My recent theme “Consultant” is still brandnew but things are working quite well at the moment and so I´m happy to show you a little preview of my next great responsive theme called “Agency”.

Again this one will be very feature rich and optimised to work brilliant on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets as well as on regular desktop computers. So no matter what device your audience is using to visit your site, you can always provide the best possible user experience.

Alongside with many other great features the theme comes with two more additional page templates for portfolio or product pages, a nice jQuery powered full responsive portfolio carousel on the homepage and 20+ fantastic build-in backgrounds by subtle patterns.

Theme Features

• Outstanding and fully mobile responsive business layout with  different layout options
• Unlimited colors for your individual colorscheme
• 20+ fantastic build-in backgrounds  (unlimited custom backgrounds possible)
• Several Google Web Fonts to choose from
• Smooth and elegant SuperFish dropdown menu
• Responsive FlexSlider for content and images included
• Integrated Nivo image slider (WordPress plugin) with lots of functionality
• WP-Cycle slider support
• jQuery powered portfolio or product “carousel”
• PRiNZ Shortcode Collection plugin included
• Auto prettyPhoto integration
• Image handling and resizing via the WordPress post thumbnail function (no TimThumb)
• 960 grid system
• Options page for easy setup without coding
• WordPress 3.0 features like custom headers, backgrounds and menus
• 5 additional custom page templates (Blog, 3x Portfolio variations and Fullwidth)
• 14 widgetized areas
• PRiNZ Widget Factory plugin provides 11 custom widgets
• Sample Child theme for update safe customization included
• Fully localized front- and backend. Default language English. German language file included.
• W3C valid code works in all modern browsers
• Full responsive mobile support: Works on mobile devices like iPhone and iPad

The new Theme will be released by the end of May. So stay connected!

jQuery powered portfolio carousel

Portfolio Medium

iPad Landscape view - Click to enlarge

Happy to announce the release of my latest WordPress Theme called “Consultant”. It´s a  highly customizable WordPress business theme for companies, consultants and freelancers alike. Its mobile responsive design makes it work perfect on all kind of devices such as desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones.

Until May 31st the theme is on sale and you save more than 30% on the regular price. Check out the full feature list, take it for a test drive and purchase the theme over at my themes shop.

To get started with “Consultant” to build your website you must do some initial settings. The theme provides a great variety of fantastic options you can choose from. Using these options makes it very easy to setup a unique WordPress powered website.

Download, Unpack and Upload

After you downloaded and unpacked the zip-archive, you have a folder called PRiNZ_Consultant. This folder contains two more folders (the theme and sample child theme), the readme files in English and German and a logo.

Now take only the folder called ” consultant” (and the child theme folder if you want ot use it) not the whole PRiNZ_Consultant folder and upload it to your WordPress themes directory which is normally located at /wp-content/themes in your servers WordPress installation. If you upload the whole unpacked PRiNZ_Consultant folder you might encounter several issues (like “missing stylesheet”). You  need an FTP program to do this. We will talk about the child themes folder later in this article.

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 > Consultant 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. Initially the theme has already some default settings you can use if you want to. This is also the place where you can significantly influence the look and feel of them theme. You can change a lot without changing a single line of code. But if you want to customize more I recommend to use a child theme to change things in an update safe way. Read more about child themes at the end of this installation guide.

Plugins

Here you find a list of required (or at least highly reccommended) plugins and plugins I can reccommend because they help to work with the theme and build your website. Simply download them and install them as usual (follow their specific instructions where appropriate).

Basic Layout

Here you decide if you want to use the responsive layout. The responsive layout means the layout “responds” to the device the site is viewed with. It changes depending if a visitor looks at your site with a regular PC, a tablet comouter (sich as the iPad) or a smartphone (e.g. iPhone). This ist the reccomended option because it allows users with smaller devices to get a good user experience when visiting your site. The theme basically works on mobile devices also if you are not using the responsive layout but it works better with the responsive layout.

You can also check the “boxed” option if you want the whole layout to be framed in a “box”. Try it and see the difference. That only  has an effekt on a regular screen because mobilde devices are too small to see this effect. And you can place the sidebar on the inner pages (homepage doesn´t have a a sidebar) to the right (default) or to the left.

