Getting Started
Introduction
So you've purchased a WooTheme and you are dying to get it up and running on your website?
To install a WooTheme, is not much different to installing any other (free) WordPress
theme. Remember though, you'll need to set up your theme options afterwards to have it
functioning like our demos.
There are two ways to install a WooTheme on your website. Both methods are explained below in
video tutorials, we however recommend doing it via the Wordpress backend.
Below is a quick overview of the Wordpress "Add New Themes" installation method:
1. Download your template file (wootheme_name.zip) from your WooThemes account.
2. Log into your WP admin panel and click on the "Appearance" tab. Now click on the "Add
New Themes" tab.
3. Click on the "Upload" button, "Browse" for your zip folder you downloaded from our site to
your computer and select "Open".
4. Click the "Install Now" button.
5. Activate the theme from this page, OR "Return to Themes Page" and activate from there
if you experience a problem. See screenshot of an activated theme.
6. REMEMBER to set up your theme option's panel for it to display correctly.
7. MAKE SURE your theme "cache" folder is CHMOD 777.
Explaining the Theme Options
Below is a screenshot of the theme option's panel included in this theme. The default settings
used are what we have used in our demo.
How To
Important installation note
Please note there is an important first step after installing the Sealight theme. You need to
navigate to Settings > Permalinks and click on the “Save Changes” button, even if you haven‟t
made any changes. This is to register the custom post types used in the Sealight theme.
Navigate to Settings > Permalinks. Click on "Save Changes" to register the custom post types.
Home page overview
The homepage consists of a featured area, mini-features area, home sidebar and a widgetized
footer.
An overview of home page modules of Sealight
Setting up the home page
Once you have installed the Sealight theme on your WordPress 3.+ website you‟ll see a custom
panel called “Sealight” in your WordPress backend menu, with the theme options, etc. within that
panel. You‟ll also see 3 custom post type panels that appear in the backend menu – “Slides”,
“Info Boxes” and “Testimonials”. These three custom post types are used to display content on
the home page.
The custom panels that appear after installing Sealight
Setting up the featured slider
The Sealight home page featured slider pulls the custom “slides” post type. The number of slides
depends on how many slides you have published. You can set the animation speed, auto start
and slide interval under the theme options, the rest of the slide functionality is added via the
slides panel documented below.
The featured slider theme options
Adding a slide
To add a slide simply follow these steps:
1. Go to Slides > Add New.
2. Type a title for the slide and complete all of the post‟s body content.
3. Add a “Slider Image” in the Custom Settings panel if you want to display an image in the
slide.
4. Publish the slide.
Adding a slide to your home page slider, more slide options below.
Add buttons to the featured slides
To add a button to a slide in the featured slider simply add a button text and button link out, as
can be seen below, in the “Sealight Custom Settings” panel when adding/editing a slide.
Adding a button to a slide
Add video to featured page
Adding video is just as simple as adding an image to the page. Simply use the Embed field in the
Custom Settings panel, and add your embed code.
Adding a video to a slide
Setting up the information boxes
The Sealight home page information boxes also uses custom post types and pulls in the the
custom “Info Boxes”. The number of info boxes depends on how many “Info Boxes” you have
published. You can enable the info boxes area on the home page under the “Homepage” theme
options. You can also add two pieces of content from WordPress pages to the home page if you
specify the page IDs of the pages you wish to display.
Enabling the home page info boxes.
Adding an info box
To add an info box simply follow these steps:
1. Go to Info Boxes > Add New.
2. Type a title for the Info Box and complete all of the post‟s body content.
3. Add a “Info Box Icon” in the Custom Settings panel if you want to display an icon next to
the slide.
4. Publish the info box.
Adding an info box
“Read More” Links
Info Boxes are publicly query-able and will produce a inner single pages, unlike slider and
testimonial posts. When you publish an info box, the „Read More‟ link will point to it‟s permalink,
taking you to the single.php template showing the corresponding data. This „Read More‟ link can
either be removed or substituted with a custom URL link.
Info Boxes on the Homepage – Visibility and Order
By default all info boxes are set to appear on the Homepage. To hide certain info boxes from the
homepage, you need to check the “Hide on Homepage” box. This will hide boxes from the
homepage.
