How To

Overview

Retreat is a revolutionary Tumblr-like WordPress theme that allows you to very easily publish snippets of content, whether they be images, videos, audio, articles, quotes or links.

After you have installed the theme you will have a custom coded Tumblog publishing form accessible right from your WordPress dashboard, allowing you to publish content much quicker than using the default WordPress post publishing pages.

Your posts will then be arranged according to their type of content and accessible on the front end via the javascript powered post navigator at the top of your website.

Important installation note

Please note there is an important first step after installing the Unite 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 taxonomies used in the Retreat theme.

Explaining the “Tumblog” taxonomy

Once you have installed the Retreat theme it creates a new option in the WordPress backend under the “Posts” panel. You will now see “Tumblogs”. This is new functionality, thanks to WordPress 3.0 that allows you to create a new type of post.

Custom taxonomies are useful when developing/customizing themes as you can create custom templates for specific taxonomies, i.e. we could have a specific template for blog posts, and a specific template for tumblog posts.

As can be seen above the “Tumblogs” taxonomy is different to categories. You can now assign a post to certain taxonomies AND categories, so it can be very specifically filed away in the archives.

Using the Tumblog dashboard facility

Once you have setup your categories, as documented above, you can now start using your Tumblog dashboard publishing facility to publish content.

Publishing content using this is quite self-explanatory. Click on the button of the type of content you are wanting to publish and then fill in the fields with the corresponding content. Once you hit the “Submit” button the post will be published to your website. Easy as that!

When you click this an area will load below the editor which will allow you to set the Post Status, Post Date/Time, assign the post to multiple categories and to multiple tumblog taxonomies (it is by default assigned to the relevant tumblog type). This is great for using the Dashboard Tumblog widget to draft posts and post date them even.

Widgets

Custom Retreat widgets

This theme includes 1 widgetized zone and 5 custom widgets that you can add to any of them.

• Woo – Flickr
• Woo – Live Twitter
• Woo – Blog Author Info
• Woo – Adspace Widget
• Woo – Search

Setting up your live Twitter feed

Retreat comes with a unique twitter widget that we have not packaged with any other themes. The live Twitter widget is an ajax based module that looks for specific keywords across Twitter, added via the widget options. For example you can include not only your tweets, but tweets mentioning you as well. Simply add the keywords the widget must search for in the “Search String” and everything else is done for you. The “Limit” sets the amount of tweets to display, whilst the “Rate” is how frequently the twitter widget must update, we suggest something around “15000”.

Setting up the “Blog Author Info” module

This widget allows you to place content in the sidebar about you, your company or your site in a neatly designed space. It is a simple widget with lots of flexibility best described in the screenshot below.

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Page Templates

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