How to Set Up Gonzo WordPress Theme

Gonzo WordPress Theme is a very cool, colourful, energetic, responsive theme that suits very well with any entertainment, gaming, travel, artwork, food, or photo blogs. If you have lots of photos (or at least one image) in each blog post, Gonzo is indeed a great theme. But if you don’t, Gonzo will display a “no image” thumbnail on your post, I don’t see any on/off switch for thumbnail image display, so it doesn’t look too cool with all those “no image” thumbnails. Anyway, how does one setup a site like the Gonzo demo site?

Similar to setting up Modernize theme, first you need to create a page, name it “Home”. Edit the page, under Visual tab, you see some little Gonzo icons, the first one allows you to set the width of each module, the third one (looks like a m) allows you to select what kind of module you want to use. Assuming you want to display titles from all categories using module B, the shortcode is [loop category=all module=b ]. Now you go check your page, and you might ask where is that pretty image slider? The trick is that you need to select “Homepage” as your page’s Template, then you will get a slider which can display a maximum of 8 featured images. Also, you might want to remove the “Home” page title and save again. 🙂

Gonzo puts quite an emphasis on Category page setup, you can change colour, select background, add description, activate a featured slider, etc. There are two common problems that new users might encounter:

1. Your thumbnail images look a bit too oversized – If you have read the documentation, it can be easily fixed by running the “Regenerate Thumbnails” WordPress plugin.

2. The thumbnail images under the WordPress Popular Posts tab are way too big – Go to the widget area, under the “WordPress Popular Posts” setting, set width and height as 50 pixel.

gonzo_wordpress_theme_homepage_layout

01-17-13 How to setup Gonzo WordPress Theme Homepage? How to setup the homepage like the one presented in the Gonzo demo? Some friends are confused about the homepage setup, here I’m trying to write a bit more.

First, in “Pages”, “Add New”, name it “Home” or something, remove the page title. In “Page Attributes”, select “Homepage” as “Template”. In the demo image, the module A area has 2 main columns. If you like that, put the following code in your “Home” page. Save.

[loop category=all module=a ]
[loop category=all module=a ]

In WordPress Reading Settings, remember to set “Front page displays” as “A static page”, select “Home” as your “Front page”. Since you already removed the page title, you will only see a blank line in the pull down option, that’s your “Home” page. The above is just an example, if you want to show a specific category, replace “all” with your category slug, e.g. [loop category=some-blog-money module=a ].

If you want to use module B layout, simply put [loop category=category-name-01 module=b ] [loop category=category-name-02 module=b ] [loop category=category-name-03 module=b ] … in your “Home”.

If you want to use module C layout, put the followings in “Home”.

[loop category=abc module=c ]
[loop category=def module=c ]
[loop category=ghi module=c ]
[loop category=jkl module=c ]

Now you will see 4 little columns below your image slider.

When you “Edit Page”, under the “Visual” tab, there is an “Insert Columns” button. That is all up to you to decide how you want to play with the columns’ width. For example, you can try this:

[one_third][loop category=all module=c ][/one_third][two_third_last][loop category=all module=c ][/two_third_last]

If you leave some space on top of the above code, the contents will not align properly.

If you want to use Gallery Module, make sure you select your blog post’s format as “Gallery”, or they won’t show up in the Homepage.

06-05-13 If your image slider is not pulling images in your category page, like just showing a loading gif, make sure that 1. In that category setting page, check “Enable Featured Slider”, 2. In your blog post page, on the right hand side, set a “Feature Image”, 3. in your blog post page under “Single Post Options”, you have clicked “Featured Post?”. If you have done 1 and 2 but not 3, you will get that loading gif and no featured images showing.