Welcome to the introduction of the new Luminescence theme which gives you a quick overview of what features this theme offers, but also what is included and not included.
Key Features ofLuminescence
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Inside Your Download Package
When you download the theme, you will get the following:
- The theme itself as luminescence.zip
- child-theme – This includes a child theme already setup for you to install
- extras – this is a folder which contains things like HTML snippets, slider styles, and more
What Is not Included
Although the demo site looks great with lots of things happening in it, there are parts that are not included in the download. Plugins are not included because it’s best to let the individual to decide what plugins they want, but it also assures that when they are downloaded as needed, you will get the latest version form the developers.
The theme demo site also showcases a slider that is part of a plugin package called “Widgetkit“.
The Widgetkit is free to download, although they offer a pro version as well, but for the demo site, I used the Widgetkit Lite version. More on this later.
Recommended Plugins
Although these plugins are not required, I do recommend them, and currently they are being used on the live demo site:
- Dynamic Widgets – Let’s you publish widgets on select areas of your web site
- Remove Widget Title – Let’s you remove a title from the front-end view of any widget
- Jetpack – Lots of added featured such as a CSS editor for doing custom changes to your theme, lightbox for the gallery, Contact Form, and more. It even lets you publish widgets to select pages too.
- Recent Posts Plus – A great plugin for displaying recent posts with thumbnails.
- Simply Exclude – A plugin to let you exclude categories, posts, and more from showing in different areas
- Widgetkit – Multiple plugins packed into one plugin, including a Twitter, slideshow, and image lightbox…and more.
- Black Studio Tinymce Widget – Think of this as a super text widget with a fully functional content editor
Making Theme Modifications
There may be times when you want to make changes to a theme but the theme settings does not have the options you want. This means you will need to modify the core theme files which WordPress does not recommend because should you make an update to the theme, you lose everything you changed. For this purpose, the child theme is the solution and this theme gives you one as part of the download package. More on child themes later, but if you plan to make theme modifications, it’s best to install the child theme and activate it (you need the Luminescence theme installed for this to work).