Agncy documentation

Contents

Installing WordPress

In order to be installed, the theme requires that you have a working WordPress installation, locally or on you web space.

If you need help installing WordPress, you can head over to the official WordPress documentation page to get started.

If this is your first time using WordPress, you can also take a look at a few other pages that might help you understand the basics:

Technical requirements

To use the theme, the minimum WordPress version required is 4.4. From the technical point of view, your host must support at least the following:

  • PHP 5.2+
  • MySQL 5+

Concerning PHP, even if the minimum version required is 5.2, we strongly encourage that you use a newer version, such as 5.6 or 7.0, both for performance and security reasons. If you’re not yet on those, talk to your host and enquire about the possibility of activating one of those versions on your account.

Suggested PHP configuration settings

Every once in a while, you might encounter a problem that is somehow related to the configuration of the PHP that’s running on your host. In order to try to prevent those errors from happening, we suggest that you make sure that you have the following settings in place:

  • max_execution_time: 180
  • memory_limit: 96M
  • post_max_size: 32M
  • upload_max_filesize: 32M

Suggested WordPress configuration settings

In order to increase the memory allocated to your WordPress installation, you also need to follow these steps to set a specific memory limit.

Installing the theme

After purchasing Agncy you can download the theme package from your ThemeForest “Downloads” section.

You can either choose to upload the theme to your server via FTP, or use the WordPress theme upload function. In either case, please make sure to upload only the archive file named after the theme, contained in the main package you downloaded (e.g. if the main package is called “Theme v.1.0”, you want to upload the “theme.zip” file contained in it).

If you are new to WordPress and have problems with theme you might want to check out this page on the Envato help.

Are you getting the “Theme is missing the style.css stylesheet error“? take a look at this page for explanation on how to fix this issue quickly.

Theme installation wizard

Upon theme activation, you will be redirected to the theme wizard installation procedure, which is intended to guide you in your first steps with the theme.

The one click installation procedure will install and activate all the required plugins in order to make the theme work properly.

If you mind to skip this procedure or something goes wrong with the wizard make sure to follow the instructions in the “Required plugins” section below in order to manually activate all the plugins needed by the theme.

Required plugins

In order to use all the theme features you need to activate the following plugins, which are required by the theme:

  • Evolve framework, our backbone option framework,
  • Agncy companion plugin, which declares the custom post types used by the theme.

The following plugins are not necessarily required by the theme, but are strongly suggested to take full advantage of its functionality:

  • Brix page builder, our proprietary page composer, since all the demo pages are built with it,
  • Agncy demos importer, that will allow you to install our demo content.

If you decided to skip the theme installation wizard, or something went wrong during the wizard installation, you’ll find links to enable the required and suggested plugins under Agncy → Install Plugins, in the WordPress administration area.

Installing demo content

Agncy provides one pre-built demos that you can import and use right away on your installation.

In order to perform the installation of the demo content, please make sure that the Agncy demos importer plugin is installed and active, and then, from the Agncy section on your WordPress backend, navigate to the Demo content tab to find a list of all the available demos.

In this page, the demos are displayed in a grid-like layout. Moving your mouse over an image will make two action buttons appear, to preview and install the demo: while the first is a simple link to the demo preview, by clicking on the Install button, an installation procedure will start and all the pages and images needed by the demo will be added to your installation.

Please note that the images used in the online demo will be replaced with creative commons images from Unsplash. Images are always intended for demo purposes only.

How to update

Agncy is updated regularly, bringing in new features, providing security enhancements, fixing bugs, and generally be compatible with the latest and greatest WordPress version available.

When a new update is published, there are two ways for you to update your theme.

Auto updates

In order to receive updates notifications for the theme you’ll need to install the Envato Market WordPress plugin, which will take care of the whole process for you. Please refer to their documentation page about how to set it up correctly.

Auto updates work with child themes as well: in the case an update to the parent theme is available, you will be able to update it automatically and transparently without touching the child theme’s code.

Manual updates

As soon as a new update comes out, the new updated version will be available on your ThemeForest Downloads section, making sure to download the Installable WordPress file only.

After you got a copy of the updated theme, you have two options:

Log into your site via FTP or cPanel and delete the old theme folder and then upload the new archive you’ve just downloaded and unpack it in the themes directory.

Make sure you make a backup of the old version of your theme just in case something goes wrong.

