In most cases, themes from developers are often filled with a ton of plugins that are coded directly into the theme. Although great and convenient, there is a major caveat of doing this…several actually: The theme gets bloated with code Your theme might have plugins you will never use or want to use The plugins and scripts coded in the theme may not play nice with other third party plugins The plugins and scripts may not be compatible with upcoming versions of WordPress The more scripts and code, the more chances bugs and other problems will show up Benefits of Keeping Plugins out of Themes The user can choose what they want to use You get a much lighter theme (less code) More stable theme Much easier to update plugins than if they were coded into the theme Updates are left to the developers of the plugins If you change… read more
Setup Tutorials for Celestial Reloaded
Welcome to the Setup Tutorials for Celestial Reloaded. These are the standard guidelines to help you install, configure, and customize your newly downloaded theme. If you have any requests for additional tutorials relating to this theme, please contact me and I will review your suggestions. These tutorials are also based on the assumption you have a basic understanding of how WordPress works.
With Celestial Reloaded, you get several options that are built-into the theme to give you the ability to personalize your website by using the available customization features that come with this theme. Normally theme sites code in third party option panels, but I decided to keep to the official WordPress methods by taking full advantage of their built-in customizer (new to WordPress 3.4). Celestial Reloaded Customization Options With the Customizer, you get option tabs, each with a series of settings that let you customize your new theme in “real time”…which means as you make a change, you can see the result dynamically in the right side window. The benefit of this is that you can see what something looks like before making it official and live to the public. Available Options Site Title & Tagline – Set your logo options Basic Settings – Miscellaneous settings Social Networking – Setup your… read more
The most annoying thing with WordPress is that they have a set group of dimensions for images already in place when you install WordPress. What happens when you upload a photo, you will get several thumbnail sizes created automatically – whether you want them or not. This is a major problem for many because eventually your host server will get filled with unused images which take up a lot of server disk space. You don’t see all your thumbnails except just one in the Media Library of your site’s admin. But, if you were to go to your “uploads” folder through your FTP, you will get a shock of your life when you see how many images are there. So…before we continue on with setting up Celestial Reloaded, we will change the default settings of WordPress so that this does not happen to us. But please note that this is… read more
If you plan to customize your theme, WordPress and Styled Themes recommends you use the Child Theme method instead of directly modifying the actual theme files. If you update a theme and you made modifications, guess what will happen? Your modifications will be totally lost and you will have to do it all over again. However, if you make your modifications using a Child Theme, then your changes will not be affected whenever you update the original theme (often called the Parent Theme). When to Use a Child Theme? When there is the possibility you will be making theme file modifications whether now or future When you need to make a colour change to any element that is not part of the customizer or theme option settings When you want to change a font When you want to change part of the layout When you want to add something of your… read more
There are at least two popular methods of installing a theme into WordPress: Using the built-in Installer Manually uploading the theme The first thing you will need to do is to download the theme to your desktop and then unzip the file “celestial-unzip-first.zip” because inside this is your actual theme file. Manual Install For most people, you won’t be using this method but is available as an alternative. Unzip the celestial-unzip-first.zip file to your desktop Open your FTP program Find the unzipped folder “celestial-unzip-first” and make sure the theme files are inside that and not a double folder named the same. If there is, then upload the folder that has the theme files showing in it. Go to your WordPress dashboard >> Appearance >> Themes >> Manage Themes tab Find the Celestial Reloaded theme and click “Activate“ Using the Theme Installer Using the theme installer that is part of WordPress… read more
Welcome to the introduction of the new Celestial theme, renamed as Celestial Reloaded. As I have noted with previous posts and other communications, the redesign of the Celestial theme became a fully on redesign project from the ground up. This means when you install this new version of Celestial, it’ll actually be installed as a new theme and not as a direct upgrade to your existing Pro version because of the amount of changes I did. Key Features of Celestial Reloaded Built as a true WordPress theme Built on WordPress 3.5/3.6 Built on a 12-column grid layout Responsive Design from 320px to 1200px Unlimited Colours Custom Portfolio (1, 2, 3, or 4 columns) Dynamic width Widget groups + two for span columns 22+ Widget Positions Font based Social Icons 2 Showcase Header Styles Styled Blog Comments Layers Slider template Widgetkit Slider template Built using HTML5 and CSS3 Custom Editor CSS… read more
