Consulting Documentation

Consulting - Business, Finance WordPress Theme

A short guide and general information to help you get to know your new theme.

Above all, We would like to thank you for purchasing this theme, your contribution is very much appreciated.

This document covers the installation and use of this theme and reveals answers to common problems and issues - We encourage you to read this document thoroughly if you are experiencing any difficulties. If you have any questions that are beyond the scope of this document, feel free to pose them in the dedicated support forum.

Installation of the theme

To install this theme you must have a working version of WordPress already installed. For information regarding the installing of the WordPress platform, please see the WordPress Codex - http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress

Installation

When you are ready to install a theme, you must first upload the theme files and then activate the theme itself. The theme files can be uploaded in two ways: FTP Upload - Using your FTP client, upload the non-zipped theme folder into the /wp-content/themes/ folder on your server WordPress Upload - Navigate to Appearance -> Add New Themes -> Upload. Go to browse, and select the zipped theme folder. Hit “Install Now” and the theme will be uploaded and installed. Once the theme is uploaded, you need to activate it. Go to Appearance -> Themes and activate your chosen theme. After that you need to activate the pre-installed plugins: Here you can see video tutorial of Installation the theme:

Choose a DEMO

There are several layouts (demo versions) of the theme. You can check out them here - http://consulting.stylemixthemes.com/landing/ and choose suitable layout for you. Installing the chosen layout depends on importing the demo content.

Activate the theme and Import the demo content

After completing installation of the theme, you need to activate your product under Consulting -> Product registration following these instructions:

After this you can choose and install the demo content under Consulting -> Demo Import: Each demo layout requires a number of plugins to function properly. Fortunately, StyleMix Themes has made it easy for you to install the plugins and they will be installed automatically during demo setup proceed. In order to start the import proceed, click on the Setup layout button. Setup Layout feature installs all required plugins, imports the chosen demo layout and widgets. After finishing the proceed you can visit your site front page in order to see all ready features.

What if the Import fails or stalls?

If the import stalls and fails to respond after a few minutes You are suffering from PHP configuration limits that are set too low to complete the process. You should contact your hosting provider and ask them to increase those limits to a minimum as follows:

• max_execution_time 600
• memory_limit 128M
• post_max_size 32M
• upload_max_filesize 32M

You can verify your PHP configuration limits by installing a simple plugin found here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-php-info. And you can also check your PHP error logs to see the exact error being returned.

Setting up the Homepage

To set up the homepage you must create a new page, you can do so by navigating to Pages > Add New. The title for this page can be up to your liking. Under Settings -> Reading or Appearance -> Customize -> Site Settings -> Static Front Page please setup the new Homepage. Actually you can set any page to be your homepage. Once it’s created you can compose your homepage layout. The design layout is created under Bootstrap framework which is split into 12 columns grid. Each widget has its own maximum and minimum widths, so depending on that you can work out the layout for each page. As you can see the homepage just like any the page is now 100% constructible out of the modules we have in Visual Composer. The homepage can be created by any element in Visual Composer. To view the short manual on how to use the Visual Composer, please follow this link:
http://codecanyon.net/item/visual-composer-page-builder-for-wordpress/full_screen_preview/242431 The detailed documentation of Visual Composer can be found here also - http://vc.wpbakery.com/video-tutorials/

Theme Customization

WordPress Customize allows you to setup the general styling of the website visually. In WordPress menu go to Appearance > Customize. Here you can setup most important options of your theme. Site Settings:

• Logo & Title: You can setup basic site options like: Site title, Tagline, Logo & its dimensions and Favicon.
• Static Front Page: You can select default Front and Blog pages here.
• Style & Settings: There are Color Skins and default Layout options. Here you can select one of 7 basic color schemas or set your custom colors, enable/disable Boxed version and show/hide Frontend Customizer.

Header:

• Top Bar: Here you can enable/disable Top Bar & WPML Switcher and add your company office addresses, contact information and working hours.
• 
• Socials: Here you can select displayable social icons.
• Header Appearance: You can enable/disable Header Search form & Sticky menu and select one of the basic header styles.

Archive Pages: Choose archive pages layout, sidebar and its position. Shop Pages: Here you can select Sidebar and its type/position and number of displaying products on Shop page. Footer:

• Layout: Here you can change the footer logo & its dimensions, the copyright text and split the footer into widgets. Also specify the number of widget areas.
• Footer Socials: Here you can select displayable social icons.

