Step 1: Add some authors!

From your wordpress dashboard, create accounts for your authors.

To do this, go to Users -> Add New.

Now go to Users->All Users. Find the new users, hover over the name, and see “edit” appear. click edit.

Now scroll to the bottom of the form, see the section

Custom profile information by XOXO

enter a twitter name if you have one (like @aliseya).

and check the box if you want this author to show up on the home page.

Step 2: Create Categories for your top navigation menu

In wordpress, you make new posts (articles), and put them in categories. so before we make a post, let’s make some categories.

in the admin dashboard, go to Posts->Categories.

give the new category a name, a slug, and at the bottom, check the box to show it in the navigation.

it won’t show up yet. that’s because there are ZERO articles posted to this category.

make a few categories (you can always delete them later) and check the box to show it in the navigation.

now that you have a few categories that are pinned to your navigation, let’s make an article (post).

go to Posts->Add New

enter a title, and some text. the important thing is to add a category (see the red circle). you can add more than one. then hit the blue publish button (above the red circle).

now that you’ve posted an article in the category, you’ll see the category link at the top of your website!

Step 3: Add featured products

This is a feature unique to this theme. The photos and products that show up on the right hand side of the home page are there because they are posted to the “Featured Products” category.

To create a product here, go to Posts -> Add New. Give your post a title, a featured image, and put it in the “Featured Products” category. Finally, and most important, in our custom product link section, include the link to where people can buy the product. Hit “Publish” and your product post will be created.

Step 4: Customizing the links at the bottom of the page.
To do this, go to Appearance -> Menus.

Create a new menu.

Now in the box on the top left, it will say “Your theme supports 1 menu, Select which menu you would like to use.”  In the drop down titled “Bottom Section Menu” select the new menu you just created. Now this menu will show up at the bottom.

Many of our themes use the Easy Restaurant Menu Manager plugin for creating your menus.

To edit your menu, login into the WordPress admin panel and select the “Manage Menus” item.

To change the categories in your menu, select the “Edit Categories” link.

To change the items in your menu, click the “Edit Items” link.

When adding a new menu item, make sure you add it to the category you want it in!

The Sweet Treat theme is a restaurant theme that features rotating images on the home page. For details on how to set up these photos as well as set up other photo galleries, see this post Creating new Photo Galleries.

It also features a menu management using the Easy Restaurant Menu Manager plugin. For details on how to activate this plugin and how to update your menu, please see this post Adding a menu to your theme.

Most other options are set in the the admin panel under Appearance -> Theme Options. Go to this page, and look at what’s available!

If you have any questions, email us at support@xoxothemes.com or post a question in our forum at http://support.xoxothemes.com

The Foodie theme is a restaurant theme that features rotating images on the home page. For details on how to set up these photos as well as set up other photo galleries, see this post Creating new Photo Galleries.

It also features a menu management using the Easy Restaurant Menu Manager plugin. For details on how to activate this plugin and how to update your menu, please see this post Adding a menu to your theme.

Most other options are set in the the admin panel under Appearance -> Theme Options. Go to this page, and look at what’s available!

If you have any questions, email us at support@xoxothemes.com or post a question in our forum at http://support.xoxothemes.com

Our restaurant themes are built to use the Easy Restaurant Menu Manager. When you install the theme, you’ll be prompted to install and activate this plugin.

When you click “Begin installing plugin”, you’ll be taken to this screen

From here, select the Easy Restaurant Menu Manager plugin, and select Install.

Now that the plugin is installed, you’ll have a new menu item in your admin panel “Manage Menus”

From here, you can add and remove items from your menu. For more details on how to do that, see this article
http://blog.xoxothemes.com/updating-your-menu/

Some themes allow you to specify what the name of the Menu link is in your main navigation. If the theme you’re using has this feature, you’ll see it in “Theme Options”.

If you have any questions, email us at support@xoxothemes.com or post a question in our forum at http://support.xoxothemes.com

When you install the one of our themes that feature photo galleries, it will automatically create two Categories for you. The first is “Gallery”. The second  is “Featured”. If you delete these categories, the theme will recreate them, since they are required for the theme to work.

To showcase photos on the homepage, create a post in the “Featured” category, and set the image to be used as the featured image. It is not necessary to resize the photo before upload, but you may want to if you want precise control over the cropping. You must add a title to this post.

(Create a new post in Gallery -> Featured)

(Set photo as featured image for this post)

To create other galleries, first create a new category, “Headshots” for example, and make sure you set the parent category to be “Gallery”. This is required for it to show up on the Gallery page. Once you have this new category, add posts to it and be sure to set a featured image. You can add as many new gallery child categories as you like.

If you have any questions, please email us at support@xoxothemes.com or post a question in our forum at http://support.xoxothemes.com

Here, we discussed how to automatically create a WordPress Category. Now we’ll extend it a bit further by showing you how to create a WordPress page. We use this in our themes that have a static home page. First we create the necessary ‘Blog’ and ‘Home’ pages, then we tell WordPress to use a static home page.

So onto the code:

First you want to see if the page you are creating already exists:

If it doesn’t the next thing to do is create it:

All of this goes in your functions.php file, but we don’t want to do this every time functions.php is loaded, so we wrap this in a function, and also only execute this when we’re in the admin panel.

putting it all together, we have this:

Any questions? Ask us in the comments!

If you’re going to use WordPress as a CMS, then you’ll definitely want to display all of the pages in your blog. Just displaying all of the pages is really quite simple.

To do this, you want to get all of the pages, and then for each one, print out a link to it. Like this:

That’s the basics of it. Once you get that going, you’ll probably want to add some styling. Also, if you want to use drop down menus, then you’ll want to create a page hierarchy. But we’ll cover that in a later post.

Happy Blogging!

Vanity is a portfolio wordpress theme that allows you to easily showcase your best work, or yourself on your website.

When you install the Vanity theme it will automatically create two Categories for you. The first is “Gallery”. The second  is “Featured”. If you delete these categories, the theme will recreate them, since they are required for the theme to work.

To showcase photos on the homepage, create a post in the “Featured” category, and set the image to be used as the featured image. The image will be cropped to 200×200. It is not necessary to resize it before upload, but you may want to if you want precise control over the cropping.

To create other galleries, first create a new category, “Photos” for example, and make sure you set the parent category to be “Gallery”. This is required for it to show up on the Gallery page. Once you have this new category, add posts to it and be sure to set a featured image. You can add as many new gallery child categories as you like.

Vanity uses a static home page.  This means the home page is not your blog, and the the viewer has to click another link, in this case “Blog” to see your blog. When the Vanity theme is installed, it will set up the necessary pages and adjust your WP settings for you. In case you’re wondering what exactly was done, see this post, but don’t worry, it’s all done for you in the background.

Vanity is a customizable theme, so be sure to login into your WordPress Admin panel and go to Appearance -> Theme Options to see what options are available. This page is where you can select the theme font, specify a logo to be used in place of text, set the link to your facebook and twitter pages. Go to the theme options page to see all of the available options for this page.

If you have any questions, please email us at support@xoxothemes.com

If you are looking for this theme in our store, go here.