Documentation for El Greco
About El Greco
El Greco is a travel guide theme for WordPress. It allows you to display your content via the standard WordPress posts you know and love. Each post has been customized to give you the ability to add a review score or a hot-word to highlight the post. More on these below.
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.
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.
After activation, you will be redirected to the CSSIgniter Settings panel (accessible from Appearance > CSSIgniter Settings) to start customizing your brand new theme.
Image Sizes
The recommended image sizes for El Greco are:
- Homepage slider: 945x570px
- Homepage slider background: 1920x750px
- Post thumbnail: 750x475px
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.
- CSSIgniter Shortcodes you can use our custom made shortcode plugin to help you create a variety of layouts and elements on your site. Instructions can be found here.
- Socials Ignited use this plugin to create a widget that links to all your social profiles. You can also customize it with your icons and add new social networks, a guide can be found here.
- Contact Form 7 use this plugin to create a contact form, then copy the shortcode it gives you and paste it in the contact page you created earlier.
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.
Setting up your theme
1) Creating theme pages
- “Home” this will serve as your homepage, assign to it either the “Frontpage” template from the “Page attributes” panel.
- “Blog” this will be your posts page. Just create it, no further action needed.
- “Contact” (optional) here you can place your contact form which you will create using the Contact Form 7 plugin.
(TIP, all page titles serve as examples, you can name your pages according to your needs.)
Once the pages are created, navigate to Settings > Reading and set the “Home” page to be your static frontpage and the “Blog” page as your posts page, as demonstrated in the image below.
2) Populating your blog
On El Greco posts are the primary way you’ll use to display your content. To add new posts to your blog, go to Posts > Add New and follow the steps below
Give a title to your post,
Place your text in the content editor,
Upload a featured image by clicking “Set featured image” on the Featured Image panel,
Add a category to the post, if you so desire, from the respective panels
From the Format panel on the right you can select the post format, if you select Standard you can go ahead and publish the post.
Next move to the Rating panel and either add a number or a featured word.
Posts can be added in the homepage’s slider, to do that you can use the Slider Details metabox.
Check the box, add a subtitle and select a secondary image or solid color for the slider’s background.
You are done, you can publish the post.
To create categories for your posts go to Posts > Categories and create some. Notice the Icon box just above the Add New Category, you can assign a FontAwesome icon to your categories which will appear when using the CI Categories widget, follow the instructions above the text box to set the icon.
3) Adding Slider items
To add items to your homepage’s slider go to Slideshow > new Slide, set a title for the slider item and upload a featured image (which will be the image displayed on the homepage). Next move to the Slider Details
panel, give the slider a subtitle, a custom link and change the ‘Learn More’ button text if you so desire, here you can also assign a secondary image or a solid color for the slider’s background. Finally, publish the slider item. Homepage slider behavior can be controlled under CSSIgniter settings > Homepage options.
4) Creating your menu
Now that your content is in place, you need to set up the menus. Go to Appearance > Menus and create two menus, one for the header and your main menu. Customize each one by adding menu items to it and then go to “Manage Locations”, set the menus on their respective positions and save.
(TIP, for more info on creating and managing menus, please read the WordPress Menu User Guide here)
5) Adding content to your Homepage
The homepage on El Greco consists of the slider and the Homepage widgetized area. You can access this area and add content to it in Appearance > Widgets.
Duplicate the demo’s layout
On the demo’s homepage we have a post set to appear on the slider and some widgets in the Homepage sidebar. These are five CI Category widgets displaying three posts from a particular category each in a three column layout.
6) Changing Footer text
The theme’s footer features an area for you to enter your copyright info, privacy policy etc. To change the text you need to go to CSSIgniter settings > Site options.
7) Custom Widgets
The theme features eight custom widgets, which can help you display additional information.
All widgets can be accessed from Appearance > Widgets. Below each widget you will find a small description explaining their functionality.
The Settings Panel
Last but not least, under Appearance > CSSIgniter settings, you can find our custom built settings panel. From here you can manipulate various aspects of your theme, including, but not limited to, changing your logo, setting a custom background, changing color scheme and applying custom styles via the custom CSS tab. All options feature a description so you instantly know their provided functionality.
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 in our support forums