Can anyone explain Mimbo? WordPress
- SOLVED
I've been asked to repair/revise a website built with Mimbo 2.2. Despite experience with WP, working with Mimbo is like being the only English speaker at a Polish family reunion. Everyone else is having a good time, but while the food looks good, the there's no way to tell what goes with what. I can't find a single document that states simply how someone should think about organizing content for Mimbo.
Content is organized by Categories but where do you control which Categories go where on the generated home page? The wide column features a wide Category at the top and two side-by-side half width categories below. There's a right hand column but nothing in the WP interface seems to control what appears in it.
Mimbo claims to be a "magazine" but is there any way to recall an "archive" of what past home pages looked like? With each Category feed acting like a push-down stack of stories, they all are independent. A visitor can view a story scroll by date, but not the look of the stories as they appeared as a composite on that date.
I have found out how to fiddle with what the original developer did, but image files seem to be in arbitrary locations only accessible by FTP but there's no WP or Mimbo convention for how those locations are found by Mimbo.
Rather than list additional specific questions, I will generalize to: is there any resource for this?
Answers (3)
Chris Olbekson answers:
Unfortunately Darren's older support forums are constantly being attacked by spammers and are not very active anymore.
Mimbo is actually a very well written theme and contains a lot of neat features (especially for a free theme). It has evolved into Mimbo Pro which has a very active support [[LINK href="http://forum.prothemedesign.com/"]]forum.[[/LINK]]
I will try and give you a basic rundown of how the theme works.
<strong>Category Based Menus</strong>
The navigation is based on categories and the pages that they link to use the archive.php template and show the post in chronological order. If you want to view the posts using date archives you can add the archives widget to one of the sidebar widgets.
<strong>Home Page Structure</strong>
If you look at index.php you will see the first loop gets the latest sticky post or the latest post then it gets the excerpts from the next 4 posts. (You can change the number of posts in this section by editing this line: elseif( $postcount > 0 && $postcount <= 4 ) from 4 to whatever you want.
Next it gets the featured categories which are defined in the dashboard options.
<strong>The Images</strong>
The thumbnails are generated using [[LINK href="http://www.darrenhoyt.com/2008/04/02/timthumb-php-script-released/"]]Timthumb[[/LINK]] which is php script that takes the first image attached to a post and creates a cached thumbnail of it. Options and usage instructions can be found at http://www.darrenhoyt.com/2008/04/02/timthumb-php-script-released/
Most of the customization for this theme will involve editing the various template files.
Chris Lee answers:
Mimbo Forums: [[LINK href="http://www.darrenhoyt.com/support/forum.php?id=3"]]http://www.darrenhoyt.com/support/forum.php?id=3[[/LINK]]
More About Mimbo: [[LINK href="http://www.darrenhoyt.com/2009/01/30/mimbo-30-released/"]]http://www.darrenhoyt.com/2009/01/30/mimbo-30-released/[[/LINK]]
If the question is specific; possibly darren will answer your questions in twitter:
[[LINK href="http://twitter.com/darrenhoyt"]]http://twitter.com/darrenhoyt[[/LINK]]
Ashley Grayson comments:
As far as I can tell, all the replies to questions on the support forums are for counterfeit jewelry or NFL jerseys.
Erez S answers:
I guess you can change the theme options through the control panel of the theme,and if you can't find what you want,you can always use thier [[LINK href="http://www.darrenhoyt.com/support/forum.php?id=3"]]support forum[[/LINK]]