forums, etc… The Workaholic PRO Theme would have a lot of additional goodies.

  6. I have a problem with work-a-holic because on the main page it shows pics 284×150 px which isnt a normal photographic 3×2 standard. How to change it so it can show pics for example 300×200 px?

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