Fonts

The theme uses Google Webfonts for several headlines and the “text-logo” (if you don´t use an image logo). Here you can select the font that will be used for those headlines.

Colors

One of the great things of the Consultant WordPress theme is the “unlimited” color-handling. You can select colors (using hex codes like #FFFFFF for white, or #000000 for black) for many areas such as the header background, links, headlines etc. Combined with the default WordPress custom background (color) function you can easily set your preferred colors and make the theme very unique without beeing limited by pre-defined color schemes and without touching one single line of CSS code. Just play around with it. It´s fun.

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. In some rare cases the headerimage or logo isn´t aligned correctly. If you see your image looking strange apply the “Logo Fix”.

Here you also decide if you want to use the Headerbar (looks a bit like the WordPress adminbar) and you can set the background structure of the bigger header area.

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 dark 4-column footer in the demo is the alternative footer.

The footer section changes from four to two and one column in the responsive layout depending on the device the site is viewed with (e.g. two columns on an iPad and one column on an iPhone). Make sure the content of the four columns is more or less of the same height to ensure proper alignment on mobile devices. This also looks better on regular desktop screens.

Navigation Menus

The theme offers one  menu location for the main navigation menu bar to the right of the logoarea. You can use it to display a menu for pages, categories etc. Be aware that you first need to create a custom menu and assign it it to the location in the theme.

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.

You can use additional menus by using the custom menu widget (a default widget in WordPress) e.g. in the regular footer, the headerbar or your sidebar if you like. If you use a menu in the headerbar or the footer you should only use simple menus with no subpages or subcategories because that will not fit well into the layout. These positions are good for not so important menu links like “About”, “Contact”, “Imprint” etc.

Homepage Layout Options

The homepage layout options allow you to switch on or off almost any area on the homepage. If you don´t need it, switch it off. You can play around with it to see the effect of ticking or unticking the checkboxes. If you decide to use the actionbar which will be displayed right below the slider/leadarticle you also need to enter a text for the punchline (Actionbar Text) and maybe a text and link for the call to action button.

Click to open full overview

Leadarticle and Image-Slider

First you need to decide if you want to use a slider, an article from a specific category with a headline, text and image or no slider at all (that removes the enire area). You can select between three sliders (FlexSlider, WP-Cycle and Nivo).

FlexSlider: The best option is to use the FlexSlider because it´s the only real responsive slider. Any other slider will not work very well with the responsive layout on a mobile device. If you don´t use the responsive design you can use any of the sliders.

Be aware that the Nivo Slider and the WP-Cycle Plugin are NOT made to work properly with the responsive Layout.

You can change the settings for the FlexSlider. The most important is to decide if you  want to use post or pages for the slider. If you use posts you need to select the categoriy where the content is coming from (or the last posts from all categories are shown). It´s always the featured image (see “images” section below), the excerpt and the title of the post that you will see in the slider. If you decide to use specific pages for the slider instead of poast you need to check the box that you find in the edit page panel for every page. Checking the box “tells” the theme to add this particular page to the FlexSlider. Pretty easy, right?! No playing around with cryptic custom fields. Just tick the box and your page belongs to the slider. I guess the other options are self explaining and you can play with them to find the result that you like the most.

Nivo Slider: If you go for Nivo Slider  you need to install the plugin which you can download from the themes optionspage. This plugin is huge and has many functionalities. After you have installed the plugin (like any other WordPress plugin) find a “Nivo Slider” menu item in your WordPress admin. Here you need to make several settings. Check out this Screencast that explains the Nivo Slider plugin in detail.

WP-Cycle: If you need a very simple image slider you can also use WP-Cycle. You need to download the plugin at the WordPress plugin repository and install it. Then you find a sub-menu item under the “Media” menu item of your WordPress admin.

Leadarticle: You can also decide not to use a slider but static content (headline, text, featured image) from a category (maybe called “Leadarticle”). Select the category here.

Any category selection expects that this category already exists. Otherwise it will not be in the list.

Home Middle Section – Featured Area

There are no specific settings on the options page for the 3-column section that comes  below the action bar and image slider. This is a widget area and you need to use widgets to display content here. The best way is to use the custom “Featured Page” and “Featured Post” widgets that are part of the PRiNZ Widget Factory plugin that you can download from the “Plugins” section on top of the themes options page. Just install and activate that plugin and then go to Appearance > Widgets and play around with the widgets.

