How To
Introduction
Announcement is a unique WordPress theme with it’s usage extremely diverse, with modules enabling it to be an announcement site for either a birth, graudation, wedding or even a business product/service launch. More detailed documentation below on how to set it up for exactly your requirements using either of these layouts, or by creating your own custom layout with a combination of modules.
The Announcement theme comes with support for 2 menus. The Primary Menu is located below your theme header. The Top Menu (not show in the demo) will appear in a strip across the top of the site. You can activate the top menu under “Appearance > Menus”. See documentation on “Menus” for more info.
The Birth Announcement Homepage Layout
![woo-ann-birth-explained](http://woocommerce.test/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/woo-ann-birth-explained.jpg)
The Graduation Announcement Homepage Layout
![woo-ann-graduate-explained](http://woocommerce.test/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/woo-ann-graduate-explained.jpg)
The Wedding Announcement Homepage Layout
The Business Announcement Homepage Layout
![woo-ann-business-explained](http://woocommerce.test/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/woo-ann-business-explained.jpg)
Creating your own custom Announcement Homepage Layout
You can use any of the 4 pre-defined layouts documented above for your Announcement homepage, we’ve made it even more flexible though – you can create your own layout for your announcement!
By dragging numerous instances of the “Woo Component” widget to the “Homepage” widgetized region you can create a flexible custom homepage.. completely widget based.
Set up all the theme options for the modules you want to use, as you would for the pre-defined layouts, then just place the widgets in whatever order you like. Please note: the homepage widgets placed will overwrite the layout selected in the theme options with the widget based layout.
![announcement-custom](http://woocommerce.test/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/announcement-custom-600x327.jpg)
![Screen Shot 2011-08-10 at 13.45.37](http://woocommerce.test/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Screen-Shot-2011-08-10-at-13.45.37-600x421.png)
Setting up the photograph slider
The unique homepage photograph slider can be used to display photos relevant for the announcement.
![announcement-photograph-slider](http://woocommerce.test/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/announcement-photograph-slider-600x344.jpg)
The Announcement photograph slider pulls the custom “slides” post type. The number of slides displayed at once is set under the “Photograph Slider” theme option’s panel. You can set the animation speed and slide interval under the theme options.
Adding a slide
To add a slide simply follow these steps:
- Go to Slides > Add New.
- Type a title for the slide and add body content if you wish a caption to display with the overlay image when the slide is clicked on.
- Add a “Image” in the Custom Settings panel which will appear as the background image.
- Publish the slide.
![announcement-slide](http://woocommerce.test/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/announcement-slide-600x363.jpg)
Multiple columns for your “Content” and “Occasion Details” modules
With Announcement, as with our Editorial theme, you can further customise the look of your content within a blog post by using the “Column Options” in the Announcement Custom Settings panel below your WYSIWYG editor.
Please note this is reserved for the “Content” and Occasion Details” modules.
Just follow the step-by-step guidelines below.
- Give your post a title and add your content using the post editor, as you would usually in WordPress.
- Add an excerpt for your blog post if you don’t want one automatically generated as the first “x” characters of your blog post.
- Under the “Announcement Custom Settings” add an optional featured image under “Image/Embed Options”, as well as an optional video embed code if your post has a video in it.
- The all important “Column Options” allows you to specify how many columns to split your post content into. In the above example we specified a 2 column with a narrow left column and wider right column. You can then specify how many columns the post title, image gallery/slider, and except should span.
- Seeing we specified the 2 column layout for the post content we need to place only one column divider in our post. Place it like you would a “Read More” break anywhere in your content. Look for the “Add Column Break” button next to the WooThemes shortcode button in the WYSIWYG editor.If you were to choose a 3 column layout for your post content you’d need two column breaks in your post content.
![editorial-column-break](http://woocommerce.test/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/editorial-column-break-560x429.jpg)
![announcement-columns](http://woocommerce.test/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/announcement-columns-600x479.jpg)
Widgets
Custom Announcement widgets
The theme includes 8 custom widgets that you can add to any of your 4 widgetized footer regions, or in your primary widgetized region reserved for when you create your own custom homepage layout. Go to Apperance > Widgets to add these to your theme.
The custom woo widgets included are:
- Woo ââ¬â Component (Use if you are creating a custom homepage layout)
- Woo ââ¬â Adspace
- Woo – Search
- Woo – Twitter Stream
- Woo – Flickr
- Woo – Blog Author Info
- Woo – Embed/Video
- Woo – Subscribe/Connect
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Page Templates
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