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 additional stuff), 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.
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.
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 two menu locations. One on top (the primary bar menu) and one in the footer (the secondary menu). You can use both or only one 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.
There are two areas where custom menus can be put. The primary menu is the top menu bar and the secondary is the menu in the footer.
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 punchline which will be displayed right below the slider/leadarticle you also need to enter a text for the punchline of course.
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.
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 integrated into the theme. Just 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. 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. 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. 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 (if you don´t use the image slider), the featured articles (only the height because of the layout), the hompage bottom colums 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.
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.