KubrickHeader
I have been playing with this thing for days now. Not because it is fun but because I don’t want to have to admit that the computer is smarter than me.
Well, of course! I googled everything I could think of regarding the header and I got lots of information. Unfortunately it was all for a previous version of WordPress.
I tried taking my graphic image (720×200) and renaming it kubrickheader.jpg. I also was careful to make sure it really was a .jpg file. When the header came up I could see bits of the new graphic behind the big blue screen that still came up in front of the graphic. Okay, some more investigating and I discovered that all I really needed to do was name it personalheader.jpg. That did not work either.
Then I found out about Kubrickr. A neat tool that makes graphic headers. That did not work either because I had a display problem, not a graphics creation problem. Oh, I got a nicely formated header graphic for Kubrick but it still hid behind the original blue header. I got distracted with flickr trying to figure out why my own flickr pictures would not get displayed.
I finally got my flickr problem resolved, uploaded a bunch of pictures, then started making header graphics using Kubrickr. Most of them turned out a nice shade of black. I have not figured it out completely yet but it has something to do with the size of the image. The image has to be larger than what ends up appearing in the nicely framed Kubrick header graphic else it gets replaced with a big black banner to replace the blue one.
Just for fun I uploaded a 400kb+ file to my server, a closeup of a red rose. That displayed okay except for being wider than the blog page by just a little on each side. It also took forever and year to load.
I finally discovered a Wordpress Tutorial:Replace Header Graphic Kubrick Template.
Toward the end of that tutorial under PROLBEMS: (no, that is the they way they spelled it ) it was suggested to delete the functions.php file from my wp-content/themes/default/ directory on the server.
Not being one to throw anything away, I renamed the file to functions.php.tst. I reloaded everything and behold!, the graphic displayed as expected. Only problem was it had the title of the blog across it.
Reading a little further, I discovered that I could get rid of the unwanted verbage by adding ‘display:none;’ at the beginning of h1 and #header .description{ sections of the style.css file.
So now I have a page that has no header except for the graphic that is loaded. All the nice border and fancy formatting is gone. The place where the header was is now just a blank part of the page except for the graphic. That is okay. I suspect all the fancy stuff was part of the default graphic anyway and it can be restored with a little creative manipulation of my new graphic.
My only concern is the disabling of functions.php. The name implies it was doing more than just preventing me from displaying a custom header.
Those folks at www.siteoodles.com may not know how to spell ‘problems’ , but they do know how to solve problems. At least I am closer now than I have been all week to making my custom header work.
Now to see if I can get rotator.php to do its magic and display a new graphic in the header each time the page is reloaded.
Got that done too. Everything is easy when you know how. I found the details for the code changes at the WordPress Codex Site.
As usual, when everything else fails, read the instructions. In this case the WordPress Docs.