All info boxes are ordered by date ascending. If you want to change order, update the info box
publish dates to the order you want them to appear.
Custom Permalinks
When you publish an info box the resulting page created acts like a post page. There is a
single.php template available for it and will also come with it‟s own unique URL. If you choose to
use this page in your theme. Eg. “http://mysite.com/infobox/waterproof” you might want to make it
more tailored to your needs. Eg: “http://mysite.com/features/waterproof”. This can easily be
achieved with the custom URL / Permalink option.
Create a unique URL structure
Adding the Info Boxes page template
There is a button on the Sealight home page below the info boxes called “View all features”
(see demo). When you click on that button it takes you to a page dedicated to all the info boxes
you have added.
To add the dedicated info box page simply follow these steps:
1. Go to Pages > Add New.
2. Type a title for the Info Box page, leave the post‟s body content empty.
3. Set the template to “Info box template”.
4. Publish the page.
Adding the info box page template
Setting up the testimonials
The Sealight home page testimonials also uses custom post types and pulls in the the custom
“Testimonials”. The number of testimonials depends on how many “Testimonials” you have
published.
Enabling the home page info boxes.
Adding a testimonial
To add an info box simply follow these steps:
1. Go to Testimonials > Add New.
2. Type a title for the Info Box and complete all of the post‟s body content.
3. No need to add any “Sealight Custom Settings” options.
4. Publish the testimonial.
Adding a testimonial to the home page of Sealight
Widgets
Custom Optimize widgets
The theme includes 8 custom widgets that you can add to any one of your widgetized areas:
Woo – Flickr
Woo – Adspace
Woo – Search
Woo – Blog Author Info
Woo – Custom Nav Menu
Woo – Network
Woo – Tabs
Woo – Twitter Stream
Setting up widgets in a WooTheme
Widgets are hugely powerful optional modular blocks of content or functionality that you can place
on your WooThemes powered, Wordpress website. This tutorial shows you how to set up widgets
to further enhance your website's appearance.
Supported Plugins
Yoast Breadcrumbs
Easily add breadcrumbs to your WooThemes template to show your site visitors exactly where
they are on your site. If you‟re using one of the supported WordPress frameworks, it‟s as easy as
installing and enabling the plugin and checking the “Try to add automatically” box.
After the Breadcrumbs installation, you'll enable this functionality on all pages
You can download the plugin from the WordPress plugin directory here.
Page Navi
Page Navi adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WooThemes site. By default you‟ll
see the “Previous” and “Next” buttons to navigate to older/newer blog posts in the archives. With
Page Navi you can navigate via the number of archived blog post pages there are.
How the Page Navi pagination results look.
You can download the plugin from the WordPress plugin directory here.”>WordPress plugin
directory here.
Page Templates
Custom Page Templates
This theme comes bundled with unique page templates for some additional functionality to your
WooThemes powered website. Below is a list of some of the page templates available across our
themes. Please note they are not all bundled with all our themes.
Archives (template-archives.php) - Displays all categories, monthly archives, popular
tags and the 30 latest posts
Sitemap (template-sitemap.php) - An alternative to some WordPress plugins out there,
this page template will create a sitemap, which you can use for SEO & user-usability purposes.
Full Width (template-fullwidth.php) - A full width page template without the sidebar.
Redirect (template-redirect.php) - Is a nifty page template used to "fool" Wordpress into
creating a menu item in your page navigation, which is in fact a link to an external site. Simply
follow the steps mentioned below under "Adding an external url to your page navigation menu"
Image Gallery (template-imagegallery.php) * - Displays the images you have
associated with your posts in an image gallery, linking back to the original article
Contact Form (template-contact.php)* - A page with a contact form on it so that a web
visitor can email you. Please note you will have to add your email address to the theme option's
panel of the theme to make sure it is set up correctly.
* This page template isn't included in all themes
Setting Up Page Templates
If you still need some guidance after this video tutorial then follow the steps below:
1. Go to Write > Page in the WP admin panel.
2. Simply fill in the page title, which can be anything, and then ignore the page body content.
3. Scroll down to the "Templates" field in the "Attributes" box and select the page template
you'd like to use.
