Theme installation
The easiest way to install the theme, is by accessing your WordPress admin panel, then go to Appearance > Themes. Select the Install Themes tab and click the Upload link located just below the tab’s name. Click on Browse… and select the WordPress theme zip file you just downloaded. Then click the Install Now button, and after a few seconds, your new theme should be installed. Click activate and the theme is ready to use.
TIP: A more visual guide can be found here.
In order to install the theme manually, or in case you have trouble installing it through the admin panel, you have to unzip the WordPress theme’s zip file on your computer, and upload via FTP the resulting theme folder into your WordPress installation themes folder (wp-content/themes). Then, from the WordPress admin go to Appearance > Themes. The theme should be available in your themes list. Click activate.
Image Sizes
The minimum recommended image sizes for Brittany are:
- Post thumbnail: 750x460px
- Slider images – Fullwidth featured image: 1140x475px
- Fullwidth slider: 1920x850px
- Square thumb: 300x300px
- About me widget thumb: 360x220px
- Plain layout thumb: 360x450px
- Vertical thumb: 360x540px
- Vertical fixed: 355x325px
- Horizontal fixed thumb: 375x430px
Useful Plugins
These plugins provide functionality and features used directly (or not) by the Theme. So, it is recommended to install and activate them before importing your sample content.
- Contact Form 7 use this plugin to create a contact form, then copy the shortcode it gives you and paste it in a page which will serve as your contact page.
- WP Instagram Widget: Use the latest version of this plugin to help you display your Instagram feed in any of the theme’s sidebars.
- WordPress Jetpack: You can use this to create a contact form instead of Contact Form 7, insert sharing buttons, create tiled galleries etc.
- One Click Import : Use this plugin to help you import your content with just one click.
Importing Sample Content using One Click Import
To automate the process of importing and for a better experience we have natively included support for OneClick Import Plugin. Let install it fist:
From your WordPress dashboard
- Visit ‘Plugins > Add New’,
- Search for ‘One Click Demo Import’ and install the plugin,
- Activate ‘One Click Demo Import’ from your Plugins page.
From WordPress.org
- Download ‘One Click Demo Import’.
- Upload the ‘one-click-demo-import’ directory to your ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory, using your favorite method (ftp, sftp, scp, etc…)
- Activate ‘One Click Demo Import’ from your Plugins page.
Once the plugin is activated you will find the actual import page in: Appearance > Import Demo Data.
Click on the Import demo data button and you are done!
This plugin requires PHP version of at least 5.3.x, but we recommend version 5.6.x or better yet 7.x. Please contact your hosting company and ask them to update the PHP version for your site.
Importing sample content manually
To get the sample content file you can click the link in the notice that will appear on your dashboard immediately after activating the theme.
Extract the zip file you downloaded and upload the xml file in Tools > Import > WordPress (if not already present, you will be prompted to install the WordPress importer plugin), assing the authors to an existing user and make sure you check the “import attachments” box. You can now import the sample content.
You can also download the Sample Content for Brittany by clicking here
Importing widgets
You can also import the widgets you see on the theme’s demo. To do that, you need the Widget Importer & Exporter plugin. To install it go to Plugins > Add new search for widget importer exporter and install the plugin. Activate it and go to Tools > Widget Importer & Exporter click choose file and upload the brittany_widgets.wie file which is located in the sample content zip file, click Import widgets and you are good to go.
WARNING: As this will create posts, pages, custom post types, categories, widgets, etc. and change various system settings, it is strongly advised that you do this on a clean WordPress installation, without any previous and/or precious data. Under no circumstances we can be held responsible for total or partial data loss, so please be careful.
WooCommerce
To enable eCommerce functionality for your website you need to install and activate the WooCommerce plugin by WooThemes. You can download the plugin free of charge from the WordPress Plugin Repository. For installation and usage instructions please refer to the plugin’s documentation.
Once you have installed and activated the WooCommerce plugin please install its pages by clicking on the button that WooCommerce provides on its banner. This will likely create a duplicate of some pages along with the pages installed by the sample content but its a needed step. You can delete the old pages that came with the sample content or use them instead by going to WooCommerce > Settings > Products > Display and assign them anew.
Setting up your theme
1) Populating your blog
To add new posts to your blog, go to Posts > add new and proceed to:
- add a title to your post,
- enter the content in the editor,
- add a category and/or tag to the post,
- upload a featured image by clicking “Set featured image” on the Featured Image panel,
- Select the preferred post layout from the drop down in the Layout section and
- once done click the Publish/Update button.