Homepage bottom Columns

In the lower area of the homepage two columns (left, right) is also a widgetized area. It works just like any widgetized area. Aganin you can use the fantastic featured page or featured post widgets instead (from the PRiNZ Widget Factory see above). Go to the Widgets area under Appearance and you will find two widget areas for the homepage called “Homepage Bottom Left” and “Homepage Bottom Right”. Here you can put the featured widgets. They have various options to play with. Just try it.

Images

Here you can define the dimensions (width and height in pixels) of the various images on the homepage and the archive pages if you want to change the default sizes.

Here you can also switch the prettyPhoto image lightbox effect on or off. You might not need it if you use another lightbox plugin like Fancybox.

The image size function is a very powerful feature that allows you to change the image dimensions basically whenever you like. But be aware that you need to re-generate the thumbnails after you have changed sizes for the changes to take effect. The settings effect the images of the leadarticle, the featured articles , the hompage right colum (categories) and the archive (category overview) pages.

If you need to change image dimensions this plugin might become very handy.

You need to set a featured image in every post you write which will be used as the thumbnail. There is a very detailed tutorial about the WordPress featured image function written by Justin Tadlock here.

Portfolio Page and Blog Page

The portfolio page and the blog page are page templates that can be assigned to a page and display specific content. The portfolio page can be used to show some of your recent work, or clients. The blog page is obviously a page that you can use as your companies blog on your website.

For both pages you need to define the categories. The portfolio page requires just one category (maybe you like to call it “Portfolio” or “Clients”). The blog page can display one or more categories in a regular chronological order.

If you want to use one of those templates create a page (not a category or post) and assign the template to this page. You don´t need to enter any content (But you can if you want to write an short introduction for example). The regular content will be taken from the categories that you set.

The portfolio page will display the images and headlines of the posts of the category that you use for your portfolio. Let me give you an example how I did in on the demo page. Each of the portfolio items you see is an article (a post) within the category called “portfolio”. The portfolio page template takes the post from here and displays the image and the title of the post on the portfolio page. When you click on an image it will open in larger size using the prettyPhoto lightbox effect. Pretty nice and very easy to do.

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. If you want to make bigger changes to the styles you should use a child theme instead.

Using a Child Theme to customize your Theme

As you see you can make a lot of customizations without touching the code of the themes template files or even the CSS files. But in some cases you might want tocustomize the theme even more. If you do that by editing themes files all your changes will get lost in case of an update of the theme. A themes update doesn´t work like an update of WordPress. You never change WordPress core files, right? At least that´s not a good idea. If you want to change your theme but stay safe in case of an update this is where child themes come into play. Read about child themes at the WordPress codex or take a look at this tutorial I wrote to explain the what and why of child themes. There is a very basic sample child theme included into Incorporated that you can use as a starting point.

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 as explained in the beginning of this article. The installation functionality tries to upload the whole zip-archive and will create errors.

No articles appear

The reason why no articles appear for example in the featured 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

Need more Support?

Got to the support forum to get more support and additional information. Read the forum guidelines before you start using the forum.

Further Readings and Tutorials

• Watch the Screencasts
• More Tutorials
• FAQ

Consultant is mobile responsive and a highly customizable WordPress business theme for  companies, consultants  and freelancers alike. It comes with some great features focused on individual setup options and full mobile device support via a fully responsive layout.

Unlimited colors, Google Web Fonts, image sliders or static leadarticle and various layout options are just some of the great features of “Consultant”. It also includes a sample child theme you can use for even more customization in an update safe way. And as all PRiNZ themes it comes with the new PRiNZ Shortcode Collection  and the PRiNZ Widget Factory plugin included.

