Documentation for Vignette

About Vignette

Vignette media driven WordPress theme targeted at photographers. It allows you to display your work primarily by using the “Galleries” custom post type available. Also a “Testimonials” one is available to help you display critique on your work by your clients. The above act as standard WordPress posts or pages but each of them has extra fields or custom layout which differentiates them from the former.

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 the Vignette theme are:

• CI Thumb: 730×475 (General thumbnail size, used on listing pages and widgets)
• CI Blog Thumb: 730×390 (Used for thumbnails on your blog listing page)
• CI Fullwidth: 950×475 (used as a featured image on the fullwidth page template)
• CI Page Header: 1920×190 (background for your header, can be set under CSSIgniter Settings → Appearance Options)
• CI Thumb Uncropped: 730 pixels in width, height not limited.

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 an empty page.

Setting up your theme

1) Creating theme pages

Let’s start by adding pages you are going to need. Go to Pages > Add New and create the following pages:

“Home” this will serve as your homepage, assign to it the “Frontpage” template from the “Page attributes” panel. Upload a featured image and publish the page, have a look at the “Setting up your homepage” section below for more info on how to use the rest of the homepage template’s features.

“Blog” this will be your posts page. Just create it, no further action needed.

“Galleries Listing” this page will display your galleries. Apply the “Galleries Listing” template to the page and notice the “Gallery Listing Details” panel that appears. Here you can select the number of columns your gallery listing page will have and a base photo category (optional, only select if you want to create a listing page that displays one gallery category alone).

“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

To add new posts to your blog, go to Posts > add new, title your post, enter the content in the editor, upload a featured image by clicking “Set featured image” on the Featured Image panel, add a category and/or tag to the post, if you so desire, from the respective panels and publish the post by clicking “Publish”.

3) Adding Galleries

To create a new gallery item go to Galleries > Add New, set the gallery’s name as a title, enter some text if you wish in the content editor, set a featured image and proceed to the “Gallery Settings” section below.

Click the “Add Images” button to upload your photos (check the creating galleries section at the end of the document for more info on this). Once your photos are uploaded you can select either a “Grid Layout” or a “List Layout” for them.

you can also set a number of columns for the gallery page, three or four columns.

Finally you will notice a third layout option, the “Native Layout”

This option overrides the styling/functionality of the options above and you need to create a standard WordPress gallery to add your images. Info on creating standard WordPress galleries here. This option can be used along with the WordPress Jetpack plugin so you can use the Tiled Galleries add-on and the Jetpack Carousel

To install Jetpack go to Plugins > Add New, search for Jetpack and install it. Once you activate it you’ll get a “Jetpack” tab on your admin panel, right below “Dashboard”. Click it and activate “Carousel” and “Tiled Galleries”. (TIP: You need a free account on WordPress.com to make Tiled Galleries work)

4) Adding Testimonials

To create a new Testimonial, go to Testimonials > New Testimonial, set the author’s name as the title, and the testimonial’s text in the content box, finally, publish it. Testimonials can be used in any widgetized area you like by using the “CI Item” widget.

5) Setting up your Homepage

Set up the homepage header section

The header section of the homepage on Vignette can either featured a single image (the page’s featured image) or feature a video.
To add a video on the homepage’s section you will need to create three instances of your video, one in each popular web video format (mp4, webm and ogv) you can use this tool to help you convert your videos (or any other tool capable of outputting video in these formats). Once you have the three required files upload them to your WordPress installation and paste the link to each one in the corresponding box under the “Front page Details” section.

NOTICE: All three file formats are necessary to ensure cross-browser compatibility. The video header only works on desktop browsers, on mobile ones it is replaced by the homepage’s featured image, so make sure you add one. Homepage featured image should be at least 1920x1100px in size for best appearance.

In the “Front page Details” panel you can also set a title for the hero section and a button that links to a URL of your choice, just fill in the boxes below

Duplicate the demo’s layout

On the demo’s homepage we have a video on the header section, three CI Item widgets, with a gallery selected on each on the Homepage #1 sidebar. Following is a CI Item widget with a testimonial on the Homepage #2 sidebar. Next there are six CI Item widgets, with a gallery selected on each on the Homepage #3 sidebar. Finally we have a Text widget and the Socials Ignited widget on the Footer Widgets Column #1 and Footer Widgets Column #2 sidebars respectively.

6) Creating your menu

Now that your content is in place, you need to set up the menu. Go to Appearance > Menus create a menu, name it “main menu”, customize it by adding menu items to it and then go to “Manage Locations”, and set it to be your main menu.

(TIP, for more info on creating and managing menus, please read the WordPress Menu User Guide here)

7) 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 (4th box down).

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.

Additional Information

Creating Galleries

To create a gallery using our gallery management system follow these steps:

On the “Gallery Information” panel click the Add Images button.

To upload your images, drag & drop them in the Edit Gallery window which will pop-up, or select Add to Gallery in order to select already uploaded ones. Once you are done, click the Update Gallery button on the lower right.

Your “Gallery Information” panel will look like this

You can re-arrange the order of images by drag & drop.

If you wish to remove an image from the gallery, hover your mouse over it and click the X as shown below.

By checking the Randomize order box your gallery images will appear in random order which will change on every page refresh.

When done, publish the gallery item.

If you need to add images after the gallery’s creation just follow the same procedure.

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