Actually, this post is a reminder of how I setup the Modernize theme. When I first activated the theme, I was surprised! Where’re the blog post titles? There’s no title, no sidebar! Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy with this theme purchase. It is just that Modernize is a powerful theme with lots of features, it’s not a turnkey theme. A little adjustment here and there would make it work perfectly. The theme comes with a help file, but I still need to get the theme running by trial and error. And I have really bad memory, so I better jot it down, lol.
1. This theme requires you to upload your own logo. If you don’t have one, download Gimp, create a simple one, remove the background layer and save as a .png file. Upload and replace the file default-logo.png.
2. If you want a blog with a right sidebar, you need to first “create” a sidebar and name it, maybe “Right Sidebar”? Then your “Right Sidebar” will appear in the widget section.
3. Basically you can do anything with your front page, put a slider, gallery, portfolio, anything you like. If you just want it to look like a blog, add a “blog item”. First create a page, name it, maybe “Home”? In Settings, Reading, set front page displays “A static page”, i.e. your “Home”. Edit the “Home” page, add the “blog item”, make it 1/1, edit the item, you can set how many blog posts to display, length of excerpt, etc…
4. I use a plugin called Auto SEO Tags, which auto-generates tags from visitors’ search queries. The default tag area only has a height of 16px, which is only good for a few tags. So I adjust the height by modifying div.single-thumbnail-tag in the style.css file or simply remove the height attribute. Actually, I even moved that blog post info part to the bottom, edit single.php, cut line 49-61, paste it after line 116. Next, I want to remove tags in the Archives/Categories page, so I remove line 215 (the_tags…) in \include\plugin\blog-item.php.
5. This theme comes with captcha, contact template, pagination, and social shares, so I deactivated some previously installed plugins. Somehow Shareaholic placed useless space between the post title and content, so I had to remove it.
6. Archives/Categories pages use its own sidebar. Stuff that you put in your blog’s “Right Sidebar” would not appear in Archives/Categories’ sidebar automatically, you have to re-add everything in widget section.
3-2-13: Few days ago, I tried to upgrade my theme to version 3.01, I encountered a little problem. Everything worked fine, except the header background was in a red colour of some sort! So I emailed GoodLayers for help, and I received a prompt reply within hours. To solve this problem, you need to visit the theme’s admin panel and “Save Changes”. 🙂