Theme Features

• Outstanding and fully mobile responsive business layout with many different layout options
• Unlimited colors for your individual colorscheme
• Several Google Web Fonts to choose from
• Smooth and elegant SuperFish dropdown menu
• Responsive FlexSlider for content and images included
• Integrated Nivo image slider (WordPress plugin) with lots of functionality
• WP-Cycle slider support
• PRiNZ Shortcode Collection plugin included
• Auto prettyPhoto integration
• Image handling and resizing via the WordPress post thumbnail function (no TimThumb)
• 960 grid system
• Options page for easy setup without coding
• WordPress 3.0 features like custom headers, backgrounds and menus
• 3 additional custom page templates (Blog, Portfolio and Fullwidth)
• 14 widgetized areas
• PRiNZ Widget Factory plugin provides 11 custom widgets
• Sample Child theme for update safe customization included
• Fully localized front- and backend. Default language English. German language file included.
• W3C valid code works in all modern browsers
• Full responsive mobile support: Works on mobile devices like iPhone and iPad

Demo, Support and Purchase

Demo Support Forum Tutorials

• Sale!

  Consultant

  € 39,90 € 29,90 incl. 19% VAT

  Add to cart

Multisite

The theme was not build to be used with the multisite (former WordPress MU) feature. Although it might work on a multisite install it is not tested on multisite.

Installation

Please read the readme.html file contained in the downloaded zip-archive before you start.

Change Log

Version 0.9.1 BETA (released 02.05.2012)

Initial release of the public beta version.

I have another great business theme in the works, and I am excited to give everyone a sneak peek today. It´s called “Consultant” and although there not much to see yet I plan to release it by the end of next week.

Theme Features

• Outstanding business layout with “boxed” or “streched” layout
• Unlimited colors for your individual colorscheme
• Several Google Web Fonts to choose from
• Smooth and elegant SuperFish dropdown menu
• Four different homepage options for sliders or a static lead article
• Integrated jQuery content slider for posts or pages with text and image
• Integrated Nivo image slider (WordPress plugin) with lots of functionality
• WP-Cycle slider support
• PRiNZ Shortcode Collection plugin included
• Auto prettyPhoto integration
• Image handling and resizing via the WordPress post thumbnail function (no TimThumb)
• 960 grid system
• Options page for easy setup without coding
• WordPress 3.0 features like custom headers, backgrounds and menus
• 3 additional custom page templates (Blog, Portfolio and Fullwidth)
• 13 widgetized areas
• PRiNZ Widget Factory plugin provides 11 custom widgets
• Sample Child theme for update safe customization included
• Fully localized front- and backend. Default language English. German language file included.
• W3C valid code works in all modern browsers
• Mobile device ready: Works on mobile devices like iPhone and iPad

And of course – as all PRiNZ themes – it´s ready for upcoming WordPress 3.4

Happy to announce the first update for my latest theme “Incorporated“. Version 1.0 has a lot of new features and several enhancements under the hood. I also introduce the brand new PRiNZ Widget Factory plugin which provides 11 custom widgets that have been created especially to be used in DER PRiNZ WordPress themes. As usual the update is free for existing customers and you can download it from the download section of the support forum or visit the shop to purchase this great theme.

Incorporated has now more color options. It has a new small additional headerbar (a bit like the WordPress admin bar) which comes with two widget areas that you can use to put additional information, a menu, or social icons. By the way. Social icons are included in the new PRiNZ Widget Factory which I will explain later. The former punchline now became an action bar where you can put a powerful punchline and a call to action button to grab your users attention.

The regular small footer also got a widget area and I removed the footer menu. But wait, you still can add a footer menu simply by using the WordPress default Custom Menu Widget.  I´m always trying to use default WordPress functionality for specific things because it´s more flexible and I feel it doesn´t make sense to create things that already exist. That applies for the logo, the menus, the page background and also for the thumbnail images.

Bye bye TimThumb

In the former version you had the choice to use either the default WordPress Post Thumbnail (Featured Image) function or the well known TimThumb image resizer script. Well as you might know TimThumb – despite its great functionality – was a security risk a couple of times in the past and developers already started to create plugins to narrow that risk. I used TimThumb since the early days of my themes but now I felt it´s time to say good bye to an old fellow. So I removed TimThumb completely from “Incorporated” and left just the WordPress Post Thumbnail way of dealing with thumbnails. It´s safer, it´s simpler and you have more control over the images you use. And of course it´s again a core WP functionality and not another third party piece of code.

