Documentation for Doberman

Login to your WordPress admin panel. Go to Appearance > Themes. Click on the Add New button.

Click upload and Choose File. Select the doberman.zip located in the WORDPRESS folder and click Install.

Wait for the theme to upload and you will get a message that says “Theme installed successfully”. Click Activate and.. congratulations! You just installed the Doberman theme!

Next, follow the exact same procedure to install the child theme. Upload the doberman_child.zip, install it and activate it. This is very important if you plan on making any changes to the theme’s templates since it will help you keep these changes across updates. More info about child themes you can find here.

Notice: In order to setup the theme as seen on our preview you need to keep reading. Even If you are an experienced WordPress theme user do read this documentation in order to understand our approach on various things around the theme.

Image Sizes

The minimum recommended image sizes for Doberman are:

• Post thumbnail: 750x440px
• Full width images: 1140x480px
• Media layout thumbnail: 480x300px

Importing sample content manually

To get the sample content file go to the /wordpress/sample content/ folder of the zip file. Additionally you can click the link in the notice that will appear on your dashboard immediatelly after activating the theme.

or click here.
Extract the zip file you downloaded to get the sample content & widgets files.

Importing the sample content is easy. Go to Tools > Import and select the last option called WordPress.

If the Importer is not installed, a popup window will appear asking you to install it. Click the Install button on the right and click Activate Plugin & Run Importer

Click Browse, select the doberman.xml file you extracted earlier and click Upload file and import. It will ask you to import one or more authors. Just assign the posts from all of them to your existing user account by selecting it from the drop down menu. Check the Download and import file attachments. Click Submit.

NOTE 1: This will take a while. It could even take minutes because of importing all the placeholder images etc. So if you are out of coffee, go for a re-fill :)

NOTE 2: Demo Images are under copyright so you can’t use them.

NOTE 3: You need to set your permalinks at Settings > Options > “Post name”
option.

NOTE 4: If you get a SERVER TIME OUT you need to contact your hosting provider. It’s not a fault with the theme :) more info 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 doberman_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.

Setting up your theme

1) Populating your blog

To add new posts to your blog, go to Posts > add new and proceed to:

1. add a title to your post,
2. enter the content in the editor,
3. upload a featured image by clicking “Set featured image” on the Featured Image panel,
4. fill in a subtitle for your article and select whether you want its featured image to appear or not in the Article Details metabox,
5. and finally, add a category and/or tag to the post.

Once you are done click the Publish button to publish your post.

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 chagnes 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 you can toggle the appearance of the Add Post button,
configure the News Ticker which will appear below the menu bar,
and modify header colors using the built-in color picker.

Menus

Here you can create and assing menus to the theme. The theme features three menu locations, the main menu, the footer menu and the tags menu which will appear on both the header and the footer. Both the footer and tags menus do not support submenu items. 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, footer logo and site icon.

Layout Options

Here you can independently modify the blog layout and the layout of the rest of the theme’s archive pages. Additionally you can toggle the excerpt on listing pages, configure the length of the automatic excerpt and choose between numbered and older/newer pagination.

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.

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. These will appear on the header, footer automatically, you can also display them in the post/page sidebar by adding the Theme – Social Icons widget in the blog or page sidebar.

Posts Options

Here you can toggle various aspects of the single post, like the appearance of categories, tags, date, comments, social sharing etc. Also you can toggle and configure the trending and related posts sections.

Virality Options

This tabs allows you to fine-tune how post virality is calculated and displayed. For this to work make sure you have installed and activated the WordPress Popular Posts plugin as suggested.
Here you can select the Trending and Popular posts’ pages, change the icon text, select a post range and modify the order posts are displayed on.

Widgets

Through this tab you can add widgets to the theme’s sidebars. The theme features three sidebars, the Blog Sidebar which appears on all posts and post listings, the Page Sidebar which will be displayed on your pages and the Homepage sidebar which is available if you decide to use the widgetized homepage template.

Static Front Page

If you don’t wish to have your latest posts on the front page and wish to display static content using a normal page, or want to use the widgetized homepage template as your front page, you can do so here. Set the desired page as your static front page and save.

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. Here you can also set your Google analytics ID so you can get stats on your site’s visitors.

Theme pages

Widgetized Homepage

If you don’t want to have your all latest posts on the front page you can use the theme’s widgetized homepage by applying the Homepage Template on a page and setting that page to be your Static Front Page under Customize > Static Front Page.

Now you can use the theme’s Latest Posts to customize what is displayed on your site’s front page.

The Trending Page

This page will host your trending posts, set the Trending articles template to it and select it as your trending page under Customize > Virality Options.

The Popular Page

This page will host your popular posts, set the Popular articles template to it and select it as your popular page under Customize > Virality Options.

The contact page

For the contact page on the theme’s demo we used a page with the Default template applied to it and pasted in a contact form created with the Contact Form 7 plugin.

Widgets

Along with WordPress widgets we have created 2 custom ones.

Theme – Social Icons

This widget allows you to display links to your social profiles. All links can be configured under Customize > Social Networks.

Theme – Latest Posts

This highly configurable widget will help you built a custom front page for your site by allowing you to display your post categories the way you like. You can create widgets that display only a particular category, or one that exclude one or more categories. You can also select to display, latest, popular, trending or random posts, set the number of posts and if used on the homepage, select between different layouts.

Required Plugins

To utilize the theme fully you will need to install and activate some plugins. These are:

1. The WordPress Popular Posts plugin, this will handle the virality of posts. It will allow you to have popular and trending posts working on your site. Once activated go to Customize > Virality Options to configure it.
2. The Mashshare plugin. This one will provide the social sharing icons on your posts. Social sharing buttons can be toggled under Customize > Posts Options.
3. The DW Reactions plugin. This plugin gives you reaction buttons for your posts, similar to the ones found on Facebook. Reactions can be toggled under Customize > Posts Options.

Setting up Mashshare

After installing and activating the plugin you will be redirected to the plugin’s Visual settings tab. Under Location & Position set the Position to manual and tick the IMPORTANT: Load JS and CSS all over box.

then click the Save Changes button below.

Next you can go to the Customize tab and check the Round Shares and Animate Shares boxes.

then click the Save Changes button below.

Finally you will need to select the networks that will be available for sharing to. To do that go to Mashshare > Settings > Social Networks check the boxes for Facebook and Twitter and save. Here you can also select how many large buttons you want to have visible at once.

then click the Save Changes button below.

If you need more social networks you need to install the Mashshare Social Networks Add-on. Information on how to install the add-on can be found here.

The plugin’s documentation can be found here.

Setting up DW Reactions

Once the plugin is installed and activated go to Settings > Reactions. Here you will need to un-check all boxes on Positions so you don’t get duplicates. Once done, save the changes. This is the setup we have on the theme’s demo:

Post Virality

Popular/Trending posts functionality

Once you install and activate the WordPress popular posts plugin it will start tracking popular and trending posts for you. The only thing you have to do is go to Customize > Virality Options and configure the archive pages and time ranges you want to have.

Once done these icons will appear on the theme’s header:

Let’s see what they mean:

1. Trending: This icon will appear once a valid page with the trending template is selected. Trending icons are calculated based on the number of views they have.
2. Popular: This icon will appear once a valid page with the popular posts template is selected. Popular posts are calculated based on the number of comments each post has. More comments mean increased popularity.
3. Fresh: This icon appears once you have set a static front page for your site and have also set a page for your posts under Customize > Static Front page. Essentially this is your blog page displaying your latest posts.

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