Created: Oct 28th, 2011 / Author: Adrian Diaconescu
Thank you for purchasing my theme! If you have any questions that are beyond the scope of this help file or even suggestions on how to improve the theme, the best way to get in touch is via my ThemeForest profile page contact form (right sidebar, at the bottom).
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Personality is a premium one page portfolio WordPress theme, ideal for powering a small presentation website for both businesses or individuals. There's no blog functionality (the posts are used to power the portfolio) and the main focus is on the pages. The theme uses a slick navigation system and its features (shortcodes, photo gallery, portfolio, contact page) have been tweaked to perfection. Personality makes deploying and managing your small website and portfolio a breeze!
Before installing the theme and setting up the content, please make sure you have the latest version of WordPress installed. The theme should work with previous versions, but my advice is to update to WordPress 3 as soon as possible. Once you're ready, login into the WordPress admin and follow the steps below:
In the ZIP file you downloaded from ThemeForest there should be a folder called theme. Inside this folder there's another ZIP file, which contains the actual WordPress theme. There are two ways to install the theme:
Note: Do not use the main ZIP file you downloaded (use the theme ZIP only), otherwise the whole process will fail.
The main menu is dynamically generated, based on the pages you added under Pages > Pages. The moment you activate the theme and if you have more than one page, the page slider should kick in and you should have a functional navigation.
In order to easily manage the order of the items in the menu (and that of pages in the slider) I recommend you install the Custom Page Order plugin or a similar one that allows you to drag and drop pages, rather than mess with the Page Order parameter.
Personality comes with an intuitive, easy to use Theme Options panel. You can access it by navigating to Appearance > Theme Options. The theme options are conveniently grouped under a series of tabs and each tab contains the options that pertain to a particular area of the theme.
The theme features include a couple of shortcodes that allow you to create some nice column layouts, an enhanced and more flexible gallery shortcode and a dedicated portfolio section that's super easy to manage and has a kick-ass navigation. Oh, and there's also a contact page template with everything you need.
You can split the page width into up to 5 columns. There's also a gimick that allows you to implement a content - sidebar type of layout. There's no better way top explain how column shortcodes work than with a couple of examples, so here goes:
[column split="3"]
Add column 1 content here ...
[/column]
[column split="3"]
Add column 2 content here ...
[/column]
[column split="3" last="true"]
Add column 3 content here ...
[/column]Got it? Now all you have to do is change the split parameter to and add the correct number of shortcodes. And don't forget that last="true" parameter for the last shortcode.
[column split="3" multiply="2"]
This column will be wide ...
[/column]
[column split="3" last="true"]
This column will be narrow ...
[/column]Notice how we're still spliting the conten into 3, but we're telling the first column to take twice the space. There's only styling for this particular setup (others didn't seem practical), so don't try it with more columns.
...
[column split="5" highlight="true"]
This column will be highlighted ...
[/column]
...To highlight a certain column you just add the parameter highlight="true". You can add this to one or more columns, although I think it looks best when added to all columns.
This is still a shortcode (and I have actually overwritten the default one for some added awesomeness), but it definitely deserves a separate discussion.
First of all, there's something you should know regarding how galleries work in WordPress. In order for certain images to show up in a gallery from a page / post, they must be attached to that page / post. This has to do with how you upload the images and there are two ways you can do that:
Once you attached more than an image to a page (and clicked Save all changes), a new tab called Gallery will show up in the Add an Image popup window. To add this gallery to your page, here are the steps you might want to take:
Now make sure you navigate to Appearance > Theme Options and click on Gallery Settings for more options.
To set up the portfolio, first navigate to Pages > Add New to create a new page. Give it any title you like, but make sure you choose the Portfolio template in the Page Attributes panel. You don't have to add any content, as it will not be displayed anywhere. What this pages does is grab and display all portfolio items and create the links to filter by category.
The theme uses the posts as portfolio items, so basically all you have to do is navigate to Posts > Add New and create a new post as you normaly would: add a title, add some content that will act as a short description and choose a category, which will be used to generate the portfolio filter. Besides that, you have to perform the following tasks:
To set up a page containing the contact info, social links and contact form you must navigate to Pages > Add New and create a new page, but this time choose the Contact template in the Page Attributes panel. You can add some content, that will show up above the contact form. The page might not look like much, so make sure you navigate to Appearance > Theme Options, then click the Contact Settings tab to add your own info.
If you intend to make design or functionality changes to the theme, I recommend you read the info below before you get to work. It might save you some trouble! ;)
The theme is based on the HTML5 Boilerplate, from which is removed what I didn't find relevant. In terms of styling, the following CSS file are being loaded (located in the root folder and in the css folder):
The theme uses jQuery and a couple of jQuery plugins. These are the files that are being loaded (located in the js folder):
I've included 2 layered PNGs and PDSs with this theme: light skin and dark skin. The mockups were originally created in Fireworks and then I exported PSD files and tweaked them in Photoshop. For pixel perfect accuracy you should use the PNGs. However, both versions are pretty similar and they are both carefully oraganized using layers and sub layers.