Welcome PRiNZ Widget Factory

“Incorporated” as well as any other PRiNZ themes already had several custom widgets intergrated. This was a part of the themes I haven´t touched for a long time and some things required a little makeover. So I asked my collegue Ralf Albert again to create a collection of widgets and pack them right into a plugin. Ralf already created the PRiNZ Shortcode Collection plugin which is part of all of my themes since January 2012. The result is just great. Eleven (11) custom widgets that you can use in you theme to display featured pages, -posts, -categories, social icons, tweets, newsletterforms, contact info etc. I´m very proud especially of the featured pages, -posts, -categories widgets and the social icons widget. They come with a lot of functionality and custom settings and it´s fantastic what you can do with them.

I will update the installation guide as soon as possible and  I guess I will create a screenscast that shows the power of the new Widget Factory. So make sure you stay tuned and have fun with the new version of the “Incorporated” WordPress theme.

Last Update: 03.04.2012

Before you get started with “Incorporated” to setup your website you must do some initial settings. The theme provides many different options you can choose from. Using these options makes it very easy to setup a unique WordPress powered website.

Download, Unpack and Upload

After you downloaded and unpacked the zip-archive, you have a folder called PRiNZ_Incorporated. This folder contains three more folders (the theme, a sample child theme and – depending on the version – additional stuff. The “Stuff” folder doesn´t exist in version 1.0 and later), the readme files in English and German and a logo.

Now take only the folder called ” incorporated” not the whole PRiNZ_Incorporated folder and upload it to your WordPress themes directory which is normally located at /wp-content/themes in your servers WordPress installation. If you upload the whole unpacked PRiNZ_Incorporated folder you might encounter several issues (like “missing stylesheet”). You  need an FTP program to do this. We will talk about the child themes folder later in this article.

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 > Incorporated 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. Initially the theme has already some default settings you can use if you want to. This is also the place where you can significantly influence the look and feel of them theme. You can change a lot without changing a single line of code. But if you want to customize more I recommend to use a child theme to change things in an update safe way. Read more about child themes at the end of this installation guide.

Plugins

Here you find a list of required (or at least highly reccommended) plugins and plugins I can reccommend because they help to work with the theme and build your website. Simply download them and install them as usual (follow their specific instructions where appropriate).

Basic Layout

Here you simply decide if you want to place the sidebar on the inner pages (homepage doesn´t have a a sidebar) to the right (default) or to the left.

Fonts

The theme uses Google Webfonts for several headlines and the “text-logo” (if you don´t use an image logo). Here you can select the font that will be used for those headlines.

Colors

One of the great things of the Incorporated WordPress theme is the “unlimited” color-handling. You can select colors (using hex codes like #FFFFFF for white, or #000000 for black) for many areas such as the header background, links, headlines etc. Combined with the default WordPress custom background (color) function you can easily set your preferred colors and make the theme very unique without beeing limited by pre-defined color schemes and without touching one single line of CSS code. Just play around with it. It´s fun.

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. In some rare cases the headerimage or logo isn´t aligned correctly. If you see your image looking strange apply the “Logo Fix”.

Here you also decide if you want to use the Headerbar (looks a bit like the WordPress adminbar) and you can set the background structure of the bigger header area.

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 grey 4-column footer in the demo is the alternative footer.

Navigation Menus

The theme offers one  menu location for the main navigation menu bar. You can use it to display a menu for pages, categories etc. Be aware that you first need to create a custom menu and assign it it to the location in the theme.

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.

You can use additional menus by using the custom menu widget (a default widget in WordPress) e.g. in the regular footer, the headerbar or your sidebar if you like. If you use a menu in the headerbar or the footer you should only use simple menus with no subpages or subcategories because that will not fit well into the layout. These positions are good for not so important menu links like “About”, “Contact”, “Imprint” etc.

Click to open full overview

Homepage Layout Options

The homepage layout options allow you to switch on or off almost any area on the homepage. If you don´t need it, switch it off. You can play around with it to see the effect of ticking or unticking the checkboxes. If you decide to use the actionbar which will be displayed right below the slider/leadarticle you also need to enter a text for the punchline (Actionbar Text) and maybe a text and link for the call to action button.

Leadarticle and Image-Slider

First you need to decide if you want to use a slider or if you want to use an article from a specific category with a headline, text and image. You can select between two sliders (WP-Cycle and Nivo).