Another choice that you have is to rename folder that contains the now old version of the theme. This will allow you to successfully upload the new version of the theme.

In the case you’re manually updating the theme, make sure to only update the main/parent theme, not any child themes that you might be using.

Updating the required/suggested plugins

When a new theme update comes out, the required/suggested plugins, even when they’re distributed as a bundle together with the theme itself, may require to be updated as well.

Should that happen, a warning sign will be displayed near to the Agncy item in the WordPress admin menu. By going to that page, you’ll see a notice that will tell you which plugins need to be updated and will give you instructions about how to do it.

Child themes

You might be wondering, “Should I install a child theme?“

This is a good question and the answer is a resounding yes! If you’re not familiar with child themes, here’s a good place to start knowing them a little more.

Long story short, activating a child theme allows you to receive all the theme updates available, without compromising your customizations, because they would be in fact done on a different theme.

This is also why the version number of the child theme will never change: in order to perform an update to your theme, even if you’re using a child theme, you’ll always only need to update its parent theme.

Widget areas

Widgets are fully supported in Agncy, as they’re used in various parts of the theme, such as Headers, Footers and they’re also available to be used in the Brix page builder plugin.

Agncy allows you to create additional Widget areas, with a sidebar creation tool that’s integrated in the Appearance → Widgets section of the WordPress admin and that will allow you to create an unlimited number of sidebars.

After a Widget area has been created, it will appear under the User-registered widget areas panel in the Widgets administration screen.

Theme options

The Agncy global options can be found under the Agncy → Options page in your WordPress admin area and are divided in Global options and Post Type options.

If you navigate to Agncy → Options → Header you will find options that will allow you to specifically configurate the header portion of your website.

The header can use one of two templates:

  • An “horizontal” layout, with logo and navigation aligned, with optional widget areas on the right,
  • An “hamburger” menu layout, with the logo on the left, and an icon that will trigger an overlay menu on the opposite site.

You can select which layout to use by changing the Layout setting.

If you’ve chosen the “horizontal” layout, which is also the theme’s default, the two Widget area options below it will allow you to select which widget areas to display next to the logo and navigation elements.

You can upload a grand total of four logos in the theme:

  • The main logo that will be used when using a light background (theme default),
  • The mobile logo, loaded on mobile devices only,
  • A main logo that will be used when using a dark background,
  • The white mobile logo, used on dark backgrounds on mobile devices.

You can upload your logos by navigating to Agncy → Options → Header and then finding the Logo settings.

Mobile menu

The Mobile drawer skin setting allows you to control which colors are used in the mobile panel menu that will appear when triggering the menu display on mobile devices.

If you navigate to Agncy → Options → Footer you will find options that will allow you to specifically configurate the footer portion of your website.

Just like the header, the footer as well can assume different forms, as it can either be:

  • A special tailored preset, which displays the website’s logo on the left and a series of horizontally and vertically arranged widget areas on the right, with copyright on the bottom,
  • or a set of colums, each one of them being a different widget area, over which you’ll have full control.

To select which preset is going to be used by your footer, alter the Layout setting. According to your selection, different options regarding the columns layout and widget areas used will appear below the main preset radio button control.

There are two different main settings regarding footer appearance:

  • You can have the footer to be fixed on the bottom of the page, initially hidden and shown upon scrolling down the page (theme default),
  • or you can have it “relatively” positioned like the rest of the page, hence visible by default.

You can choose which one is going to be used by checking/unchecking the Fixed reveal option.

Similarly to other parts of the theme such as mobile navigation, the footer as well has its own “skin” settings, allowing you to choose which colors combination is going to be used in the footer portion of your website (Background skin setting).

Global options

Under the Agncy → Options → Global options page, you will find site-wide options.

One of them is the Google Maps API key setting that is needed if you want to display maps for the Office content block in Brix.

Search & Blog

Under the Blog section, you’ll be able to control page Layout, loop layout and which sidebar is used in posts’ single pages, archives or blog index. Similarly, you can do the same with the Search results page.

Social

Under the Agncy → Options → Social page you will be able to set your social networks addresses. These social networks will be used by the Social widget that you can use in the theme’s widget areas.

Brix Page Builder

The documentation for the Brix page builder is available at the official website. Also, a number of video tutorials are available on Brix’s YouTube channel.