2) Customizing the appearance
All theme customization is done via WordPress’s built in customizer. If you haven’t used it or want to learn more about it, please read this article.
Go to Appearance > Customize and you will see this
TIP: any changes you make in the tabs below will be previewed live on the site which appears in right side of the screen, however to save these changes you need to click the Save & Publish button on the top of the bar, if you have made a change but see the button grayed out (for example changed the font size of a heading), move the cursor outside the input box, for example, to the next input box, then the button should be clickable again.
Let’s take a look at the options each tab gives you.
Header Options
Here toggle the sticky menu, social icons and inline logo, additionally you can customize the header colors.
Menus
Here you can create and assign menus to the theme. The theme features one menu location, the main menu one. To learn more about menu creation check out the Codex’s menu user guide here.
Site Identity
In this tab you can modify the site’s title, tagline, logo and site icon.
Layout Options
Here you can define the layouts of the blog listing and single post, set the blog columns, modify the length of the automatic excerpt , toggle the excerpt display in listings and select between numbered and older/newer pagination.
Front Page Carousel
In this tab you can toggle the appearance of the slider, select a source post category to display on it, or specific posts via their IDs. You can also limit the number of posts that appear on the slider and modify slider timings. Finally you can select where you want the slider to appear.
Typography Options
Here you will find various options regarding the theme’s typography. You can change heading, body text and widget title sizes and toggle the capitalization of various elements.
Content Colors
Are you looking to create your own unique color scheme? This tab will help you do it by allowing you to modify the colors of many elements of the content. To do that click the Select Color button and either use a hex color value in the box or use the palette to select a color.
Widgets
Through this tab you can add widgets to the theme’s sidebars. The theme features ten sidebars, the blog, pages, two homepage sidebars, an e-shop sidebar, the pre-footer Instagram one and four footer sidebars.
Sidebar Colors
This tab will allow you to modify the colors of various sidebar elements to complete your custom color scheme.
Social Networks
Here you can fill in the URLs to your various social network profiles supported by the theme. You can display them in a sidebar by using the Theme – Social Icons widget.
Posts Options
Here you can toggle various aspects of the single post, like the appearance of categories, tags, date, comments, social sharing etc. You can also set the default single post layout and change the related posts section title.
Pages Options
Here you can toggle the display of the signature and social sharing buttons on pages.
Footer Options
Here you can toggle the credits text.
Static Front Page
Use this tab to make the Home page your static front page so you can take advantage of the homepage template we have created for you.
Other
In this tab we host the custom CSS panel which you can use to insert styles for elements not covered in the rest of the tabs. Also here you can set the Google Analytics ID to get statistics on your site.
Theme pages
The Home page
To utilize the front page layouts we have created for this theme you will need to create a page named Home and apply to it one of the available front page templates, these are:
- The Widgetized Homepage with Full screen Slider template which will offer you a full screen slider that adapts to the screen size, with all homepage widgets below,
- the Widgetized Homepage template which offers a slider with a fixed height and the same width as the rest of the content and
- the Widgetized Homepage with Full width Slider which will give you a front page with a full width slider with fixed height.
the template can be selected from the Page Attributes drop down.
The contact page
To create a contact page similar to the one found on the theme’s demo, you can create a new page, name it Contact and use the Contact Form 7 plugin to help you create a contact form, then paste the shortcode it provides in the page’s text editor, publish and you are done.
Widgets
Along with WordPress’s widgets we have created 4 custom ones. The Theme – Items and the Theme – Latest Posts ones will help you generate your front page layouts. More about them below.
You will find a small description in each widget detailing its usage.
How to use the latest posts widget
The Theme – Latest Posts widget will be the cornerstone on creating the various homepage layouts. It’s a highly versatile widget, let’s take a look at how to use it.
We start by adding a title to the widget, next we select a post category to display on it (leaving the option empty will display posts from all categories), below we can select whether we want our posts to appear at random (default is by date from newest to oldest) and how many posts we want to display on the widget. Finally we set the number of columns our items will be displayed on and select one of the 13 available layouts.
Excluding post categories from the widget
As mentioned above, if we don’t select a post category on the widget it will display posts from all categories. We can exclude some of them if we wish. In the example above we created a widget which pulls posts from the health category, now lets create another one, which displays posts from all categories apart from the health one.
as you can see it’s very easy, we just tick the box to exclude the category we want and we are done.
Suggested layouts for optimal appearance
While all posts appearance & column combinations will work, the once suggested below will provide you the best visual result.
TIP: These combinations work for the blog listing layout ( See layout options in the Customization section) and the Items widget.
