Setup Tutorials for Luminescence

Welcome to the Setup Tutorials for Luminescence. 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.

Choose content or excerpts for your blog posts

December 24, 2013 |
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This video in this series provides an overview of how to choose your blog post to be content based with a read more tag or an excerpt. You get two options here, but you also get another feature that lets you decide how many words you want for your post excerpts. Covered in this video: Introduction to the blog content post method. Introduction to the blog excerpt post method Choose how many words your excerpt will have. Video  

Create a custom Gallery using WidgetKit

December 24, 2013 |
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This video in this series provides an overview of how to create a custom gallery using a plugin called “WidgetKit“. WidgetKit comes in two flavours, a Lite version (which is what we will use) and a full version which is a paid plugin. This widgetkit is of course optional, but because I am displaying it in the live demo, you may want to use this instead of the WordPress Gallery. To see this custom gallery in action, you can check out the demo website here for Luminescence:  Custom Gallery Code That we Need We will have some work to do here to get ourselves ready to build our special custom gallery. What I will do here is post a couple snippets of code that we will be using, although editing to our own needs, primarily the paths to our images. To Add a Spotlight to a Thumbnail – We need…    read more 

Adding an image overlay with a lightbox using Widgetkit

December 24, 2013 |
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This video in this series provides an overview of how to create a nice overlay effect called Spotlight, as well a night lightbox to view a full sized image. Spotlight and the Lightbox is part of a plugin called “WidgetKit” which comes in two flavours, a Lite version (which is what we will use) and a full version which is a paid plugin. This widgetkit is of course optional, but because I am displaying it in the live demo, you may want to use this for any linked thumbnails you insert into a page or post. To see this in action, check out the custom gallery, and by mousing over any thumbnail and click on it. You can see it in action here:  Spotlight & Lightbox Code That we Need To Add a Spotlight to a Thumbnail – We need this code to the <a href> like this: data-spotlight=”on” To Add…    read more 

Setup a slideshow with Widgetkit

December 24, 2013 |
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This video in this series provides an overview of how to setup the Widgetkit slideshow that you see on the live demo front page. This is a free plugin that you can download and install with custom styling that I provided in the theme download package you got with Luminescence. Widgetkit Slideshow Covered in this video: Introduction to the Widgetkit plugin. Installing Widgetkit. Setting up the included template skin for your slider. Create slides Using the Widgetkit widget to display our slideshow. Video  

Introduction to HTML Snippets

December 24, 2013 |
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This video provides an overview of available HTML code snippets that comes with the Luminescence theme. There are several snippets to choose from, but basically these are available instead of using shortcodes which are a little more difficult to manage if you ever need to make any modifications. With HTML, you can easily make changes with just a basic understanding of it, including CSS. Availabler Snippets: Alerts Blockquote Button Styling Drop cap Glythicons Image Boxes Image Styles Table Styling Thumbnails Widgetkit Gallery Covered in this video: Introducing you to the available snippets. How to use snippets. Video  

An Introduction to Post Formats for Luminescence

December 24, 2013 |
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This video provides an overview of how to use WordPress Post Formats. This is actually a feature that is part of WordPress and as long as a theme offers support for each post format, you can take advantage of different types of posts:  Luminescence Post Formats Available in Luminescence Standard  Aside Status Quote Image Audio Video Covered in this video: Introduction to post formats. Create post format categories Create a few posts using the formats Video  

Disable Titles on Widgets

December 24, 2013 |
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This tutorial will take you through the process of being able to disable widget titles without having to leave the widget title field empty. This comes in handy when you are loading an image, such as a header, or slider, into a widget position where you do not want a title showing. Covered in this video: Introduction to widget titles and how it looks on your pages. Installation of the Remove Widget Title plugin. Creating a widget and disabling the title. Video    

Create a WordPress Gallery

December 24, 2013 |
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This video provides an overview of how to create a WordPress Gallery. This is actually a feature that is part of WordPress, but what I did with Luminescence is change the default styling for the gallery to be a little more pleasing to the eyes. To see what we will be making here, let’s take a look at the demo site’s gallery:  WP Gallery Covered in this video: Introduction to the WordPress gallery feature. Setting up a page for our gallery. Create a gallery with 6 photos Add our gallery page to our menu Preview your gallery and click on an image to see it in a special page viewer Video    

How to setup the Recent Posts widget with thumbnails

December 24, 2013 |
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This video in this series provides an overview of how to setup a Recent Posts widget with thumbnails like the Luminescence theme demo website displays on its blog page. The widget is a plugin called Recent Posts Plus and offers many features that you can customize how the widget looks. Here is a demo of it in action:  Recent Posts Covered in this video: Introduction to the plugin. Getting the Recent Posts Plus plugin and setting it up. Using the widget to display recent (latest) posts with thumbnails. Recent Post Plus Settings In your original download of this theme, there is a folder called “Recent Posts Plus”, and inside this will be a text file that contains settings as well as a category setup and a recent post layout template you can use. You can also modify them to your needs as you feel fit. Video