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Introduction to The Writer
The Writer is a theme specifically designed for writers and content creators. Our intention was to create a text-driven theme without a lot of extra stuff, but still allow it to be visually stunning. Our theme demo shows you what can be done with the theme, but should not be taken literally – how you configure and build your website is up to you and the outcome will depend on the content you create.
This guide will help you through the following:
-
Optimal WordPress Settings - Theme Installation
- How to use the theme’s various post options to create your content
- How featured images and videos work in this theme
- Setting a custom logo and configuring the theme
- Using widgets
- Setting up menus
- Customization options
Below, we provide an overview of how the theme interacts with WordPress. If you are new to WordPress, these overviews will prepare you for managing your site and creating optimal content. If you are a veteran user or know your way around Obox Themes, you may skip straight to Quick Setup for the recommended setup order
How the Theme Handles Images
Book Covers & Custom Post header images
The Writer does not use WordPress featured images as book covers (the background fill on your index pages) or header images (the large image at the top of posts). This is to allow easier transition for existing content and support for featured video. As a result, all featured images or videos will appear in the post content on the single post page.
As described in detail later under the Posts article, book covers and custom post header images should be as high-resolution as possible while keeping the file size under 2MB. You can see from our demo that these images will scale and snap to fill your entire browser viewport, so for visitors on large monitors, this means your image should be at least 1900px wide and 720px tall, or ideally 2200px wide. Some images will look fine when blown up larger and some won’t, so you will need to experiment when designing each of your posts. You may optionally set custom colors instead of header images if you don’t want the full-screen images to appear on your posts.
Recommended Image Sizes
The Writer uses two primary images in the templates: Featured Images/Video and Post Background images.
Featured Images or Video appear at the top of the content on the post or page, but below the title area.
- For best results, upload images at least 850 pixels wide for display in posts and pages or at least 1600 pixels wide for full-width pages.
Post Background images will fill the colored space behind the post title in the list page blocks and appear full-screen at the top of posts.
- For best results, upload high-resolution images at least 1900 pixels wide and 1000 pixels tall for full-width backgrounds. For tiled backgrounds, any image size will do.
If you have existing content in WordPress, download and run the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin
Post Types, Page Templates & content Structure
The Writer focuses on the standard content types in WordPress, Posts and Pages.
Your homepage will display all posts from all categories in chronological order by default. Categories will use the same format when viewed separately. Both of these views support infinite scroll.
The Blog page template can be used if you are using a plugin to exclude specific categories on the homepage, and need a way to show all posts chronologically. This template uses traditional pagination.
The Archives page template is identical to Blog, but is included for those of you who want to modify the template to create a custom view. This template uses traditional pagination.
Before your site will look like our demo at all, you must add some content and customize your menu. Once you’ve populated the post types with text and a featured image or video, they will appear on your homepage.
Detailed instructions on adding and customizing posts is included on the following pages of this guide, or you may use our Demo Content file below.
Quick Setup
Setup time for the Writer should be extremely quick compared to the majority of our themes as it has no custom post types or homepage widgets. For average WordPress users, setup should take less than 30 minutes.
This guide provides detailed instructions for setup and configuration of WordPress and the theme. You may also access quick tips and links to documentation from within WordPress under Theme Options → Help, and inline from each WordPress screen under the Help link in the upper-right. At a minimum, you must do the following:
- Ensure → is set to Your Latest Posts.
- Ensure→ is set to anything but default and Saved
- Follow the core setup articles:
Demo Content
If you prefer to pre-load our demo content into your theme to get a head start, you may use our demo content file below.- Right-click the below link and choose Save File As or your browser equivalent
- Unzip the downloaded file to find the the-writer_demo-content.xml file
- Go to → and click WordPress
- If prompted to install the plugin, follow the steps to install and activate.
- Browse to the the-writer_demo-content.xml file and click Upload and Import.
- You will be prompted to import authors and users from our demo site. Select your name from each drop-down to assign posts to yourself so these users are not creted on your setup.
- Click the "Download and import file attachments" box to attempt to import our demo images.
Customization
Post Content
To enable some level of art direction, the Writer pioneers a unique feature in our Post Options panel that allows WordPress users with a little CSS knowledge to take individual post customization further than the built-in options allow. This feature allows you to set specific fonts for copy or titles, set background colors, keep a header image from appearing in the post view, and change individual element colors. We provide a help article at the end of this documentation series with some tips for using Custom Post CSS.
We also provide pre-formatted elements for your post content such as dividers, drop-caps and columns. Learn more about this here:
The Writer: Obox Editor Styles
Colors
And for customization of the theme’s overall color scheme, you may use the WordPress customizer:
Infinite Scroll
Infinte Scroll may be enabled for The Writer 1.2.3 and later via the Jetpack plugin and will be automatically enabled in homepage and category views.
Support
For help with common issues you may encounter, check out our Knowledgebase first. If you can’t find the answer there, head over to our Support Forums and post your question in The Writer forum. You should receive a response within 24 hours on weekdays.
For help with modifying templates or changing functionality in The Writer, we can provide basic direction and may refer you to hire a pro. Please understand we are not able to write custom code or go into detail about how to implement CSS customizations or mods that are not explicitly needed to fix a programming error in our code.
