Windmill 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.x, 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.

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.

Global

Under the Global section, you can find options that impact on the layout of the theme, as a whole.

The theme layout is split in three areas: the header, the footer, and the page content, that lays between the two of them and that changes according to the URL you’re visiting.

The header is the top portion of your website, and consists of two sub-regions, that are the Header Bar, and the Page Header.

While the latter contains the website’s logo, the former is an horizontal stripe that contains the website’s navigation and social and search icons.

If you plan to add social icons to your Header, check out the Social networks section of this document.

Adding a logo to your website

By default, the theme displays the Site Title and Tagline, which can be set under the WordPress General settings.

If you choose to add a logo to your website, you can do so by using the Logo control in the Page Header section: you’ll notice that there are actually two controls to use, one for standard screen definitions, and one for high-density screen definitions, such as Retina displays.

This means that if you’re logo doesn’t look right on a high-density device, you’ll probably need to upload a bigger version of it and choose it as the ‘High density’ logo.

The Header Bar stays fixed on top when scrolling down the page. When you do it, you can choose to have a small logo popping in from the side of the screen.

You can choose which logo to load in this situation, by modifying the Small logo option in the Header Bar section. This option also comes in two varieties, one for standard definition devices, one for high-definition devices.

Creating and associating menus

To make your website have a navigation system, you’ll need to create a Menu first. You can do so by heading to Appearance > Menus in the admin area, select a name for your Menu, and click the Create Menu button.

After you’ve created a menu, make sure you associate it to the Primary Menu theme location, for it in order to be displayed in the Header Bar.

You can also choose to associate the same menu to the Mobile Menu theme location: this menu location is used to specify which menu is used on mobile devices.

Adding an Instagram stripe above the Header Bar

By installing and activating the WP Instagram Widget plugin, a new set of options will be accessible in the Header section of the Global option page.

After properly configuring the options, for example inserting a valid Instagram username, a set of images picked from the latest of the specified account will be displayed above the Header Bar.

The footer is the bottom portion of your website. The footer options give you the ability to display a centered logo, both for standard and high definition screens and a list of social networks links as well as a small copyright text.

If you plan to add social icons to your Header, check out the Social networks section of this document.

By installing and activating the WP Instagram Widget plugin, a new set of options will be accessible in the Footer section of the Global option page.

After properly configuring the options, for example inserting a valid Instagram username, a set of images picked from the latest of the specified account will be displayed at the very bottom of your website, just above the copyright text, if set.

Home

The home page is the front page of your website.

By default, WordPress will show a list of your latest posts as your home page. The amount of posts being shown depends on the Posts per page setting under Settings > Reading in the admin area. Keep in mind that altering such parameter, will also change how many posts are displayed in archive pages.

You can also choose to have a regular page as the home page of your website. After you’ve created a page and published it, head over to the Settings > Reading screen in the admin area, and select it under Front page displays > A static page.

After you’ve set a regular page to be the home page, you’ll be able to editing the contents of your new home page by editing the page itself.

If you choose to display a list of your latest posts in your home page, you will find a specific set of options dedicated to your home page under the Windmill > Home screen in the admin area.

Blog

The Blog area of the option page is dedicated to manage options for individual posts pages and blog archives.

Single post

In the Single post tab, you’ll find options that allow you to switch on or off the display of some elements regarding the post when it’s displayed in its individual page, reachable from its permalink (they have no effect on loops).

Each option you see listed in this tab, can be overridden by each post in its editing screen in the admin area.

You’ll also be able to specify if all posts have, by default, a sidebar associated to them. This option is common to all blog posts, but, again, it can be overridden in the post editing screen in the admin area.

Also concerning sidebars, there’s a specific part of this document that’s dedicated to explaining how they work.

Archives

In the Archives tab, you’ll find options that allow the control of the loop in archive pages (date archives, categories and tags are treated as one), as well as to which widget area, if any, to show in those pages.

To learn more about loops, read the dedicated section of this document. Concerning sidebars, there’s a specific part of this document that’s dedicated to explaining how they work.

Social networks

Your social networks links can be managed in the Social networks section of the theme options page.

By inserting the direct links to your social profiles (by the way, mind to insert the full links, not just the username), the corresponding services will be available to be selected in the social areas of the Header Bar and the Footer.

