Installing The Theme Get This Beauty Installed

To install your theme in WordPress you must navigate to the menu "Appearance" on the left and then the submenu "Themes". From that page you should see your current theme "Twenty Eleven" by default OR whatever theme you currently have. Now click the "Install Themes" tab and then the text button at the top "Upload". You then should click Choose File and find your theme files on your computer and upload them. Note: You are only uploading the folder "pivotWPTheme.zip" Your final step is to "Activate" your theme.

This process is shown in the images below

First navigate to the themes page
Then click the add new button
Now click upload
Choose your theme file and install
Finally activate the theme

Installing The Theme - Video

Installing Required Plugins This is the most important thing!

A Number of theme features come as external plugins to make your life easier if you ever switch themes. These need installing before importing the demo data for proper theme operation.

When you first install the theme you'll see a popup on your dashboard from the theme asking you to install a number of plugins.

Allow the theme to install these for you, it will add custom post types, a page builder, a portfolio post ordering plugin and a custom crop featured image plugin.

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Seriously, make sure these are all installed before importing demo data, you'll only cause yourself problems if you install the demo data first and do this second.


Installing Plugins - Video

Installing Demo Data Did you install the required plugins?

I cannot stress this enough, do not run this section until you've installed the plugins from the section above, if you do you'll only cause yourself problems.

Importing Demo Data (Auto Method)

If this method returns any errors, you must use the fallback demo import method (next section). This auto method can return errors depending on your server setup, 9 times out of 10 this method is perfect, remember, there is a fallback if this fails.

To use demo demo data installer go to "appearance" => "customise" from your WP Dashboard. Inside the customiser (this is also the theme options panel, you can modify loads about the theme from here) click on the "Import Demo Data" tab. Next click the "Import Demo Data" Button, a backup prompt will appear, click OK when you're ready on this, and then leave your install until you get a successful message. This process takes up to 15 mins. Do not do anything during this process!.

Developers: If you have wp_debug set to true, this process will fail, set to false whilst importing demo data.

After importing the demo data, you're about 5 mins away from a perfect demo setup. Please now follow the steps in "Initial Theme Setup" for the final steps to take.

Importing Demo Data (Fallback Method)

I have created a folder labeled "Demo XML Data" which contains an export for the Live Preview. The place to upload this XML file is in WordPress under Tools > Import.

Once you've arrived on the Import page, you will click on the "WordPress" link: Wordpress - Install the WordPress importer to import posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags from a WordPress export file.

The first time you do this you will get a pop-up prompting you to install the "WordPress Importer". You will need to click "Install Now". Then You will have installed the plugin and need to click "Activate Plugin & Run Importer".

From here you will just need click "Choose File" and select the demo-data.xml file. Then click "Upload file and import".

You will then be prompted to Assign Authors. You can read the description at the top as this explains everything. Note: Make sure you Import Attachments.

Check the box "Download and import file attachments". This will download attachments for images included in the Live Preview demo.

You now just need to wait for the importer to finish. This might take a few minutes depending on your hosting server speed.

After importing the demo data, you're about 5 mins away from a perfect demo setup. Please now follow the steps in "Initial Theme Setup" for the final steps to take.


Installing Demo Data - Video

Initial Theme Setup Required after demo data install!

This is a required step after importing demo data and installing require plugins. This is the final step to producing the same site as my theme demo.

From your WP Dashboard go to "settings" => "reading" and click the "static homepage" option. Let's set the "home page" to any of the "home layout" pages, and let's set the "posts page" option to "blog", once you've done this hit the save changes button. You now have a proper homepage, and a proper blog page, nice one :)

Now the last step. Go to appearance -> menus and set the theme menus in place. Use the checkboxes at the bottom of the menus to set them in location. Set the main menu into the primary location.


Initial Config - Video

Using Theme Options All Theme Options & Fonts Usage

All the theme options are very self-explanatory, but if you're a beginner, please read my section about using Google Fonts if you wish to change the theme fonts.

The Theme Options

Using Google Fonts

Heads Up!
Please read this section carefully if you plan on changing the fonts used by the theme.

Google fonts are the only tricky part of the theme options, the reason for this is that we've chosen a simple integration of this rather than a huge resource-hogging implementation that's going to slow your server down. The negative of this is that our font control option is a tiny bit trickier than some others, but hey, you probably only change your fonts once and my implementation makes your server faster than most themes!

Pivot gives you 3 areas that you can change the font for, Body, Headings and "Alternate", if you want a fast page load, make these all the same font, if you use 3 different fonts be prepared that this means 3 times the font data to download.