If you go for Nivo Slider (which is very nice) you need to install the plugin which is located in the themes download folder unter /Stuff/Plugins. This plugin is huge and has many functionalities. After you have installed the plugin (like any other WordPress plugin) find a “Nivo Slider” menu item in your WordPress admin. Here you need to make several settings (details below).

If you need a very simple image slider you can also use WP-Cycle. You need to download the plugin at the WordPress plugin repository and install it. Then you find a sub-menu item under the “Media” menu item of your WordPress admin.

You can also decide not to use a slider at all. Instead you can use static content (headline, text, featured image) from a category (maybe called “Leadarticle”). Select the category here.

Any category selection expects that this category already exists. Otherwise it will not be in the list.

Basic setup of the Nivo Slider

If you use the Nivo slider you first need to set up a slider for the homepage. You can setup more than one sliders and use them in pages and articles as well by using shortcodes. This plugin is very feature rich and works perfect with the Incorporated theme. For detailed information about the Nivo slider WordPress plugin see the Nivo slider website or checkout the scrreencast.

When you enter the Nivo slider settings you need to add a new slider if no one exists. It´s a bit like adding a new WordPress post. You need to enter a name for your slider (for identification) and make some additional settings. You can choose if you want to just show images or images from posts from a specific category. If you choose “category” as the image source you need to have a category for that purpose that has posts and those posts need to have featured images. Sounds complicated but it isn´t. If you decide for the “manual” setting you can upload images directly to the slider. You can order them later by drag&drop.

Click to open full overview

The next two settings are very important. Set the slider size to 980×400 pixels. You can change the height but you shouldn´t change the width of the slider. The image must be ate least of that size. Larger images will be resized and cropped. Smaller image will simply be too small. Then set the slider theme to “none”. This will make sure the slider style that is build into Incorporated theme will be used. All other settings are totally up to you. Try them and use whatever you prefer or leave them as they are.

When you´re finished save the slider. Below the “Save” button (top right) you will find a box called “Using this Slider”. This box contains the required shortcode. Copy this code (for example [ nivoslider slug="default" ]) and go back to the themes options page. Now paste the shortcode into the “Nivo Slider Shortcode” field.

Home Middle Section

There are no specific settings on the options page for the 3-column section that comes right below the image slider. This is a widget area and you need to use widgets to display content here. The best way is to use the custom “Featured Page” and “Featured Post” widgets that are part of the PRiNZ Widget Factory plugin that you can download from the “Plugins” section on top of the themes options page. Just install and activate that plugin and then go to Appearance > Widgets and play around with the widgets.

Setup the Homepage bottom Columns

In the lower area of the homepage two columns (left, right) with different categories are displayed. Here you can define which ones. In every column you can define as many different categories and number of posts per category as you like. Just enter the IDs of the categories separated by commas and the number of post taken from each category. I reccommend one post per category.

There is an alternative and very flexible method to display your stuff in this area also. Instead of using a category to display the most recent posts from each category you can use the fantastic featured page or featured post widgets instead (from the PRiNZ Widget Factory see above). Go to the Widgets area under Appearance and you will find two widget areas for the homepage called “Homepage Bottom Left” and “Homepage Bottom Right”. Here you can put the featured widgets. They have various options to play with. Just try it.

Images

Here you can define the dimensions (width and height in pixels) of the various images on the homepage and the archive pages if you want to change the default sizes.

You can also define if you want to use TimThumb (only themes versions prior to 1.0) or the default WordPress Post Thumbnail (featured image) function.

Here you can also switch the prettyPhoto image lightbox effect on or off. You might not need it if you use another lightbox plugin like Fancybox.

The image size function is a very powerful feature that allows you to change the image dimensions basically whenever you like. But be aware that you need to re-generate the thumbnails after you have changed sizes for the changes to take effect. The settings effect the images of the leadarticle, the featured articles , the hompage right colum (categories) and the archive (category overview) pages.

If you don´t use TimThumb (which was removed in themes version 1.0) and need to change image dimensions this plugin might become very handy.

You need to set a featured image in every post you write which will be used as the thumbnail. There is a very detailed tutorial about the WordPress featured image function written by Justin Tadlock here.