Concerning both controls, after you’ve selected the social networks you want to display in each area, you’ll be able to rearrange their order by dragging them one before the other.

Loops

From the technical point of view, WordPress calls a list of posts displayed in a page a loop.

Loops are present in:

  • the home page, when using the blog index as your home,
  • pages using the Blog template,
  • archives pages

There are three layouts that you can use with loops:

  • Standard: in this layout, posts are stacked one after another, and they have multiple details shown, such as the author and number of comments,
  • Grid: here posts are arranged in a masonry grid layout,
  • Compact: similar to the Standard layout, but with less information.

If you choose the loop to have a Grid layout, you’ll also have an option to highlight the very first post of the loop making it bigger.

Advanced loops

For the Home page loop and loops in pages with the Blog template, advanced options are available to control what items are shown in the loop.

You can filter from which taxonomies posts must be selected, or which taxonomies to exclude from the loop.

In pages with the Blog template, you’ll also be able to control the number of items displayed in the loop, thus affecting its pagination.

Note. By activating the Jetpack plugin and its Infinite Scroll module, subsequent posts in the loop can be loaded without even refreshing the page.

Loop sliders

Before loops in the home page and in Blog page templates, you can add a slider that shows selected posts in a carousel format.

Posts sliders can pick up posts in two ways:

  • you can pick individual posts and rearrange them in the order you want them to be displayed,
  • or you can select a certain number of posts from specific taxonomies.

This theme natively supports widgets, which means that you can add sidebars to your pages, archives and posts.

Settings that regard sidebars can be found:

  • In the Search page tab of the Global options page: these options will govern which sidebar, if any, will be shown in your search results page,
  • In the Home options page: when using the blog index as your home page, these options will allow you to select which sidebar, if any, will be shown in your home page,
  • In the Blog > Single post options page, valid for individual post pages,
  • In the Blog > Archives options page, valid for all blog archives,
  • In each post’s editing screen, overriding the setting previously set under the Blog > Single post options page,
  • In each page’s editing screen.

There are a number of plugins that manage sidebars in the official WordPress repository, and that can play along nicely with the sidebars system provided in this theme.

Customizing the theme

Theme customization in terms of colors and typography happens thanks to the Kirki plugin, that is freely available on the official WordPress plugins repository, so make sure to install and activate it.

When you open the WordPress Customizer, you’ll see a bunch of custom panels available, namely:

  • Site title
  • Typography
  • Colors
  • Header bar
  • Blog
  • Footer copyright

Concerning colors, they can all be controlled from the Colors panel, so for example changing the highlight color there, will impact in several places in the theme.

Typography works in the same way. In the Typography panel you’ll be able to change the main font family, used for the entire body copy, as well as font families used for headlines throughout the theme.

Note: keep in mind that panels like Blog can also edit headlines, in terms of size and spacing.

If you want to modify the menu color, you’ll find the relative controls in the Header bar panel of the Customizer, while if you want to edit the Copyright portion of the website, the Footer copyright panel is what you want to look at.

External plugins

If you haven’t done it already during the installation process, the suggested plugins can be installed by heading over to the Appearance > Install Plugins screen, provided by the TGM Plugin Activation tool.

You can go to this page at any time to install and update plugins, and activate additional functionality for the theme.

WooCommerce

By installing and activating WooCommerce a new option tab will be created under the main Windmill options panel.

WooCommerce options will allow to display custom sidebars in the Shop page, in archives pages of Product Categories and Tags, and in the single Product page.

Read more about sidebars in specific part of this document that’s dedicated to explaining how they work.

Also, a WooCommerce panel will be added to the WordPress Customizer screen.

WP Instagram Widget

By installing and activating the WP Instagram Widget plugin, a new set of options will be accessible in the Header and Footer sections of the Global option page.

After properly configuring the options, for example inserting a valid Instagram username, a set of images picked from the latest of the specified account will be displayed above the Header Bar or in the Footer, just before the Copyright text.

Yoast SEO

The Yoast SEO plugin works out of the box with the theme. Additionally, enabling Yoast will display authors’ social icons in single blog posts pages, if set in the author’s profile.

YARPP

You can enable the display of related posts in single posts pages by activating the Yet another related posts plugin.

You can select the appearance of related posts in the YARPP settings page, under Settings > YARPP.

Contact Form 7

The theme supports forms created with Contact Form 7.