Projects

The Projects Custom Post Type it’s an easy and powerful way to showcase your works and create an amazing portfolio.

You can access to the Projects section from your WordPress admin interface.

Being a CPT, you can create multiple projects, and then group them together in Portfolio-like pages creating content using the Brix page builder plugin, using its Portfolio content block.

Single projects

Project pages can either be composed using the regular page content, like you would do for a post or page, or using Brix.

Single projects can also be filed under Project Categories: categorized projects can then be filtered in Portfolio pages.

Additionally, projects support a number of options:

  • Layout: this represents the layout for the top portion of the project page. You can choose among three different layouts:
    • A simple layout with the project title on top of a wide featured image,
    • A layout that features the project image as a background for the header portion of the page, with logo, navigation and project title on top of it,
    • A layout that has the project image boxed in the middle that has a nice and smooth entrance effect.
  • Video allows you to link to a video (self-hosted, YouTube or Vimeo) in the header, using the featured image as a poster image for it, if the Use video instead of featured image setting is checked,
  • Meta data: The most interesting aspect of the single project Data meta box is that the same meta data isn’t only displayed in single project pages, but can also be used later in Portfolio pages to create amazing multiple filters. There are three built-in metas that can be used in your projects: year, role and client. If you need to add other meta data of your choice, you can easily do so by using the agncy_projects_metas filter.
  • You can set a Subtitle to be used for each individual project. This subtitle can either be a combination of project metas, or its categories, or being a completely custom text.
  • After the project page content, you can opt to display social sharing links and/or having a projects navigation block, to link to other works of yours.

Portfolio pages

Portfolio pages can be easily created using the Projects loop generated by the Portfolio builder block, that will allow you to display a list of Projects in different formats.

Optionally, you can also enable a Filter on top of the list of Projects, so that individual items can be filtered by Project Category, or meta data.

External URLs

If your project showcase is hosted somewhere else (like on Behance, for example), you can fill the External URL setting to bypass the regular WordPress permalink and link to that URL instead.

Color

You can indicate an accent color for the project by filling the Color setting with an hex color code.

To facilitate things, every time you upload and select a new featured image for the project, a palette composed by five colors extracted from the image will be presented to you to choose from.

The color of the project will be used in page transitions to the project page.

Offices

The Offices Custom Post Type allows you to indicate your agency’s working places. Offices do not have a single page, but can be show using the Offices content block in Brix.

Each office is defined by its textual content, a richly-formatted >Address, a set of Coordinates used if you want to show its physical location on a map, and a set of Meta data in key/value pairs.

Offices are also referenced by a hidden “Offices” taxonomy, that is used to link to other custom post types such as Jobs. Every time you will create a new office, and entry to that taxonomy will automatically be created, using the same name.

Office Brix content block

You can display data from a particular office using the Office content block in Brix.

After selecting the office you want to link to, a number of options will be presented to you:

  • Which Media to display above the office data, choosing from the office image or a map that will use the office coordinates,
  • Switches to turn on/off the office address/contact details,
  • A select that will allow you to link to another specific page of your website.

Team

The Team Custom Post Type allows you to manage your team. Each entry in the CPT represents a person of your team, with the following data:

  • The name and/or surname of the person should be inserted in the CPT title, and their bio should go in the textual content of the entry.
  • A textual Role for the person,
  • An Image used in Brix content blocks that loop trough team members,
  • A featured image use in single team member pages.

Team Brix content block

You can display all the components of your team using the Team content block in Brix.

When loading the Team content block, it will essentially create a loop through of team members arranged in a grid format. The number of columns of such grid can be selected from the block options.

You can also specify which Image size to use in the loop concerning team member images.

Jobs

The Jobs Custom Post Type allows you to create a job ad for your firm.

A job is composed by the following data:

  • A title, usually describing the position you’re looking for,
  • A description, that gives a little more details about the requirements for the job.

A Job can be associated to a particular office, by associating it to a term in the Offices taxonomy on the left.

If your job opening has a page hosted somewhere else, you can fill the External URL setting to bypass the regular WordPress permalink and link to that URL instead.

Job Listings Brix content block

You can display all the available jobs using the Job Listings content block in Brix. The block can either pick up all the jobs that are currently published in the website (which means that if you want to hide one you can simply set its status to draft instead), or you can opt to select only jobs that belong to a specific office.