You just purchased BranfordMagazine and want to make a quick start? Thanks to the themes optionspage and this installation guide, setting up BranfordMagazine for the first time is pretty easy. Here I explain it step-by-step.
Download, Unpack and Upload
After you downloaded and unpacked the zip-archive, you have a folder called PRiNZ_BranfordMagazine_pro. This folder contains two more folders, the readme files in English and German and a logo.
Now take only the folder branfordmagazine-pro not the whole PRiNZ_BranfordMagazine_pro folder and upload it to your WordPress themes folder which is normally located at /wp-content/themes in your servers WordPress installation. If you upload the whole unpacked PRiNZ_BranfordMagazine_pro folder you might encounter several issues (like “missing stylesheet”). You will need an FTP program to do this.
Do NOT use the WordPress theme installation functionality for that. The installation functionality tries to upload the whole zip-archive and will create errors.
Setup the Theme Options
Now go to your WordPress admin and open the themes options under Appearance > Branfordmagazine Options.
At this options page you need to make some settings to make the theme work properly. You might encounter issues if your settings are incorrect. So double-check your settings if you face any issue.
Colors
Select from many different color schemes. The “default” scheme ist the one you see in the themes demo. If you select one of the other color schemes (e.g “green”) and use the option to display a logo instead of blogname and description (see next paragraph) always the default logo will be displayed and this logo doesn´t change even if you change the color scheme. Assuming you will use your own logo anyway it wouldn´t make sense.
In addition to the color schemes you can change some colors for the background of the featured articles and the leadarticle. I will surely add some more color options in a next update.
Header and Footer
In this section you select if you want to use the blogname and description text that is defined in your WordPress settings or a graphical logo in the header of your site. Default is blogname/description and if you want to use a logo image you need to upload one by using the WordPress “Header” option under the Appearance menu.
The alternative Footer provides four additional widget areas that you can use to put additional content in four columns at the footer of your site. If this is switched off you will just see the regular footer with the credit links. The 4-column footer in the demo is the alternative footer.
Navigation Menus
The theme offers two menu locations in the top menu bar. You can use both or only one to display a menu for pages, categories etc. Be aware that you need to create a custom menu and assign it it to the location in the theme. First you need to check the box(es) and then you need to create a custom menu.
Since WordPress 3.0 there is a powerful functionality available called “Custom Menus”. You find this under Appearance > Menus. With this custom menus you can create very flexible menus, you can mix pages and categories, add external links and define your own order of menu items completely independent from the WordPress defaults. See also this screencast that explains the custom menu function in detail.
There are two areas (or locations) where custom menus can be put. The primary menu is the top menu and the secondary is the menubar right below the primary.
Homepage Layout Options – Leadarticle
The leadarticle is the most recent newsarticle displayed in the tabbed area of the homepage. You need to select the the category you want do show here from the dropdown menu. It makes sense to create for example a “news” category and use it for the leadarticles only. If there is no article assigned to this category, nothing can be displayed.
Customizing the Tabbed Section
Presumably you want to customize the tabbed section as well. Under “Homepage Tabbed Section” you can change tabs or add new tabs and enter text or HTML. You cannot use PHP Code here because that´s not allowed by WordPress for security reasons. If you need to use PHP code here you need to edit the code file directly.
Homepage Layout Options – Featured Articles
The featured articles are the articles (three by default) in the left column of the homepage. They are taken from one specific category, typicallly called “featured articles” (or whatever you like) which you have to setup first or you assign a category that already exists. Again you need to select the category from the dropdown and enter the number of post to show (default 3 posts). And remember: If there is no article assigned to this category, nothing can be displayed. If you use the same category for the leadarticle and the featured articles it might make sense to define an offset to the featured articles section. An offset of “1″ for example means that the articles start to display not with the first but with the second article. Makes sense if the first already is the leadarticle.
Homepage Layout Options – Homepage middle Column
In the middle column of the homepage all other categories that you define are displayed. Always the most recent article from the categories will be displayed. Enter the IDs of the categories separated by a comma (e.g. 3,5,7,8,9). You can also change the number of articles to dislay per category but I reccomend to leave the default (1).
There is a plugin that makes it easy to find the correct IDs
Images
Here you can define the dimensions (width and height in pixels) of the various images on the homepage and the archive pages. This works only if you use the TimThumb image resizer script.
You can also define if you want to use TimThumb or the default WordPress Post Thumbnail (featured image) function.
If you don´t use TimThumb and need to change image dimensions this plugin might become very handy.
And you can switch the prettyPhoto image lightbox effect on or off. The image size function is a very powerful feature that allows you to change the image dimensions whenever you like. Thanks to the TimThumb image script all images are croped and scaled “on the fly” and can be changed as often as you like. Imagehandling has never been so easy. The settings effect the images of the leadarticle, the featured articles , the hompage right colum (categories) and the archive (category overview) pages.
Be aware that you only have this great flexibility if you use TimThumb (tick the box to use it). If you don´t use it for some reason, you can use the bild-in WordPress post thumbnail / featured image function. If that´s your choice you need to set a featured image in every post you write. There is a very detailed tutorial about the WordPress featured image function written by Justin Tadlock here.
Setup the Sidebar
Here you can remove the newsblock and the “Stay informed” RSS Links. You can also define how many newsheadlines are displayed on the homepage sidebar. The newssection shows a number of headlines from the same category that you set as the leadarticle category. There is an offset of 1 which means that the list starts with article 2 from this category. If you have only one article in this category it will show this article as the leadarticle but no other article will appear in the list of news headlines. If you have two articles in this category the first one (most recent) will be the leadarticle and the next (older one) will appear in the list in the sidebar.
Anything else can be setup with regular or the custom widgets that are included with the theme.
Setup the 3-colum Page Template
The 3-column page is a special template to display content from three different categories in a very prominent way. Take a look at the demo and see how it can look like. All relevant settings can be made here. See the tutorial to this template for more details.
Custom Scripts
Here you can enter custom scripts to the header and footer like Goolge Analytics or other Javascripts. And you can use custom CSS for simple editing of fonts, colors etc.
Troubleshooting
Installation Error
Do NOT use the WordPress theme installation functionality to install your theme. Always use FTP to transfer the theme files to your server. The installation functionality tries to upload the whole zip-archive and will create errors.
No Categories
Make sure you use correct category IDs otherwise you will see “no categories” where you expect the name of a category (e.g featured articles)
How to remove the double “Continue reading…” below the Leadarticle
If you encounter a “Continue reading…” link twice below your leadarticle in the tabbed section and want to get rid of one of them just tick the box in the themes options “Homapage Tabbed Section”
Images do not show up
If you have issues displaying the image thumbnails on the homepage have a look at this tutorial that shows you how to use images. Another tutorial which can be found here, deals with potential issues with the image handling script. Don´t worry: there is a solution in 99,9% of all cases.
No articles appear
The reason why no articles appear for example in the lead article area is because you have no articles in that category. Once you write an article it will apear. So always make sure your categories have articles.
It´s quite a good helper to write e.g. 3 testarticles and assign them to each category. That gives you a good overview how it works.