How To

Theme Overview

The Listings theme is one of our most feature rich themes to date. Where Canvas offers you huge flexiblity in terms of design and layout, Listings offers you huge flexibility in creating custom post types, taxonomies and advanced search facilities. It is the perfect solution for anyone needing to efficiently create a directory-based website.

When installed the theme activates a module called the Content Builder where you can create your custom post types, taxonomies and custom fields. Before we go any further we strongly recommend you watch the video overview of Listings that will give you a good idea of it’s power and capabilities.

Important installation note

Please note there is an important first step after installing with Listings theme. You need to navigate to Settings > Permalinks and click on the “Save Changes” button, even if you haven’t made any changes. This is to register the custom post types used in the Listings theme. Also if you make any changes to the permalink slug or custom post types/taxonomies in the theme options/custom builder. In other words when in doubt why the page isn’t loading, make sure you check that the permalink structure has been updated.

Video Overview/Tutorials

An Introduction to Listings – Part 1

A general overview of our Listings theme, which is one of our most powerful themes and allows any niche business to create a listings/directory based website thanks to a Woo-powered content builder for custom post type, taxonomy and custom field generation. The theme showcases your listings in a minimalistic style with advanced search capabilities and the ability to upload a listing from the front end.

Theme Options for Listings – Part 2

In this tutorial we go over the unique theme options available to you in our Listings directory based theme. We cover the search options, general labels, popular keywords, the listings category panel, featured slider, upload a listing template and Google maps integration.

Our Listings demo setup

For demonstration purposes we’ve used the Listings theme to set up a car sales site, but you can use it for whatever your requirements. After the theme was installed we used the custom post type that Listings install by default. You however can create your own custom post type and remove “Listing” if you want. A few tweaks we made:

• Used the “Listing” post type to create vehicle postings.
• Labelled “listingtype” – “Make” under the “Custom Taxonomies” section of the “Content Builder”
• Under “Makes” we added vehicle makers like Audi, BMW, Hyundai, Toyota, etc.
• Labelled “listingfeatures” – “Vehicle Features” under the “Custom Taxonomies” section of the “Content Builder”

The content builder

Content Builder Video Overview

In this tutorial we go over the WooThemes content builder, the backbone of the Listings directory theme. With it we build a band directory site and it’s corresponding custom post type, taxonomy and custom fields. All with the click of a few buttons.

Explaining custom post types and taxonomies

Often website content doesn’t necessarily fit into the two post types WordPress offers by default – blog posts and pages. If you want to list books, music, cars, locations, etc on your site it would be better to have another post type dedicated to what you want to list, reserving blog posts for your company/site news and the pages for the static content like “About us”, “Contact Us”, “Services”, etc. That’s where Listings and the content builder comes in handy creating additional custom post types.

Not only that you can also create taxonomies. A taxonomy is way of classifying data in WordPress. What this means is that you can better separate your data in both the frontend and backend. Until WP 3.0, there were only 2 major built in taxonomies – categories and tags, both of these for posts. This allows you to manage your data more efficiently and to extend the default usage of WordPress to include new powerful features.

An example: You could create a custom post type called “Books” and then create a taxonomy under that called “Genre” and/or “Authors”, etc. Or you could create a custom post type called “Vehicles” and have taxonomies like “Make” and “Features”. Refer to the theme overview video for more information.

The Listings home page layout

Below is a screenshot of the Listings home page with each of it’s modules explained. More detailed documentation below.

Setting up the featured slider

The home page featured slider can be used to display noteworthy blog posts or custom post types – this is because it is tag based. Once you have specified the tag it must loop through to display posts, make sure you add that tag to the blog posts / custom post types you want to feature. It will display the title of the post, the excerpt, and the optional, but important, custom image which is the focal point of the panel.

Adding the tag to the post is important, as is specifying the image to use in the “Listings Custom Settings” panel below the WYSIWYG editor on the Add/Edit post form.

Widgets

Custom Listings widgets

The theme includes 9 custom widgets that you can add to any of your 6 widgetized regions – 1 primary sidebar, 2 sub column sidebarsl and 3 footer widgetized regions.

The custom woo widgets included are:

• Woo – Tabs
• Woo – Flickr
• Woo – Adspace
• Woo – Address
• Woo – Overview Map
• Woo – Embed/Video
• Woo – Blog Author Info
• Woo – Twitter Stream
• Woo – Standard Search

[insert name=”adding-widgets”]

Page Templates

[insert name=”page-templates”]