Blog Page Layout: Right Sidebar
| Demo preview | Item appearance | Columns |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Column | Default | 1 |
| 2 Columns | Default | 2 |
| 2 Columns Fixed | Fixed | 2 |
| Horizontal left fixed | Horizontal left fixed | 1 |
| Horizontal right fixed | Horizontal right fixed | 1 |
| Horizontal fixed alternating | Horizontal fixed alternating | 1 |
| Media 2 columns | Media | 2 |
| 2 Columns no excerpt | No excerpt | 2 |
| 3 Columns no excerpt | No excerpt | 3 |
| 2 Columns plain | Plain | 2 |
| 2 Columns reveal | Reveal | 2 |
| 2 Columns vertical | Vertical | 2 |
Blog Page Layout: Left Sidebar
| Demo preview | Item appearance | Columns |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Column | Default | 1 |
| 2 Columns | Default | 2 |
| 2 Columns Fixed | Fixed | 2 |
| Horizontal left fixed | Horizontal left fixed | 1 |
| Horizontal right fixed | Horizontal right fixed | 1 |
| Horizontal fixed alternating | Horizontal fixed alternating | 1 |
| Media 2 columns | Media | 2 |
| 2 Columns no excerpt | No excerpt | 2 |
| 3 Columns no excerpt | No excerpt | 3 |
| 2 Columns plain | Plain | 2 |
| 2 Columns reveal | Reveal | 2 |
| 2 Columns vertical | Vertical | 2 |
Blog Page Layout: Fullwidth narrow
| Demo preview | Item appearance | Columns |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Column | Default | 1 |
| 2 Columns | Default | 2 |
| 2 Columns Fixed | Fixed | 2 |
| Horizontal left fixed | Horizontal left fixed | 1 |
| Horizontal right fixed | Horizontal right fixed | 1 |
| Horizontal fixed alternating | Horizontal fixed alternating | 1 |
| Media 2 columns | Media | 2 |
| 2 Columns no excerpt | No excerpt | 2 |
| 3 Columns no excerpt | No excerpt | 3 |
| 2 Columns plain | Plain | 2 |
| 2 Columns reveal | Reveal | 2 |
| 2 Columns vertical | Vertical | 2 |
Blog Page Layout: Full width wide
| Demo preview | Item appearance | Columns |
|---|---|---|
| Default 2 columns | Default | 2 |
| Default 3 columns | Default | 3 |
| Default 4 columns | Default | 4 |
| Fixed 3 columns | Fixed | 3 |
| Fixed 4 columns | Fixed | 4 |
| Media 2 columns | Media | 2 |
| Media 3 columns | Media | 3 |
| No excerpt 3 columns | No Excerpt | 3 |
| No excerpt 4 columns | No Excerpt | 4 |
| Plain 3 columns | Plain | 3 |
| Plain 4 columns | Plain | 4 |
| Reveal 3 columns | Reveal | 3 |
| Reveal 4 columns | Reveal | 4 |
| Vertical 3 columns | Vertical | 3 |
| Vertical 4 columns | Vertical | 4 |
Recreating the demo’s homepage layout
If you chose not to import the default widgets, but still want to recreate the homepage layout of the theme’s demo, let’s have a look on how you can achieve it. The homepage consists of the Slider area and the Homepage sidebar.
The Slider area
The slider can be configured under Customize > Front Page Carousel. The size of the slider depends on the template you have selected for the Home page.
The Homepage sidebar
Under Customize > Widgets you can access the homepage sidebar, let’s take a look at the widgets used on the theme’s demo:
- Theme – About Me which displays some information about the author
- Theme – Latest Posts displaying six items from a post category, in a three column layout with the reveal appearance setting.
- Instagram widget provided by the WP Instagram Widget plugin.
- Theme – Latest Posts displaying six items from all but one post categories in a three column layout with the vertical appearance setting.
- Theme – Items displaying three products in a three column layout with the default appearance setting.
- Text a text widget with a newsletter form and some text.
TIP: Info on how to use the latest posts widget can be found in the widgets section here.
How to use the page builder template
The theme comes bundled with a page builder template which allows you to use your favorite page builder plugin on it and create unique layouts very easily.
To use that template start by going to Pages > Add New. This will create a new page. Add a title to your page and select the Page builder template from the template drop down in the Page Attributes metabox.
That’s it. You can now start building your page using the page builder of your choice, once done publish it and check it out.
Next Steps
Still have questions or problems setting up your CSSIgniter Theme? We will be happy to help you out! Please visit our support Hub