The slider on the Pure & Simple demo website is optional, but this tutorial will help you get setup if you decide to use the Widgetkit slideshow. You can freely download Widgetkit from yootheme.com and once you install it, you can enjoy the benefits of the custom theme (style) that we have created for it. You can also use some other slider if you want to. Download Widgetkit Lite (free) here. Go to Plugins >> Add New >> Upload Browse for the widgetkit zip file you downloaded and install then activate it Note that it gets added to the bottom of your admin menu group Upload the Slideshow Theme With the Pure & Simple theme, you get a custom theme for the slideshow to match what you seen on the live demo website. You can find this style in the the “Puresimple-package” folder, then in that you will find a… read more
Setup Tutorials for Pure & Simple Pro
Welcome to the Setup Tutorials for Pure & Simple. 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.
Font management is a very large topic because it’s probably the one thing that most users will, at some point, want to change in their site pages. I know many people would love to have every font choice and everything about sizes, styles, colours, and more, all rolled into something easy to click and you’re done kind of thing….in a perfect world, yes. However, I hate to be bearer of bad news, but you will have to do some form of custom CSS for your site somewhere along the lines. If you want to change the font of something in your pages, you first need to have some understanding about how and where fonts come from. Anyone who uses a computer, whether it’s a Windows machine or a MAC, will have fonts that are part of their operating system. This is what allows us to see different fonts when we… read more
I know the little “Edit” link that appears on pages and posts annoys people because it does to me too. So for everyone who wishes they can delete that edit link from the front of their site pages when viewing it, I have a theme option setting for you. By default, most themes have this so that it allows the site owner to edit the page or post by clicking on this link directly from the front-end. Go to Appearance >> Customize >> Basic Settings Check the box next to Hide Edit Links Click Save & Publish Screencast – Hide Edit Links
This theme offers a large selection of font based icons from a source called “Font Awesome” which has proven to be very popular…so much, that there is even a plugin for it. We will use this plugin with this theme because I also added the font and custom styling for it. Get the Plugin Go to Plugins >> Add New Type in the search: Font Awesome Shortcodes Activate it Using Icons in your Content When you install the Font Awesome Shortcodes plugin, you get a green button added to your editor that looks like this: Basically you click in your page or post content where you want to insert the icon of your choice and then click the Font Awesome button which gives you a popup window to choose your icon. Once you select your icon, it gets inserted as a shortcode. You won’t see the actual icon in your… read more
There are many ways to create a contact page, but the one thing hey all have in common is that they use a plugin for the actual form that people fill out. Normally I used Contact Form 7 as the plugin, but since I am using Jetpack in the live demo site for Pure & Simple, I decided to give this a try and created this tutorial based on Jetpack. For a basic form, it’s very solid and we know it’s coded well because it’s from the developers over at Automattic (makers of WordPress). Each contact form can easily be customized to fit your needs. When a user submits your contact form, the feedback will be filtered through Akismet (if it is active on your site) to make sure it’s not spam. Any legitimate feedback will then be emailed to you, and added to your feedback management area. NOTE: Even though I… read more
You may have noticed the live demo site for Pure & Simple showcases a portfolio that looks great when you want to display projects that you have done, whether for a client, or for yourself. The portfolio is not built into the theme for a very good reason…if you ever change to a new theme, you can keep your portfolio because it’s not part of the theme. In this case, the porfolio is part of the Jetpack plugin. To show you what the portfolio looks like, or at least what I did for the live demo site, you can see it here: Portfolio Demo The first thing you need is Jetpack, so if this is not installed, you need to install it so that we can activate one of the modules in it called “Custom Content Type“. Create Your First Portfolio Project and Portfolio Items Go to Jetpack >> Settings… read more
This is more of a generalized tutorial to help you decide how you want to generate thumbnails for your website. This is important because everyone will have their personal preferences, but the idea here is to make you aware of what happens when you upload photos to your Media Library. By default, WordPress has preset thumbnail media sizes for you. Although you can modify them to suit your own needs, having auto generated thumbnails has its pro’s and con’s. Advantages The advantage of having WordPress create your thumbnails each time you upload a photo, is that you get a preset group of thumbnails that you can use for your posts, pages, galleries, etc. Another is that if you do not have the capability of preparing your photos before uploading, such as sizing and cropping, then setting your Media Thumbnail sizes is ideal if you use a lot of images. You… read more
This tutorial will help you make a gallery using WordPress. Although this is a common thing with any theme, I will show you how it looks with Pure & Simple as your theme. First thing you want to do is prepare your images ahead of time. I am one who likes to keep things consistent so that I get a nice gallery that is evenly displayed within a page, post, or text widget. This means preparing images by cropping, sizing, and optimizing photos before you upload them. If you were to create a gallery with different sizes of images and some are vertical while others are horizontal, you get a very uneven gallery layout…however, sometimes you may not have the option to make them all the same. Create a page or open a page (or post) where you plan on adding a gallery Click on the Add Media button above… read more
I will show you how to create custom page headers for pages that include the option to add different backgrounds, as well publishing nice page captions to help make a page stand out. To give you an idea of what these are, check out the demo website, and look to the banner area near the top: Custom Headers Having this capability allowed you to create nice backgrounds with a descriptive page header with caption text that looks like this: You do not have to create titles and captions, you can simply change the background image to something different for select pages. This lets you have the capability of each page having its own background and caption. Get Started With Custom Fields To acheive this, we need to use a plugin called Advanced Custom Fields. This plugin is a big one and can do a LOT of things, but for Circumference,… read more
By default, WordPress will show a widget on every page that the widget position exists on. In most cases when making a website, you don’t want that widget to show on every single page, so the only way to manage where and what pages it should be on is to use a plugin. You have a few options available: Jetpack – Has a Widget Visibility feature that adds the settings at the bottom of every widget Display Widgets – A plugin that lets you show widgets on select pages. It also adds the settings to each widget in the admin. Dynamic Widgets – A plugin that offers extensive options but does come with a learning curve, albeit very powerful features. Pure & Simple uses Jetpack on the live demo site and I enabled the Widget Visibility feature on it so I can use it to show widgets on select pages…. read more