Ok, here's how you change your theme fonts to another Google Font:

  1. Navigate to the fonts section of the theme options via "appearance" -> "customise" => "Pivot: Styling Settings"
  2. In the description of the "fonts" section, click the link to take you to the google fonts website
  3. Whilst on the Google fonts website, try to just choose 1 font at a time to save you some hassle.
  4. To choose a font, click the "Add to collection" button, once you've done this you'll get a grey bar on the bottom of the page, click the "Use" button.
    Click this button to add the font to your "collection", only do this with one font at a time!
    Click the use button to advance to the next steps.
  5. In the next window you can review the font weights you wish to include, and any font-subsets you may need, check boxes for these, but do it sparingly!
  6. Now see step 3 & 4 on the Google Fonts page you're currently viewing, first let's use step 4 to fill in our "Font" option, so if step 4 says this:
    font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif;
    Then we just want to use the value that's inside the quotations, so we would enter this for our option:
    Open Sans
  7. Next, let's use step 3 to fill in our "Font URL" option, from step 3 click the "@import" tab (it's easier to look at) and see the font URL like this:
    @import url(http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans);
    From that, we're just interested in the actual URL, so in the theme option we'd add:
    http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans

That's it! Save your options and if you've done this correctly your fonts will update to your new choices, you can't really go wrong here, but see the default values below if you need to roll back and start again.

Here's the default settings for this area:
Body Font: Open Sans
Body Font URL: http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans:300italic,400italic,400,300,600,700
Heading Font: Open Sans
Heading Font URL: http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans:300italic,400italic,400,300,600,700
Alternate Font: Raleway
Alternate Font URL: http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Raleway:700


Using Theme Options - Video

The Page Builder How To Build Pages

Creating pages is really simple, just go to "appearance" -> "ebor page builder" and start dragging blocks from the left into your page template on the right.

You then go to a published page edit screen and click the "add template" button and add in the content of your choice, make sure you set the "page attributes" template to "Page Builder" so that WordPress knows what the content is.

The basic structure of a page builder template is the "page section" block which you use to mark out the sections of your page, and then add your content in appropriate to the page you're creating.


Using Ebor Page Builder - Video

Using Post Types An overview of the additional post types in Pivot.

Client & Testimonial post types are simply content creators for the corresponding elements in the page builder, neither post type has a single or archive view, so any content entered can only be picked up by the appropriate blocks in the page builder.

Portfolio Posts

Heads Up!

A single portfolio post represents a singular image within the portfolio post feeds on the site. Portfolio posts are automatically show at /portfolio/ on your site, though you can use the page builder to add these to a page instead.

Portfolio posts function exactly in the same way as blog posts. Any additional features of a portfolio post can be modified in the additional portfolio settings section underneath the WP Editor when making a portfolio post, take a look through these options, and make a mental note of what they offer.

Heads Up!

Each Portfolio post MUST have a featured image set. This image should be a minimum of 440px X 330px and should have a maxiumum width of 2000px

To change the layout of a portfolio post from full width to left/right, just use the portfolio layout control in the additional portfolio settings.

Custom Cropping Featured Images

It's very likely you'll want deeper control of how the theme crops your featured images to be shown in the main portfolio feeds. If you installed the plugins recommended by the theme, then you're ready to do this. After you've set your featured image, click the crop image link underneath remove featured image, a window will pop-up. With the window open, choose the portfolio tab and then adjust and crop your image. Finally update your post. When you take a look at your site, if the image has not updated clear your browser cache!

Team Posts

Heads Up!

Team posts are automatically show at /team/ on your site, though you can use the page builder to add these to a page instead.

Team posts work just like blog posts, but have no post formats. Ensure each team post has a featured image set. You'll also want to set a job title, and some social icons for each team member using the additional inputs underneath the WP Editor/

Testimonial Posts

Testimonial posts have no single view, and do not make use of the featured image. Set the testimonial author as the post title, and add the testimonial to the post content. They can be added to your pages using the Testimonial elements in the page builder.

Client Posts

Client posts are a useful way of adding some client logos to your page, set the logo as the featured image, set the client name as the title, and add a client URL if you want the logo to link somewhere.


