How To

Important: Please have a thorough read through the WooCommerce Codex and familiarise yourself with using the plugin and it’s various features. It will stand you in good stead when setting up your theme.

Setting up the homepage

After activating Shelflife you will see that your homepage looks a little empty, unless you had existing content that is. This section explains how to populate your homepage with content.

The first thing you will notice is that there are no products on your homepage. This is easily remedied by simply adding some products to your store.

Once you’ve got some products and content we can start making your homepage shine. There are a few sliders built into Shelflife so let’s talk about those real quick and how they work. All the slider options are conveniently organized into one option labeled obviously “Sliders” in your theme options.

As you can see in the Sliders option are the three sliders we’re going to setup. The Featured Products, Popular Products, and Promotions sliders.

Featured Products Slider

The name says it all, this slider shows off your featured products. First of all you need to set a few of your products as featured. You can do this from the product view in WooCommerce, or when editing an individual product.

Once you’ve a few featured navigate to Shelflife>Sliders>Featured Products. You then have the option to enable this slider and also exclude the products featured here from the More Products section.

Featured Product Slider Setup

It then looks sleek and sexy on your home page, much like this.

Popular Products Slider

The popular products slider displays your products that receive the highest ratings from your customers. There are a few options you have over this as well. You can of course enable the slider via Shelflife>Sliders>Popular Products, then choose the number of popular products to display and how many to group together.

Popular Product Options

Promotions Slider

Our last slider of Shelflife is a promotion slider. This sits just below your popular products and shows off any current promotions you have running. When you activate Shelflife it registers a custom post type called Promotions that you use to add these. Navigate to Promotions>Add New to get started.

You can enter a title here that will show up on the homepage, unlike the text in the edit window. This doesn’t show up on the homepage in the promotion slider. From here you can add a featured image if you are using the WP Post Thumbnail option.

Below this is the Excerpt window which is important to fill out. This is what displays below the title. Finally below that are the Shelflife Custom Settings. Here you can upload your image if using the TimThumb resizer, and put the text and url for your call to action button.

Creating A Promotion
Promotions On The Homepage

Mini-Features

Below these three sliders is the mini-features area. Here you can highlight unique product or company features. You can link to either an image or video and both will open in a lightbox. To create a mini-feature navigate to Mini-Features>Add New and you will see this screen.

Title your mini-feature and write about it in the mini-features excerpt box in the Custom Settings. From there you also have a few custom settings to utilize. You can use the Featured Image or Mini-Features image to set an image for your post. Then of course set a url for it to link to. From there you can also embed a video and a video url for the lightbox to use on the homepage.

Creating a Mini-Feature

More Products

The more products feature is easy to setup. At the top of your theme options is the one option to choose to pick the number of products to show. These appear below the mini-features. Simply choose a number and you’re off.

More Products Settings

Site Search

The search bar in Shelflife is found below the More Products section and is a pretty cool part of the site. You can add your shops phone number and email address to the search bar. Navigate to Shelflife>Homepage and then input your phone number and email address.

Searchbar Settings
Shelflife Search Bar

Homepage Content

Finally below all of this are more options to setup. Go to Shelflife>Homepage to setup these up.

Homepage Settings
Homepage Blog

Widgets

Homepage Content

The theme includes custom widgets that you can add to any of your widgetized regions. Go to Apperance > Widgets to add these to your theme.

The custom woo widgets included are:

[insert name=”adding-widgets”]

Page Templates

[insert name=”page-templates”]