Portfolio Page and Blog Page

The portfolio page and the blog page are page templates that can be assigned to a page and display specific content. The portfolio page can be used to show some of your recent work, or clients. The blog page is obviously a page that you can use as your companies blog on your website.

For both pages you need to define the categories. The portfolio page requires just one category (maybe you like to call it “Portfolio” or “Clients”). The blog page can display one or more categories in a regular chronological order.

If you want to use one of those templates create a page (not a category or post) and assign the template to this page. You don´t need to enter any content (But you can if you want to write an short introduction for example). The regular content will be taken from the categories that you set.

The portfolio page will display the images and headlines of the posts of the category that you use for your portfolio. Let me give you an example how I did in on the demo page. Each of the portfolio items you see is an article (a post) within the category called “portfolio”. The portfolio page template takes the post from here and displays the image and the title of the post on the portfolio page. When you click on an image it will open in larger size using the prettyPhoto lightbox effect. Pretty nice and very easy to do.

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. If you want to make bigger changes to the styles you should use a child theme instead.

Using a Child Theme to customize your Theme

As you see you can make a lot of customizations without touching the code of the themes template files or even the CSS files. But in some cases you might want tocustomize the theme even more. If you do that by editing themes files all your changes will get lost in case of an update of the theme. A themes update doesn´t work like an update of WordPress. You never change WordPress core files, right? At least that´s not a good idea. If you want to change your theme but stay safe in case of an update this is where child themes come into play. Read about child themes at the WordPress codex or take a look at this tutorial I wrote to explain the what and why of child themes. There is a very basic sample child theme included into Incorporated that you can use as a starting point.

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 as explained in the beginning of this article. 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 homepage bottom column articles)

Image Thumbnails 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 featured 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.

Nivo Slider Issue

If you get error messages like

Error: File doesn't exist: /.../html/wp-content/uploads/2011/12//image1.jpg

from the Nivo Slider then you are victim of a very rare problem with some hosters. The guys at the Nivo Slider forum (the guys who created the plugin) are working on it and I will add a solution as soon as it is available. If you can´t get it working I recommend to use the WP-Cycle slider.

Need more Support?

Got to the support forum to get more support and additional information. Read the forum guidelines before you start using the forum.

Further Readings and Tutorials

• Watch the Screencasts
• More Tutorials
• FAQ

It´s Friday and it´s time to provide some freebies again. I have almost finished the new Version of the “Incorporated” WordPress theme which will be released soon (better stay tuned). One of the new functions I added is a selection of different subtle background patterns that you can use in the header area. Just a few but they are quite nice I guess. You can combine them with the background color and create a very nice and individual header section.

I thought it might be a good idea to provide those patterns to the community as a freebie. This download comes with a layered Photoshop file that includes all five patterns (you can see them all in the post image above). They are transparent and you can use them together with any background color you like. Go create it´s 100% free to use!

Download this Freebie

As of now you can take a look at the new showcase section here at DER PRiNZ and get some inspiration from the work of others. It features websites that have been build upon themes from DER PRiNZ by satisfied customers.

If you build a website based on BranfordMagazine or any other PRiNZ WordPress theme and like to present it to the public, just send me a message. Please accept that I cannot publish every submitted website.

• Watch the Showcase
• Browse Themes

You might have recognized it or not but since a few days the new support forum is available. Why did I launch a new forum? Well that was not planned to be honest. It became necessary because my old forum crashed after an update and it appeared to get very complicated to bring it back to life.

For a few years I was very happy with a seamless integration of the support forum right into my WordPress site by using the SimplePress forum plugin. It´s still a great plugin but in my particular case there were several conflicts which I wasn´t able (and at the end willing) to solve.

So I decided to go for a completely other solution and installed the Simple Machines Forum software on a subdomain on my webserver. I should have done that much earlier because a real forum software has lots of advantages against a plugin (no matter how good it is). It´s more flexible, has more features to offer, provides a better permission management and much more. Especially the way it works with displaying code and attachments (e.g images) in post is worth using it. It also works much better on mobile devices.

The only disadvantage is that it was not possible to transfer the old posts and users into the new forum. So even if you had an account for the old forum you need to register a new account for the new forum. But that´s easy as 1, 2, 3…