Post Types: You can setup/change Title, Plural Title, Rewrite URL and Icon for custom post types Typography: Set up the fonts out of free google fonts. Besides this you can setup font weight, font size and line height also. Socials: You can add your company social URLs here. Custom CSS: Here you can add your custom styles. Menus: You can add/edit menus here Widgets: You can set up the widgets into the precreated areas. You can do the same later Appearance > Widgets.

Header Mega Menu

You can enable Mega Menu feature for your Header menu under Appearance -> Customize -> Header -> Header Appearance settings. After this you can got to Appearance -> Menu in order to change your menu items appearance. For first parent of the theme mega menu includes parameters like:

• Mega Menu type - Boxed or Wide;
• Mega menu columns - it sets how many columns would be your Mega Menu child elements;

Mega Menu child elements also have special options such:

• Mega Menu column width;
• Mega Menu child columns width;
• Mega Menu icon;
• Mega Menu content image;
• Mega Menu textarea;

Footer area setup

The footer is the same on all pages. You can see whole options via Appearance -> Customize -> Footer. Here you can set up:

• Footer logo and its dimensions;
• Count of additional Widget Areas;
• Footer Text;
• Copyright;

Also you can set other areas up on the Widgets page (Appearance > Widgets) and choose from the suggested widgets. Please see the attached screenshot.

How to set up the sidebar

In this theme we paid special attention to Sidebars for your biggest convenience and on multiple previous requests. We have two types of sidebar: right sidebar and left sidebar, which can be selected for both of archive and single posts/pages. In addition to that, you can add/create a new sidebar with VC Widgets/Elements, in this case you will need to go here: Edit or create a new sidebar, and add any sections you need by means of Visual Composer For archive pages you can set sidebar options up via Appearance -> Customize -> Archive pages For single pages/posts you can add sidebar via Widgetised Sidebar or STM Sidebar VC element

Adding Images to Revolution slider

You will need to upload various images to the Layer slider. You can add items from Revolution Slider plugin in the WordPress backend. When you go there first you need to create the new Slider, and add new slides. More detailed manual you can find here - http://www.themepunch.com/revslider-doc/slider-revolution-documentation/.

Menus

There are two navigations on the site – Header menu and Footer menu, so you can adjust them under Appearance -> Menus This is standard Wordpress functionality, you can choose from the pages, post categories, or custom links.

Adding Custom Icons

Apart from Theme and Visual Composer Icons you can include your own Icons in your site. Firstly it needs to generate fonts of your custom icons. You can do it via uploading your ready .SVG and generating fonts here - https://icomoon.io/app/ Then you can upload your fonts .zip archive file (which you have downloaded from IcoMoon) via Appearance -> STM Icon Manager -> Upload New Icons.

Localization

You can change your site main language via Settings -> General -> Site Language Before adding translations for static strings it needs to rename language files correctly according your site languages. Theme language files are located in a ../consulting/languages/ folder. You can find a list of language codes at WordPress in your Language. As an example, the language code for English is en_EN, so you would save the translated files as en_EN.po first, then en_EN.mo. There are several ways to fill up translations. One of them if using PoEdit platform. You can add translation via editing your .po file and at the end PoEdit generates .mo file for you. Then you needs to upload ready translation files to primordial folder (../consulting/languages/). Another way is to use a localization plugin like: Loco Translate

Setting up Content Pages and Posts

All pages can be created as simple content pages or built by means of Visual Composer page builder. You will need to first set up the page and then add and set up content blocks. Just add a row and add the modules to row from the Visual Composer dashboard. Now you can choose how to compose your template. Add Content modules, Testimonials, etc. You have everything to realize your imagination. We have also included extension packages for Visual Composer. You can use them free. Just pick the module you like and add it to the row. Then you can edit it. You can also edit the row background, add video or parallax images to the background. Just click on Row edit icon and you will see the options & features, which are available for this row. Custom added shortcodes in our theme are on a separate tab: Besides this, each page contains these options which include header color or background image, title fonts and colors, breadcrumbs and button settings:

