How To
The Diarise home page layout
Below is a screenshot of the Diarise home page with each of it’s modules explained. More detailed documentation below.
Loads of functionality packed into 4 home page modules.
Setting up the home page
The home page is completely modular with each area being customizable via either the theme options or the widgetized regions. The home page, as set up in the theme demo, consists of:
- The Events Calendar
- The Featured Tabber
- The Blog Section
- The Widgetized Footer Region
Each of these areas can be enabled/disabled in theme options, under the “Layout” tab.
The layout options of Diarise
As you can see above you also have the option to show the full content or, as per default, the excerpt for the blog section of the home page.
Setting up your events calendar
The events calendar module on the home page allows you to display event based posts, or posts that you wish to advertise as occurring in the future. This is great for example for churches, schools, sports clubs, event management companies, etc. advertising services, family days, sports matches, exhibitions, etc.
Setting up this module is easy, firstly make sure it is enabled under the “Layout” tab documented above, then go to the “Event Calendar” tab and specify a category that you have categorized your event posts with, as documented in the next section.
Setting up the Home Page Events Calendar.
You can specify a date range of events that must display in the events calendar module on the home page. Remember to set this up before questioning why your posts aren’t displaying.
Adding an event post
To have the event calendar module display some posts you must add some posts to the category you have specified above in the event calendar theme options. We recommend creating a category called “Events” then adding your event posts to this category.
The event posts will display the title and the excerpt, along with some custom field texts that can be added via the “Diarise Custom Settings” located under the WYSWYG editor on the Add/Edit posts window. See below:
Adding the custom settings for your event posts.
As you can see above you can add the event start and end date, please note the end date will default to the start date and vice versa, unless otherwise specified. You can also add the times for the event if applicable and the location the event will be held at. You then have the option to add an image/logo for the event that will display on the home page under the event.
You can also publish a video to the post by placing the video’s embed code in the corresponding field.
Setting up the booking form
Diarise comes bundled with a basic booking form page template that can be used for site visitors to express interest an event by emailing the webmaster their contact details. The alternative is to set the “Use External Booking URL” where you can link the booking button in the event calendar and on the single event posts to an external site to take bookings.
Simply navigate to the “Booking Form” theme option’s panel and fill in the details. See the example below:
The Booking Form Theme Options.
Makes sure you create a new page and assign the booking form template to that page.
Adding the booking form page template
If you experience any problems you might need to set your pretty permalink structure.
Setting up the featured panel
The home page featured panel can be used to display highlights of previous events, noteworthy blog posts or a combination of the two – this is because it is tag based. Once you have specified the tag it must loop through to display posts, make sure you add that tag to the blog posts you want to feature. It will display the title of the post, the excerpt, and the optional image and video.
Remember to enable/disable this module under the “Layout” tab.
The Featured Panel setup for the Diarise Home Page
Widgets
Custom Daily Edition widgets
The theme includes 9 custom widgets that you can add to any of your 7 widgetized regions – 4 footer and 3 sidebar widgetized regions.
The custom woo widgets included are:
- Woo – Flickr
- Woo – Adspace
- Woo – Recent Blog Posts
- Woo – Featured Media Widget
- Woo – Customer Feedback Widget
- Woo – Twitter Stream
- Woo – Custom Nav Menu
- Woo – Tabs
- Woo – Search
The Featured Media Widget
This new widget with Diarise allows you to present certain videos, images and audio posts that you wish to highlight with visually appealing icons. For example, say you want to highlight the video of a keynote speaker at one of your conferences, but it is otherwise buried in a sea of other posts. This widget highlights a quicklink to it on the home page.
Simply define the tags you have used for the 3 different types of posts – videos, images or audio. Then make sure you have used that tag for the posts you wish to display here.
Setting up the featured media widget.
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.
View more of our WordPress101 video tutorials, as well as other video tutorials 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.
- 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:
- Go to Write > Page in the WP admin panel.
- Simply fill in the page title, which can be anything, and then ignore the page body content.
- Scroll down to the “Templates” field in the “Attributes” box and select the page template you’d like to use.
- And publish!
