1. Top
  2. Getting started
  3. Setting up theme options
  4. Home Page Builder
  5. Setting Category
  6. Setting up the menu
  7. Adding content
  8. Shortcodes & Widgets
  9. Tips & Tricks
  10. Theme Files
  11. Sources and Credits

RoVeR - Magazine/Blog WordPress Theme

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Table of contents

Getting started

To install this theme you must have a working version of WordPress already installed. For information in regard to installing the WordPress platform, please see the WordPress Codex - http://codex.wordpress.org/ Installing_WordPress

After you finish setting up your WordPress installation, you have to install this theme. You can do it in two ways:

Setting up theme options

After activating the theme, you will notice that a new menu item appeared, and it is called RoVeR. If you click on it you will find the Theme Options Panel.

General Settings

In this area you can upload a favicon, your image logo, text logo, font logo, subtitle logo, font subtitle logo and add some copyright info.

 

Blog Settings

 

Here you can select to use slider, breadcrumbs, how many post on page. For single post you can choose to use share links, related posts, number of posts to show and query type.

 

Category Sidebar

 

Here you can select sidebar position and which sidebar you want to use in this category.

 

Post Settings

 

Here you can select sidebar position and which sidebar you want to use on posts.

 

Slider Settings

 

In this area you can select a type of slider, to use thumbnails nav slider, category name in slider caption, number of slices in slider, pause time, animation speed slider, navigation slider arrow, type of animation slider, the number of items in the slider, query settings slider, select a post category.

 

Images Resize

 

In this area you can change height for different images like slider home, post slider, single post slider, post or single post.

 

Typography settings

 

In this area you can select font family for H1, H2, /p/, /a/ for top menu, widget title, ets.

 

Styling settings

 

You can set your background color for different element of your site. Also you can set background image, page margin top and choose predefined color schemes. There are also various other options available to help you adjust everything perfectly.

 

Advertising settings

 

You can choose settings for header banner, default page above banner and default page below banner.

 

SEO settings

 

Here you can describe your site with meta description, meta keywords for SEO.

 

Contact Page settings

 

This area controls the view and functions of the theme’s contact form.

 

Twitter API OAuth

 

From March 2013 Twitter requires authentication to access your tweets. Here are fields you need to fill if you want to use Twitter Data in Widgets. How to do it you can find in documentation and on https://dev.twitter.com/apps.

 

Social networking

 

In this area you can choose to show social icon in top page and indicate full URL to your profile of social networking.

 

Google services

 

In this area you can paste your analytics ID tracking code, also this area controls the contact page’s and topbar GMap.

 

Setting Home Page

To set up your homepage, you first have to create a basic page. After you decide what page do you want to use, go to Settings > Reading and in the Front page displays choose A static page, then select your just created page.
If you create Home Magazine Page you need to do next steps:
1. Add New page.
2. Enter a title.
3. Choose Home Magazine in Template.
4. Hit "Publish".
5. Go to Appearance/Widgets.

 

 


6. In the right side choose Magazine Builder.
7. Use widgets with Magazine prefix, move widget to the right side.
8. Go to Settings/Reading and in the Front page displays choose A static page, then select your just created page.
9. You can create an unlimited number of Magazine styles pages.

Direct URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ifNkvLhxZQ

Customising the Categories

Category Color: This is the main colour. If you want to differentiate the categories visually then I think this is a great way to go.

Category Background Image: Add a background. Simply upload the file and save.



Setting up the menu

The final step before you can start working with the new theme is to create your menu. This theme uses WordPress 3.4.1 Custom Menus, so it will be really easy. Go to Appearance > Menus and you will see a panel where you can create new menus. Create one, add your created pages to it(from the left side panels) and save it. After this, in the left side you have a drop down box where you can select the CSC Main Navigation, CSC Footer Navigation, CSC Side Navigation, CSC Top Navigation . Choose your newly created menu, hit "Save" and you’re all set.
If you want to display blog filters/categories in the menu, you’ll have to first create some posts and assign them custom categories, then you’ll have to add those categories in the menu, as a children of the main category parent.
Take a look at the screenshot below to get an understanding of how this works.