Blog page

TThe Blog page is a usual blog, formed from the posts which belong to categories created by you, which have tags and featured images that show in the post listings on the blog page. You can set a page as a Blog posts archive page via Appearance -> Customize -> Site Settings -> Static Front Page: The blog page can have the sidebar on the left, right or no sidebar, and the contents of the sidebar, as described above, are set under the Appearance -> Widgets. Other settings of this archive page you can setup via Appearance -> Customize -> Archive pages: Blogs can be posted by someone who has the access to the backend of the site with admin or author role. Anyway that person will be able to log into the WordPress panel and have a user profile. Default blog layout is grid layout and once you set up an empty page in the theme setting where it is said blog, it will show posts in grid layout.

Services

There is a custom post type to describe a service your company offer via any element visual composer offers you: Also you can add Services as a Grid or Carousel for any page using custom STM VC elements:

Testimonials

In order that you could create testimonials in one place and then use all over the site, just inserting a VC element, we have created custom posts. Each testimonial is a simple post:

Works

Works are created as another custom post type called Testimonials. It has Categories that can be ordered as needed. Here you create just single post. You can add an Image, Title and Category(es) for each Work post. So basically, you create an individual post describing for each work in your Cases archive. After that you go to the Works > Add new. On the new page you should insert Our Works shortcode from Visual Composer. After that you can have options go make your works view Grid (by default) or Grid with filters and select Columns and Image size:

Vacancies

Again we have used a custom post type to describe vacancies of your company. There are extra fields for a vacancy (Information) apart from any element visual composer offers you: In order to display all vacancies in any page you need to add Vacancies STM VC shortcode:

Staff page

You can add your company staff and their additional information via Staff menu: There are two view types how to display your company Team: List and Grid. You can add Staff List VC element in a page and set its options up:

WooCommerce shop

WooCommerce is the most popular e-commerce plugin for WordPress. Now you can have a shop with all e-commerce features on WordPress. Before you start adding products, please go through the WooCommerce plugin settings and specify everything you need for your shop: Adding the products: You can easily add new products via Products > Add Product You can read more about Woocommerce here also - WooCommerce Documentation

Update the theme

There are 3 methods to update our wordpress themes to newer version. These new updates are essential if you want to have a bug free website as we give new features and improvements to the theme over time. Some of these updates might be needed in order to make the theme compatible with wordpress newer versions. There is no risk on losing your settings and pages. However if you have done modifications on core theme files, then they will be lost, so you should back up those files.

Update Through Wordpress Admin Panel (Envato Extension)

It's possible to update the theme easily via Dashboard -> Updates, after entering correct API credentials via Customize -> Site Settings -> One Click Update:

• Envato Username - your ThemeForest (or Envato) username (i.e. Stylemixthemes).
• Envato API Key - secret API key you have on ThemeForest. You can create a new one under the Settings > API Keys section of your profile.

Update Through Wordpress Admin Panel (using extra plugin)

• For this method you should first install Theme Upgrades Tool (http://wordpress.org/plugins/easy-theme-and-plugin-upgrades/)
• Unzip the file you just downloaded from ThemeForest and locate the WordPress Theme.
• Click on Appearance > Themes in your Dashboard. Still within the Themes section, on header tab, click on Add New, then on header second tab click Upload Theme.
• Click Browse… and locate the new theme file.
• In the Upgrade existing theme? Option choose Yes from the dropdown list.
• Click Install Now and Activate the theme.

Updating using a FTP software

• Login into your Themeforest account and go to downloads (Dashboard > Downloads)
• Download the theme into your computer
• Install an FTP program (Filezilla is free) Retrieve your FTP login information from your hosting admin panel and login into your hosting via FTP
• Unzip the item main file and locate theme archive file and unzip it. Make sure your unzipping software do not create extra directory with the same name nested into each other.
• Drag and drop theme main folder into your FTP program with the destination : YOUR_HOSTING_ROOT/YOUR_SUBDIRECTORY/wp-content/themes/
• FTP program will give a warning that there is an existing with the same directory name, choose replace all.

Also, remember to clear your browser cache after each update if you notice anything off. Old theme files can persist in your local cache and make you think something's wrong. Again, thank you for purchasing this theme! If you have any questions that are beyond the scope of this document, feel free to pose them in the dedicated support forum at www.stylemixthemes.com