Using Post Types - Video

Theme Shortcodes Just a few

Pivot comes with a few shortcodes that it's ready to use, if you need more shortcodes available in the theme, just install your favourite shortcodes plugin like Shortcodes Ultimate or simiilar

Here's the shortcodes that pivot uses:

  • [pivot_button url="#" appearance="btn-primary" target="default" text="Customize Pivot"]
  • [pivot_skill icon="icon-desktop" title="Web Design"]
  • [pivot_icon icon="icon-compass" size="icon-jumbo"]
  • [pivot_countdown date="2016/2/2"]
  • [contact-form-7 id="703" title="Countdown Contact Form"]

The first 3 shortcodes have generator pages in this documnetation to make creating these easier for you, the countdown shortcode is used for coming soon pages and just uses a / seperated date to count to. Lastly the contact-form-7 shortcode is created by the plugin of the same name, and is used to place contact forms into the theme.

WooCommerce Installing & Using WooCommerce

Pivot is ready for WooCommerce if you need eCommerce in your theme. There's 2 steps to set this up, but you should also consider installing my demo data with WooCommerce pages and posts to make your life easier after setting up the plugin.

Install WooCommerce
Go to "plugins" => "add-new" => "install" and search for WooCommerce & then run the installer.
Let WooCommerce Set Up Pages For You
Once activated, WooCommerce will offer to install required pages for you, do this now.
Install WooCommerce Demo Data

By far the easiest way to use WooCommerce is to first install the WooCommerce demo data and then configure it to your needs, you already have all the required WooCommerce pages installed so now we just need to populate them.

Head to the Demo XML Data folder in your download, the data we're after is called woocommerce.xml

For details on importing this data, head to the Installing the demo data section of this documentation.

WooCommerce is now set up

That's all you need to do to get a fully functioning shop within Pivot, with the WooCommerce pages installed and with the WooCommerce demo data installed you're ready to rock.

You may want a little more help with how to use WooCommerce though, well Pivot does not modify any of the default WooCommerce methods of working, so by far the best resource for WooCommerce now is that already written by WooThemes themselves, below is a selection of links worth visiting;

Getting Started with WooCommerce

Full details of how to add and manage your product base;

Adding and managing products

Handling digital downloads;

Digital Downloads

Adding / managing coupons with your store;

Coupons

Finally, if you really need some 101 help with WooCommerce, WPTuts did a great mini-series which you should take a read of;

WooCommerce 101

Theme Support Please Read Before Opening Tickets

Please read all of the following, a link to my ticket service is provided at the end of this section. Any ticket relating to customisation will be politely forwarded to -- http://www.madeinebor.com/customisations/ -- and then your ticket will be closed.

I run support Weekdays 9am - 5pm GMT. You can expect a response within 12 - 48 hours, Monday to Friday unless there is a national holiday. Here is a list of UK national holidays: https://www.gov.uk/bank-holidays. Note that "bumps" to tickets put you to the back of my queue, be patient, every ticket is answered promptly.

What my tickets are for: 

Help using theme features, Help setting up / installing themes, bug reports & reasonable feature requests for future updates.

What my tickets aren't for: 

Any issues relating to 3rd party plugins not recommended by the theme, theme customisations, or theme changes your client requires.

What counts as customisation? 

If you want to change the appearance or functionality of the theme by editing or extending the theme's code, then that is customisation, and will not be supported through my tickets. Likewise if your client has a function request that does not exist in the theme, my tickets are not the place to have the theme extended for this.

Do you need customisation work? 

If that's exactly what you're here for, you can fill out a custom work form here; http://www.madeinebor.com/customisations/

Things to check when leaving a ticket: 

  1. You must leave a link to your site, if not we will ask you to do this anyway and it will result in a delay to your ticket.
  2. Please be descriptive when leaving a ticket, use screenshots if possible, "doesn't work" is not an acceptable descriptive term.
  3. Before opening a ticket, disable all non-theme-recommended plugins, undo any code changes, and ensure you're using a default, unmodified version of the theme files. You'll find a lot of the time this fixes your issue.
  4. Tickets without a validated purchase will not be answered. Properly validate your purchase.
  5. If you have a modified theme, or are using a child theme for modification, we cannot help with bugs. Please present bugs to us within the default, unmodified theme, and we will help every time!
  6. Please note Envato's Licensing covers 1 URL per 1 purchase of a theme: http://themeforest.net/licenses/regular - ticket profiles covering multiple URLs with 1 license code, will be stopped until the remaining licenses are provided.

A quick point on theme support: All of my themes are tested and thoroughly scrutinised by themeforest support staff and are confirmed 100% working, if you're having any issues you should be 99.9% sure it's a user error, or a bug I will be happy to fix with you. With this in mind, please keep your tone calm & professional, you will always get the same from me. Any tickets left with vulgar language, or with threatening, unprofessional language will be promptly closed and/or deleted. All tickets left with a calm, professional tone will receive awesome support, as always.

If you've read, accepted, and followed the steps above, click here to leave a ticket.