Menu Icons

Before every menu item add this piece of code:

For XXX you can set any icon name. You can find all icon names on Font Awesome homepage.



Adding unique Colours to the Menu

Go to Appearances > Menus and add the category to the menu. Then quickly take a look at that category in the category editor. Copy the colour value you gave it and paste it into the description field of the menu item. Make sure that there is no '#' symbol. For example for red you would paste in "FF0000". Save the menu and you're done.



Setting up the widgets

Just a quick overview on this subject, before we go further. If you go to Appearance > Widgets you will notice two main areas. In the left side there is a list of widgets which you can use in this theme, while in the right side there is a list of sidebars where you can put the widgets from the left in.
There are five widget areas (Theme Default Sidebar, Home Magazine, Footer Left Sidebar, Footer Center Sidebar, Footer Right Sidebar ). Widget with Magazine in prefix uses for Home magazine. You just need to decide where you want to locate it and move widget to the right side. That's it.

Adding content

Adding Posts

These are the default steps that you need to do in order to add a blog post:
1. Go to Posts > Add New.
2. Enter a title and some content.
3. Select a post category.
4. Click on “Set featured image” to upload a preview image for this post(this is not necessary). Once the image is uploaded, click "Use as featured image".
5. Select a post format. You can dispose here text, audio, video, image, gallery, link, etc.
6. Also you can use here different banner for advertisment (big top promo banner, banner above post, banner two above post, banner below post, banner two below post). You just need to content settings (text, link, etc.)
For each page or each post you can use individual background or background slider. For that you need to upload image on the right side in Background Pattern (your image will not resize in that case) or choose color for your background.


If you want to use background slider you need to upload several background images in Background image fullwide (your image will resize) and check the box "SlideShow Bg Image" and define Slide pause.


Background Pattern and Background image fullwide don't work together!!!
And also you can define an overlay background image. It uses only with Background image fullwide.


6. For each page or post you can define your individual sidebar. And most important: you can create an unlimited number of sidebar by yourself.


7. This is really optional, but you should write an Excerpt for your post, especially if your beginning paragraphs are not telling everything about the post, and you would like better info there.
8. Hit “Publish” and you’re all done.

Adding Pages

The process of adding pages is quite similar to adding posts:
1. Go to Pages > Add New.
2. Enter a title and some content.
3. Select a page template or leave the default(more on this just after). There are so many templates for creating such page as Default template, Blog page, Contact page, Page fullwidth, Page left sidebar.
4. Because the page is mostly controlled by shortcodes, you need to write the excerpt for pages. This is because pages might be really different in content than posts, and when showing in Search results, a user should see the excerpt.
5. Here also are banners for advertisment (big top banner,banner above page, banner below page).
5. Also you can allow comments, trackbacks and pingbacks on this page.
6. Hit “Publish” and you’re all done.

Page Template

As you might already noticed, there are more Page Templates available for you to use. Each template will configure your page to look and act in a different way.

Default Template

This is the default template and it outputs exactly the content of the page, without any modifications.

Blog

This is a page which shows all your posts. There is no other way to make a Blog page, so you only need to choose this template and save the page, as the content will automatically appear.

Contact

This is a page which contains a contact form and some text, all controlled by a custom panel in the theme options.

Shortcodes & Widgets

If you’re used with shortcodes you will like it that this theme has a lot of them to help you style your content and create widgets to make your pages better.
There are three categories of shortcodes: grid system shortcodes(which control the visual structure of your page), visual shortcodes(which are used to either add styling or widgets to your page) and Icon Font Awesome shortcodes.

Grid system shortcodes

When you hit the Grid system button(the first one from the three highlighted), you will see a drop-down menu where you can insert columns.The design is based on a custom columns grid, so this means that you can divide your content into smaller columns, each taking a part from the total width.

