This is documentation for the WordPress theme “Just a Blog” which is available to download from Emz Design. If you have downloaded Just a Blog, here are some simple steps to install the theme to your blog.

1. Unzip the file and upload the folder “justablog” into /wp-content/themes on your server. Activate via Appearance > Themes in the WordPress control panel.

2. Open the plugins folder and upload the file “limit-posts.php” to /wp-content/plugins on your server, and activate via the WordPress control panel.

Featured Posts
This theme uses a custom query that pulls out Featured Posts from a category called “Featured”. For this to work for you simply create a category called “Featured” and when you post a featured post, add it to the “Featured” category and it will automatically display that post.

To show the image on the front page it makes use of a custom field named “Featured_Img”. If you’d like to show the image on the front page, upload an image as you usually would when creating a post, but instead of inserting it into the post, copy and paste the URL it creates into the custom field “Featured_Img”.

Any other image you want in the post you can just add as normal.

Latest News
This theme uses a custom query that pulls out Latest News articles from a category called “Latest News”. For this to work for you simply create a category called “Latest News” and when you post a latest news article, add it to the “Latest News” category and it will automatically display. This theme pulls out the latest 4 posts from the Latest News category.

Main Articles
Articles that don’t appear in the “Featured” or “Latest News” articles appear underneath and are also pulled out using a custom query. However, for this to work for you, you will have to edit part of this query. Open the file “edit-query.php” and you will see just one line of php like so:

<?php query_posts('cat=-3,-9&showposts=6'); ?>

-3 and -9 are ID’s for the “Featured” and “Latest News” categories and this query basically works by telling wordpress not to pull out any posts under these two categories. You need to edit the 3 and 9 to the IDs that wordpress has created for the “Featured” and “Latest News” categories on your installation.

To find out the ID’s of specific categories, simply go to Posts > Categories in your wordpress control panel, and click on edit for the “Featured” and “Latest News” categories, and at the end of the URL it will show the ID of the category. Like so:

tag_ID=3

So, simply find the ID’s of the “Latest News” and “Featured” categories and edit them in edit-query.php. So if your ID’s are 10 and 34, your edited code will look like this:

<?php query_posts('cat=-10,-34&showposts=6'); ?>

It’s important to keep the minus before the numbers otherwise it will only show posts from those categories.

Widget Ready
The theme is Widget Ready so you can add widgets using the wordpress control panel, swap them, change them etc.

If you have any questions, comments or any other enquiry about this theme please leave a comment or contact me directly.