Documentation
Community Innovation is a clean, customizable CSS-based community blog theme designed to focus on content. Documentation v2.0
Introduction
Community Innovation is a clean, customizable CSS-based community blog theme designed to focus on content. With 2 custom widgets, an extensive theme options page with dozens of options, several screencasts on how to set up the theme quickly, thorough documentation, clean code, dozens of custom functions, plus so much more, this theme is bound to end up in your collection!
Setting Up the Theme
Since the theme comes ready out of the box with no additional plugins required, set up will be quick and easy, allowing you to add content and customize it to your taste right away!
- Extract everything from the community.zip ZIP file to your desktop.
- Go into the Theme Files folder, and then again into the version folder (e.g. v2.0).
- Copy the community folder directly into the themes folder in the WordPress installation on your server.
- Activate the theme in Themes under the Appearance tab.
- Add widgets to the sidebar and footer. You can try adding the Community Innovation custom widgets, although they will be explained later on.
- Add categories to upload posts into.
- Go into Media under the Settings tab, and change the default media sizes to fit the post container.
- Large size – set the width to 540px or lower, and the height to whatever you would like
- Medium size – set the width to less than the large size (e.g. 300px) and the height to whatever you would like
- Thumbnail size – set the width and height to whatever you would like (e.g. 180px by 180px)
- Add any necessary pages, links, and upload media files such as images and videos.
- Go into Discussion under the Settings tab, and tick the checkbox that says Enable threaded (nested) comments. You may also change the number of levels of threading allowed, but for best results, keep it around 5.
- Go into Permalinks under the Settings tab, select Custom Structure and type in
/%category%/%postname%/. - Enjoy the theme and remember to stay connected by following me on Theme Forest and Twitter.
Screencasts
To help you quickly set up, customize and start using Community Innovation, several helpful screencasts are included to make your life that much easier! Unfortunately, they are not available at this time.
How to add posts and adjust post settings
In this screencast, you will see how to add a post with content such as headings and an image which will be automatically resized and used a thumbnail for the post. As a side note, you will also see how the theme options control which content you would like to be displayed (such as meta information and post thumbnail). Finally, you will notice how easy it is to add posts to the Editor’s Choice tab under the Community widget.
Post Thumbnails
Post thumbnails are generated and resized automatically, in the following order: Post Thumbnail (introduced in WordPress 2.9) > first image in the post > Thumbnail URL meta value in the post settings. Generally, you would want to stay away from WordPress’s post thumbnail choice due to it putting out just an image, instead of a link. If you would like to use a certain image as a thumbnail, please type in the URL in the Thumbnail URL meta key.
Post Excerpt
Post excerpts will be generated from the post content if no custom excerpt is set. For best results, please use the more tag to separate the content you would like to be used for excerpt from the rest. Otherwise, the excerpt will be generated with a length set by the Limit Excerpt Text option.
How to add featured post and adjust featured post settings
In this screencast, you will be shown how to display a featured post slider at the top of the page and how to add posts to the slider. The Featured tab settings will be shown, along with their effects.
Featured Post Thumbnail
The featured post thumbnail will be automatically generated to be 670px wide and the height set by the Featured Post Height option. For best results, source images should be equal to or greater than 670px wide and what height is set (360px by default).
How to add/remove/sort the navigation
This was a feature included in the original release of Community Innovation, prior to the release of WordPress 3.0 and its custom menus. It is no longer included in v2.0 but buyers who may still be using the WordPress 2.9 version can refer to this screencast.
In this quick screencast, you will be shown how easy it is to add, remove, and sort the navigation just by creating categories, enabling them to appear in the list of available links and dragging and dropping them from the list of links to the navigation. You can even enable or disable drop-down menus — how cool is that?
Widgets
Choose which array of posts you would like to display.
Community Innovation includes two custom Widgets which display an array of links using a tabbed navigation. The Community widget displays Recent Posts along with a custom query of posts called Editor’s Choice which displays posts which have the Editor’s Choice meta key set to on. In a nutshell, this is just another list of “featured” posts that authors or editors, if such are appointed, choose to receive additional exposure or are deemed of higher importance or quality.
Theme Options
Community Innovation offers an extensive theme options panel featuring dozens of options that make customization easy and fun! In just a few clicks, you can change the way typography looks, add and remove elements, sort the navigation, adjust thumbnail sizes, and so much more.
The theme options panel is divided into five tabs: General, Featured Post, Posts, Single Post, and Typography. Each individual option has a description of what it does, and any information you need to know about it so this documentation will not go into too much detail about it. Below you will find a short summary of what each tab holds.
General
Clean and simple theme options page
This tab accounts for, you guessed it, all the general global settings such as header and footer information, any custom styles and scripts, along with FeedBurner info and logos.
Featured Post
This tab is specifically for the featured post slider at the top of the page, if you choose to have one. Settings include anything from transition speed and delay, to featured post height which alters the thumbnail output and overall height of the slider.
Posts
The Posts tab includes options for archive, search, author, and frontpage post loops which includes anything from thumbnail sizes, to adding and removing features such as meta information and much more.
Single Post
This tab is dedicated to individual posts or single.php, and consists of adding and removing options such as the social media bar, About the Author section, related posts, among others.
Typography
Customizing the typography can be accomplished in this tab. All major typographical elements such as headings, links, highlights, etc can be styled the way you want them to here.
Credits
The following resources were used in the development of this theme:
- Social Media Network Icons – Komodo Media
- Fugue Icons – p.yusukekamiyamane
- jQuery Colorpicker – EyeCon
- jQuery 1.4 – jQuery
- jQuery UI – jQuery
- InnerFade – InnerFade
Support
If you find any bugs or have any problems or questions regarding this theme, please contact me through my Theme Forest contact form and I will reply as soon as possible. Please do not post problems on the item page as it is hard to keep track of what is answered and what is not, and as all genuine questions will go to the FAQ where everyone will be able to view them.
Thank you for purchasing my theme!
Designer and developer of Community Innovation,