Presenting

Presenting is a unique kind theme for Wordpress 2.3 / 2.5+ Presenting is a supplemental contextual theme, designed to compliment your blog’s regular theme. The idea is that a lot of us are increasingly giving talks and presentations where the majority of the content is already on our blogs. Why bother making a set of powerpoint files? Doing that takes away all the things that make the blogs great - updated content, comments, feeds and the like. Presenting is designed to allow you to present directly from your blogs.

Download Presenting | Purchase License | Current Version 0.9

Release Notes for 0.9

• Numerous Bug fixes, sidebar fixes, and ease of installation improvements.
A “Dark” theme is now available (it’s what we use on this site) - see style.css for more information.
• Presenting now supports Google’s recently available chart api QR codes (it places a QR code at the top of each page - the code is a link to that page). In theory anyone with a macbook cam / cellphone cam set up for QR can take a picture and jump to the link.

Additional Notes

This code is also available over subversion, see more information at the collaborative code repository.

Why a theme? Well the ideal solution would be to use the media type ‘projection’ for css, but unfortunately only opera supports it. It also does make sense to make some structural and functional changes when looking at slides that aren’t currently well supported with css. The other thing is that most themes have wildly different structural content, and having this kind of ‘contextual theme’ allows anyone to use it regardless of the the theme structure.

Presenting comes with some branding, that we’d ask you not to remove. If you’d like to remove the branding you can purchase a license to Presenting for $12. This also entitles you to support.

Presenting is intended for personal use on a single blog. If you would like to use presenting commercially, or if you are a large institution that uses wordpress (or another blogging software) we can help you out with that as well. Please contact us directly

Installation: Installation should be pretty easy. Download the theme and put the ‘presenting’ theme into your themes folder. Then place the ‘presentingplugin’ in your plugins folder.

At that point you just need to configure both sidebars (for presenting and your regular theme) to have the presentor control widget.

Organization: The best way to organize a slideshow is probably by categorizing the posts one desires into categories. You can also use tags or (if you plan on presenting everything in a particular date range) the data based archive functions.

Keyboard Control: Mousing around during the talk can be a pain. That’s why real slide shoes are controlled by remote (or at least a jab at the keyboard). The slides are set up to be controlled by your keyboard. A and Z move back and forward between slides. The number keys select individual slides from index or category pages. We also imagine you might one to jot down some other keys depending on your platform. Things like PageUp and Down (or just hitting the Spacebar on the mac) allow you to advance through slide content. Similarly having the increase font size key handy will help you set up the optimal viewing.

Inline Links and Content: We try to avoid state changes as much as possible. We use fancybox in the theme to make links to webpages, images, etc. that are within the main post content open up in an iframe on top of the presentation. This keeps you from losing your place within the main body of the presentation.

Chronological Ordering: The index page lists posts in the same order you would find them on your blog. This makes sense to ease the transition to the slide view. Searches are ordered similarly. Posts by categories, date and tags, however, are chronologically ordered. This makes sense from a slide addition standpoint. Newer slides are the ones you want to show later in the talk. So for posts categorized as “creativitytalk” the first posts would be the one from April 1st, the second from April 7th, and so on.

Control what you present: By default Presenting includes a number of styles in the presenting.css to customize the display of your content. For example, adding the class ‘present-hide’ to something will make it not display in the presenting theme, hiding it from slide view. If you want to be more semantic about this (and your content is marked up accordingly) just define what objects shouldn’t be displayed in presenting or should be displayed differently.