Visual Shortcodes

Here is a really large list of shortcode, and each one has intuitive fields to build the shortcode, so i hope that you will find it easy to use. After you’re done, just hit the “Insert” button, and the shortcode will be in it’s place.

Icon Font Awesome shortcodes

There are more then 200 icon you can use. Just insert one of them and it will appear.

Widgets

This theme also comes with a set of 20+ custom widgets that you can use in your magazine or blog. You can find them in the Appearance > Widgets page, having the RoVeR prefix.

Widget for Magazine.

Widget 1 Column magazine, 1 Column and small right column magazine, 2 Column magazine displays recent posts.
Widget Magazine carousel displays recent posts in carousel.
Widget Magazine post images displays latest post image.

Widget Recent Posts

Widget displays last posts.

Widget Tabs

Widget displays three categories posts - popular, comments and tags.

Widget Latest Flickr

Widget displays last or random images from your Flickr profile.

Widget Latest Tweets

Widget displays your last Tweets.

RoVeR Video Widget

A widget that displays a video.

ADS widgets

Widget displays advertisment different sizes (125*125, 300*250, 468*60).

Fasebook and Google+ widgets

Displays your followers on Fasebook and Google+.

Widget latest post image

A widget that displays latest post image.

Widget recent audio post

A widget to display your recent audio post.

Widget social counter

Counter of twitter followers , facebook fans , rss subscribes.

Tips & Tricks

This short chapter covers some tips & tricks that you can do in order to make the site look and run better.

Translating the theme

This theme is localized, which means it can easily be translated in your own language(easy but quite time consuming). To translate it you need to follow these steps:
1. Download and install http://www.poedit.net/
2. Go to /wp-content/themes/sparkwp/languages/ and open default.po file.
3. In the window that appears you have all the strings that were used in this theme, so you just need to go through them and write a translation.
4. When you’re done go to File > Save as and save your translation in a *.po file.
5. You should name your file pt_LANG. It’s just a naming convension.
6. When you’re done translating open wp-config.php from your WordPress root folder and replace this line: define ('WPLANG', ''); with define ('WPLANG', 'pt_LANG');

Optimize images

Always optimize/compress your jpeg images before uploading them to the server. Using all these, you will definitely make your site run faster and get a good score in Google Speed Test.

SEO Advices

The theme is built in a way to be SEO friendly, by emphasizing titles with heading tags, having the content before anything else, stripping out useless content, fast loading, setting titles and excerpts in the header for better crawling, etc.. All these help... But you have to remember that Content is King! So you shouldn’t install any plugins for SEO or blame the theme because your website doesn’t appear in search engines. You should always focus on providing good content and in this way, your website will definitely look great in search engines.

Theme Files

The last chapter discloses the sources of various files used within the theme and describes their function. Use this section to gain an understanding on how the theme functions behind the scenes if considering any type of modification.

CSS Files

This template based of standards CSS3. The main template file is csc-style.css. It is located in the folder /css . With it, you can modify and customize the theme (such as fonts, colors, backgrounds, etc.). The file is separated into sections using: 

/***** General *****/
some code
/***** Typography & Element *****/
some code
/***** Header *****/
some code
/***** Social link*****/
some code
/***** Main Nav *****/
some codeetc, etc.

Template also uses additional files CSS (in the folder /css):

 

JavaScript Files

This theme uses the jQuery framework and plugins: sliders, gallery, carousel, etc. These files are located in the folder /js. The main configuration file plugins and scripts based on jQuery is custom.js, it's in the folder /js. With it you can change the settings of the sliders, galleries, animations, etc.

Template also uses additional files js (in the folder /js):

PHP Files

Sources and Credits

I've used the following plugins, fonts or other files as listed:

Once again, thank you so much for purchasing this theme. As I said at the beginning, I'd be glad to help you if you have any questions relating to this theme. No guarantees, but I'll do my best to assist. If you have a more general question relating to the themes on ThemeForest, you might consider visiting the new support forum on all issues http://support.wp-theme.pro/

Best regards ! NORDiX Themeforest author