After you purchased SpiegelMagazine you can´t wait to get your site up an running?! With the themes optionspage, setting up SpiegelMagazine for the first time is as easy as 1, 2, 3. This is a step-by-step installation guide.
Download, Unpack and Upload
After you downloaded and unpacked the zip-archive, you have a folder called
PRiNZ_SpiegelMagazine_pro. This folder contains two more folders, the readme files in English and German and a logo.
Now take only the folder “spiegelmagazine-pro” not the whole PRiNZ_SpiegelMagazine_profolder 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_SpiegelMagazine_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 > SpiegelMagazine Options.
At this options page you need to make some settings to make the theme work properly. These settings are crucial. The theme works, there are no known bugs or major issues. If something doesn´t work double check if your settings are correct. In most cases it´s a users failure and not a themes issue. 
Colors
Select from many different color schemes. The “Default (Green-Orange)” scheme ist the one you see in the themes demo. If you select one of the other color schemes (e.g “Grey”) 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.
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 orange 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.
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 and see details below.
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 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 940×350 pixels (the image above shows values from another theme). 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 the 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.
Setup the Leadarticle (if you don´t use a Slider)
The leadarticle can be used instead of the image slider. It provides a headline an image and some text. You should create a specific category for the leadarticle but you don´t have to. Just select the category from the dropdown select-menu. The theme will then display always the latest article from this category. When you write a post in this category you must use the “more” tag or fuction when you write a post. It will not produce an automatic excerpt.
Featured Articles
The featured articles are the three articles that apear below the image slider or leadarticle on the homepage. They are taken from one specific category you may call “featured articles” or whatever you want. If this category already exists, you can select it from the dropdown selection menu. And remember: If there is no article assigned to this category, nothing can be displayed.
There is an alternative and very flexible method to display your stuff in this featured area. Instead of using a specific category to display the three most recent posts from this category you can use the fantastic featured page or featured post widgets instead. Go to the Widgets area under Appearance and you will find three widget areas for the homepage called “Homepage Left”, “-Middle” and “-Right”. Here you can put the featured widgets. They have various options to play with. Just try it.
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 seperated by commas and the number of post taken from each category. I reccommend one post per category.
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 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 (it´s the same for all PRiNZ Pro Themes) 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. If you want to make bigger changes to the styles you should use a child theme instead.
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.