4. And publish!
Adding an external url to your page navigation menu
1. Create a new page in WordPress
2. Add a title to the page (e.g. WooThemes)
3. Add an URL to the content of the page (e.g. http://www.woothemes.com OR
woothemes.com OR www.woothemes.com)
4. Add the “Redirect” page template to the page (using the method described in the video
tutorial above)
5. Publish! Your menu item will now be in your page navigation and link to an external site.
SEO
Getting started
WooSEO (SEO standing for Search Engine Optimization) will give you an immediate edge over
your competition. This out of the box functionality will have your site optimized for Google, and
other search engine results with a few clicks, helping you climb the rankings for keywords you
want to be registered under.
SEO is by no means an easy skill to master, but getting the basics right is a great start to getting
healthy traffic to your website.
Using 3rd party data
When using the Woothemes SEO functionality most users will prefer to disable any other 3rd
party SEO plugins that they might have been using beforehand. In an effort to salvage any data
previously added to posts with these plugins, this setting will enable WooSEO to use that data
and make switching over easy and effortless.
Please note that the only supported plugins at this stage are the "All-in-One SEO" and
"Headspace 2" plugins. All data is extracted from post custom fields and does not take
preference over data added to WooSEO custom fields.
Page Titles
What are page titles?
This section controls the Page titles () of your theme.
Separator - This is what will appear between selected parts of your title segments.
Blog title & Blog Description - Also found in the Theme settings pages, you can quickly update
your blogs main title and it's description for use all over you site.
Use woo_title() - Recommended. Give yourself more control with the woo_title function. Enable
this option to uncover a range of new options to modify your page titles.
Disable Custom Titles - This option voids any previously added custom page titles, and only
uses the woo_title() basic output, ensuring that your page titles are uniform and predictable
across your site.
Paged Variable - When browsing your site, this variable will appear when you page throughout
your archives. Classically this comes into play when viewing older posts on a page and you get
"Page 2" of the browsing results. This variable lets you customize the word that gets used in the
Pagination process.
Paged Variable Position - Choose to have the paging variable to appear before, or after the
generated page title.
Homepage, Single, Page & Archive Title Layout - Select from the options available how you
want to have your page title's formatted when displaying on various templates and archives.
Meta
What is meta?
Meta information on your site helps search engines crawl and index your site. It also helps with
adding value to your pages, resulting in better rankings in search engines. Typical meta tags for
example, gets added to the head of your site serving many kinds of purposes.
Indexing Meta
Archive Indexing - Any WordPress site can have several archives to find/categorize posts. Be it
by category, date, tags, search, etc. and all get indexed by search engines. This can create
issues as search engines are forced to index pages containing the same data, thus diluting the
overall value of keywords.
By default we have set the Archive indexing to the "category archives" so to focus in on more
valuable sections of your site, in the words telling search engines only to index the selected
archives.
Making Robots Follow
By default single.php and page.php pages do not let search engines follow any outbound links
from the these, "Singular" types of pages, thus letting them focus in on your content, and not
somebody else's. If you did want search engines to follow links from singular pages, this option
will let you do that.
Description Meta
Homepage Description
Off - Have no meta description for your homepage.
From WP Site Description - Add your site's description (also used in page titles) to the
homepage description
From Custom Homepage Description - Add a description (text area found below) to your site's
homepage meta description.
Single Post/Page Description
Off - Have no meta description for your post/page.
From Custom Field and/or Plugins - Add custom descriptions to posts and pages from the
fields given in the edit backend. This option will also extract data from posts added via plugins.
When a post has been created previously with data from 3rd party plugins, this option will extract
the data and use it when available.
Automatically from Post/Page Content - Choose to generate descriptions from the content
already available on in the post or page. It will use content from the first segment of your content.
Keyword Meta
Homepage Keywords
Off - Have no meta keywords on your homepage.
From custom Homepage Keywords - This will add keywords (from the texture below) into you
homepage keywords meta.
Single Post/Page Keywords
Off - Have no keywords on Posts or Pages.
From Custom Field and/or Plugins - Add custom descriptions to posts and pages from the
fields given in the edit backend. This option will also extract data from post added via plugins.
When a post has been created previously with data from 3rd party plugins, this option will extract
the data and use it when available.
Automatically from Post Tags & Categories - Generate keywords automatically from the
current posts Tags and Categories. (Posts Only)