Launched: Monotone
Friday, May 2nd, 2008 by Noel JacksonWe recently designed a theme for Automattic, called Monotone. It’s now available at Wordpress.com, free for every WP.com user!
It’s a “chameleon” photoblogging theme. Monotone takes the first (and only) image attached to a post, samples colors from it, and analyzes them to present a custom color scheme for each photo entry.
You can hear Matt talk about the theme, at the end of his talk on blip.tv.
It was really great working with Automattic on such an interesting project.
BTW, I just love how well Wordpress deals with unicode.
Any chance this will become available for those of us who self-host WP?
Noel, thanks for this theme. Really cool, now i can finally start my photoblog ;-). Any chance that this is going to be available for self hosted blogs? Saw some comments on Matt’s blog as well, but did not find an answer yet (so sorry if this is a duplicate). Cheers, michael
Great intelligent theme. The only thing I do not like are the white strips left and right (background). They’re too white (?) and compete with the light of the photo. Could be better with a black background or even better with a background of the same colour of the one choosed by the system. Is it possible?
Also the archives would look better with a dark (black) background.
I am also interested in a version of this for WP.org.
Thanks for the theme. Will it be widget aware soon?
I am trying Monotone but it doesn’t adjust the post column to the size of my photo. Is there a limit to how wide a photo can be?
(see example: http://twentyfour01photo.wordpress.com/)
Thanks, I am having fun with this new feature on wordpress. I admire anyone who can make things like this from scratch. It took me (an amount of time too embarrassing to mention, we’ll just call it “awhile”) to work out how to use it, but when I switched to Safari, it was much easier.
Great idea, thanks again. :)
Love the theme but I admit I’m having trouble with the sizing of images. I don’t understand why an 800×532 picture gets shrunk, while an 800×560 picture gets posted full size?
[...] welcome to my photo blog. may bag-o nga theme template ang wordpress… ang ‘monotone‘… ang theme nga gindesign para gid sa photo blogging… baskug kuno kay ang color [...]
Great theme. Thank you. Your background color engine is way cool. I can see it doesn’t lend itself to a lot of widgets, but maybe a horizontal region at the bottom would be unobtrusive and useful. I mean, nobody really needs a thousand mostly ugly buttons, but a few of them are a must to help visibility
another request for info on using it for self-hosted blogs…
@malisa, @Eric:
I was able to download monotone for self-hosting at:
http://svn.automattic.com/wpcom-themes/monotone/
And I also have to say… this theme is just plain smart — brilliant PHP use, Noel.
The one thing that you need, to be able to run monotone as a standalone, is a script that uses the ?w query string to resize images. I’ll be releasing my Thumby PHP class and a .htaccess rule that does this later in the week.
:)
[...] du thème : chez WebLogToolsCollection et eight6 Démonstration : la VO, ma VF (pour juger de la traduction, mes photos ne sont pas terribles). [...]
Any way that we could get away from the url_fopen() to grab the image for pre-processing? Many shared hosts (including Dreamhost, my host of choice) disable allow_url_fopen for security purposes, thus all photo postings revert to a drab black background.
Also, is there a Trac instance or suchlike to keep tabs on the development of Monotone?
[...] Links: Demo on WordPress.com | Theme URI [...]
[...] WordPressin uutta “photoblogging” pohjaa Monotone (Joel Jackson). Aika kiva, vaikka ei täydellinen. Siihen ei voi liittää valinnaisia lisäosia, kuten laskuria [...]
Thank you, Noel!
I didn’t even realize how much I wanted a photoblog until I read about this at Wordpress.com.
Your chameleon platform is so much fun to use, and really puts the focus on the image…
I have been getting very little sleep, playing with your creation, for the past 3 nights, getting excited about taking pictures all over again…
Thanks for this wonderful plaything of a tool!
Thank you so much! A beautiful, brilliant tool that is just what I needed for photoblogging roses and other flowers. I loved your theme so much that I got a wp.com account to piggyback onto my hosted site, http://www.swdesertgardening.com. But, I have had so much fun just uploading the photos that I have not yet added it to the hosted site. I loved it when I saw the prototype, I love it even more after playing with it. Thank you again!
Wonderful!
I’ve been looking for something to use for a new photo site of mine and this would work great.
Still waiting for it to be available for download to hosted WP blogs…
I am enjoying this great theme. Thanks! But just in case you are keeping a list of ideas for the next version: I wish it had the ability to make extra pages. Any chance of getting that?
Thanks for the wonderful Theme, I really appreciate it, but two things that I don’t like so much. First, the white borders on the left and the right. A black background would be much better. And second, I can’t insert links and pages… If you could fix that ones because I really want to use this theme, it ist perfectly made for my photos.
[...] Launched: Monotone ‹ Blog ‹ eight6 (tags: webdesign theme template photoblog photography image design blog wp wordpress) [...]
Hi, I was wondering if you could please write an article about how to upload pictures in Monotone? I have tried uploading from photobucket.com, some work, others don’t, and I’m wondering why? How do I add images to the “media library”?
Linda, surely! I’ll write up an article this week and get it posted.
Hey Noel, nice work! Do you have any plans to release it for wordpress.org users?