Content Creation
- Assign categories to posts to differentiate between apps, ddgsources, and ddg challenges.
- When you choose a category, category-specific fields will appear below the title at the top of the post.
- Add a “read more” tag somewhere in your post to define everything that precedes it as the article’s “Excerpt” that appear on most pages that list more than one post. Alternatively, enter the text to appear as the excerpt in the box pictured here.
- Make sure to assign a featured image to the post (also see same picture). This is the picture that will be displayed on the home page and any other list page, among other places. It is set to automatically link to the full post.
- If you aren’t using Elementor, try to avoid over-formatting, and stick to the basic heading types and basic paragraph style whenever possible. If you paste content copied from the web or Microsoft Word, WordPress will copy the formatting style of the text. For simpler Word docs that’s OK, but more complex pasted content may end up looking terrible, To solve this problem you may need to toggle the Paste As Text button in the visual editor before pasting. It’s the clipboard T icon in the second row.
Advanced Layout Options with Elementor
I recently installed a plugin called Elementor that vastly simplifies the creation of advanced layouts. You don’t need to read all of these to understand how to use the plugin by any means, but I include these all here in case you want to learn more or are having problems with a layout. This article is laid out with Elementor, take a look to see a couple basic features in use.
Here’s a guide to getting started with Elementor.
Media Galleries
Portfolio pages and anywhere else you want a unified gallery of images for a slideshowor photo grid, you should create a media gallery. These are not just a series of images in the content field, but they are easy to set up and edit.
When adding media, the left sidebar has a “create gallery” option.Skim this guide to working with galleries.
Contacts page
The contacts table data can be found in TablePress in the wp-admin sidebar menu. After every major set of modifications, I suggest exporting a backup as CSV.
Theme Modifications
The Theme Customizer gives you quick, visual editing capabilities for sidebars, menus, and many aspects of the theme design. To access it, first navigate to the page you want to customize, then look for the customize button with a paintbrush icon in the administration toolbar (of course, you must first be logged into the admin). The sidebars for a few different pages and footer elements are defined in the Widgets Panel. One available widget allows you to place a navigation menu, and we use a secondary navigation menu in one of the footer widget areas.Guide to WidgetsThe main navigation is defined in Appearance > Menus. So is the secondary community links in the footer widget area.
Developer Notes
- Our child theme is located here on GitHub: https://github.com/beekman/DDG-Knowledge-Base
- WordPress Developer Documentation (great reference resource)
- The best resource I’ve seen for understanding which pieces of the theme are used for which pages is WP Hierarchy.
Example from the text there:
In looking to find the template to use to present all the posts for given author, let’s make that authors username “david” who has a numeric
idof3. WordPress needs to know what file from your current theme or its parent theme to use. So here’s how it looks through your theme files::
- Does the file
author-david.phpexist in the child theme? No…- Does the file
author-david.phpexist in the parent theme? No…- Does the file
author-3.phpexist in the child theme? No…- Does the file
author-3.phpexist in the parent theme? No…- Does the file
author.phpexist in the child theme? YES!
The child theme is always checked first. This is a really important thing about the template hierarchy and child themes—their files always beat those of a parent, where the template hierarchy is concerned.
