How To

The Diarise home page layout

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

Setting up the home page

The home page is completely modular with each area being customizable via either the theme options or the widgetized regions. The home page, as set up in the theme demo, consists of:

• The Events Calendar
• The Featured Tabber
• The Blog Section
• The Widgetized Footer Region

Each of these areas can be enabled/disabled in theme options, under the “Layout” tab.

As you can see above you also have the option to show the full content or, as per default, the excerpt for the blog section of the home page.

Setting up your events calendar

The events calendar module on the home page allows you to display event based posts, or posts that you wish to advertise as occurring in the future. This is great for example for churches, schools, sports clubs, event management companies, etc. advertising services, family days, sports matches, exhibitions, etc.

Setting up this module is easy, firstly make sure it is enabled under the “Layout” tab documented above, then go to the “Event Calendar” tab and specify a category that you have categorized your event posts with, as documented in the next section.

You can specify a date range of events that must display in the events calendar module on the home page. Remember to set this up before questioning why your posts aren’t displaying.

Adding an event post

To have the event calendar module display some posts you must add some posts to the category you have specified above in the event calendar theme options. We recommend creating a category called “Events” then adding your event posts to this category.

The event posts will display the title and the excerpt, along with some custom field texts that can be added via the “Diarise Custom Settings” located under the WYSWYG editor on the Add/Edit posts window. See below:

As you can see above you can add the event start and end date, please note the end date will default to the start date and vice versa, unless otherwise specified. You can also add the times for the event if applicable and the location the event will be held at. You then have the option to add an image/logo for the event that will display on the home page under the event.

You can also publish a video to the post by placing the video’s embed code in the corresponding field.

Setting up the booking form

Diarise comes bundled with a basic booking form page template that can be used for site visitors to express interest an event by emailing the webmaster their contact details. The alternative is to set the “Use External Booking URL” where you can link the booking button in the event calendar and on the single event posts to an external site to take bookings.

Simply navigate to the “Booking Form” theme option’s panel and fill in the details. See the example below:

Makes sure you create a new page and assign the booking form template to that page.

If you experience any problems you might need to set your pretty permalink structure.

Setting up the featured panel

The home page featured panel can be used to display highlights of previous events, noteworthy blog posts or a combination of the two – 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 you want to feature. It will display the title of the post, the excerpt, and the optional image and video.

Remember to enable/disable this module under the “Layout” tab.

Widgets

Custom Daily Edition widgets

The theme includes 9 custom widgets that you can add to any of your 7 widgetized regions – 4 footer and 3 sidebar widgetized regions.

The custom woo widgets included are:

• Woo – Flickr
• Woo – Adspace
• Woo – Recent Blog Posts
• Woo – Featured Media Widget
• Woo – Customer Feedback Widget
• Woo – Twitter Stream
• Woo – Custom Nav Menu
• Woo – Tabs
• Woo – Search

The Featured Media Widget

This new widget with Diarise allows you to present certain videos, images and audio posts that you wish to highlight with visually appealing icons. For example, say you want to highlight the video of a keynote speaker at one of your conferences, but it is otherwise buried in a sea of other posts. This widget highlights a quicklink to it on the home page.

Simply define the tags you have used for the 3 different types of posts – videos, images or audio. Then make sure you have used that tag for the posts you wish to display here.

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Page Templates

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