How To

Important installation note

Please note there is an important first step after installing the Statua 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 and custom taxonomy used in the Statua theme.

Navigate to Settings > Permalinks. Click on "Save Changes" to register the custom post types.

Once you have installed the Statua theme on your WordPress 3.+ website you’ll see a custom panel called “Statua” in your WordPress backend menu, with the theme options, etc. within that panel. You’ll also see a custom post type panel that appear in the backend menu – “Photos”. This custom post types is used to display photo content on the home page, archives and gallery template.

Statua Media Settings

Before adding photos to your Statua based website we highly recommend you update your WordPress Media Settings to cater for the various optimized image sizes for the Statua layouts. Navigate to Settings > Media and add the image dimensions listed below.

The correct image dimensions for the Statua theme

Adding photos

Adding photos to your Statua based website is easy. Follow the step-by-step below:

  1. Navigate to Photos > Add New
  2. Give you photo a title
  3. Add your photo(s) using the built-in WordPress “Featured Image” panel. After uploading your photo(s) you must select “Use as featured image”. This image will be the featured one used on the archive pages and home page when applicable.
  4. If you wish to add more photos to the post add them via the “Add an image” button. Once you’ve uploaded the images click the “Save changes” and close the popup box. There is no need to add the gallery into the post itself as the theme will do the work for you.
  5. Add a description of the photo(s) in the post content.
  6. Assign the image to a gallery, or create a new gallery if required.
Adding a photo post. Note the photo uploaded via the "Featured Image" panel, and the gallery the photo post has been attributed to
Adding more than one photo to a post using the WordPress "Add an image" function.

Statua home page layout

The Statua home page is hugely flexible thanks to it’s 3 alternate layouts you can use for this page, or any other sub-page. The home page also comes with 4 widgetized footer regions where you can place specific widgets to appear.

Below are screenshots of the three layouts available for the Statua home page. More detailed documentation below.

Layout A includes a large featured slider to showcase the latest photos.
Layout B is also slider based, but displays a description along with the photo and if there are more than one photo in a post it will display like above.
Layout C shows your latest blog posts in a grid structure with a hover animation to show a description and title for the photo.

Setting up the home page

First decide on what home page layout you would like to use, see the screenshots in section above. You can also view all three home page layouts in action on our demo:

Then navigate to the Statua > Theme Options page in the WordPress backend and click on the “Homepage Layout” panel. Select the layout in the drop down box and decide whether you want your recent blog posts and a widgetized sidebar to display on the homepage too.

The Statua homepage layout chooser.

For example, in the demo we chose Layout A, so we then navigated to the theme options for Layout A to further customize it.

The Layout A theme options.

Setting up the gallery page

The “Gallery” page template lists all the “Photo” posts. The photo custom post type has a “Galleries” taxonomy which works as blog post categories, but for photos.

First we need to add a new WordPress page and dedicate the “Gallery” template to it.

Assign the gallery page template under "Page Attributes".
The Gallery theme options.

Adding the gallery menu items

If, like in our demo, you want to add a Gallery, with drop-down menu in your header navigation you must navigate to the Appearance > Menus page in your WordPress backend and add the gallery page template as a menu item, with it’s sub-items being pulled from the gallery custom taxonomies. See the screenshot below to explain.

Adding a gallery menu item to your header navigation.

Setting up the blog

First you must dedicate a page to your blog so that you can have a “Blog” menu item in your navigation, and a page reserved for blog posts. The same process applies as adding the gallery page documented above. Create a new page, assign the “Blog” template to it and publish the page. Voila.

The Statua blog template must be assigned to your blog page under "Page Attributes".

Widgets

Custom Statua widgets

The Statua theme comes 5 widgetized regions – 4 dedicated to the footer section and 1 to the sidebar. It includes 8 custom widgets that you can add to your widgetized sidebar.

The custom woo widgets included are:

[insert name=”adding-widgets”]

Page Templates

Gallery Page Template

The “Gallery” page template lists all your “Photo” posts on one page, and is documented above.

See the gallery page template in action on our Statua demo.

Blog Page Template

The “Blog” page template lists all your blog posts, a completely separate post type to that of your photos. Here you can list your latest news, case studies and stories behind the photos you’ve taken.

See the blog page template in action on our Statua demo.

Layout A, B and C Page Templates

These 3 layouts discussed in more detail above in the documentation are different layouts designed for your home page for you to pick and choose between. At any point you can give your home page a fresh new look by activating a different layout in the theme options.

[insert name=”page-templates”]