Shrake

Getting Started

After activating Shrake, you can jump in and start customizing your theme right away by going to Appearance → Customize. You’ll find options for adding a logo, changing the colors and background, assigning Custom Menus and front-page settings, and managing how your content is displayed.

Detailed documentation for working with the theme’s unique features are included below. If you run into any issues or have a question, you can find more help in the following places:

  • Check out the Help tab at the top right of each screen in your dashboard.
  • Search the online using Google. Usually very helpful.
  • Ask a question on Cedaro.com.

Site Logo

Your site’s title will be displayed in the header area of Shrake by default, but you can easily replace this text with your own site logo or custom image in the Customizer:

  • Go to Appearance → Customize
  • Click the Site Title section to expand it
  • Upload a new image in the Logo field

You may also customize the site title in this section, or hide it to display the logo by itself.

The site logo has a max height of 60px and works best with square or horizontal images.

Homepage

Your homepage is typically one of the first pages most visitors see when browsing your site. Shrake is designed primarily as a blogging theme, but it’s possible to use a Page instead.

Read the instructions for Setting up a Static Front Page if you’d prefer to use a Page for your homepage. You’ll also want to create a page for displaying your latest posts — see the Blog section below.

Blog

By default, WordPress will display your Posts on the front page of your site as showcased in the Shrake theme demo. Alternatively, a static front page can be used, too.

When using a static front page, you’ll also want to be sure to create a Page for your posts. This step isn’t necessary if you’re not using a static front page.

If you haven’t already done so:

  1. Go to Pages → Add New to create a new page for your posts
  2. Give the page a title (“Blog” or “News” work well)
  3. Click the Publish button to create the page

To assign a Page as the front page:

  1. Go to Settings → Reading
  2. Select the page you just created in the Posts Page dropdown
  3. Click the Save Changes button

Now when visiting that page on your site, it will display a list of your latest posts. Be sure to add it to your Primary Menu so your visitors can easily find it.

Post Formats

In addition to standard posts, Shrake has built-in support for three more Post Formats: Asides, Links, and Quotes.

Custom Menus

Custom Menus provide granular control over the links that appear in the various navigation areas on your site. Shrake supports two menu locations: the Primary Menu navigation and the Social Menu (the social icons in the footer of the demo).

You can create and assign menus by going to Appearance → Menus.

Primary Menu

The Primary Menu appears just below the Site Title and is the most important tool for helping visitors navigate your site.

Submenu Navigation

Shrake provides a unique way to include submenu navigations. When setting up the Primary menu items, any page that has a submenu item will display the submenu navigation when that page is being viewed. An example of this menu can be seen on the homepage of the Shrake demo.

Social Menu

The Social Menu allows you to display links to your social media profiles as icons. Each menu item should be added as a Custom Link. Shrake will automatically display the correct icon based on the link URL. For example, a link like https://twitter.com/audiotheme will display a Twitter icon because the theme has detected it is a URL pointing to Twitter.

The following icons are bundled in Shrake for use in your Social Menu: CodePen, Dribbble, Facebook, Feed, Flickr, GitHub, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, Vimeo, WordPress, YouTube.

Widgets

Shrake features one widget area in the footer of each page, just above the social links and site credits. Any widgets added to this area will display in a three-column grid on all pages.

Featured Images

Posts and pages can be assigned a Featured Image to display as a large, full width image just above the page title and content for posts, pages, and the homepage. If the browser height is large enough to display the full image height, the entry content will scroll over the top of the featured image, hiding it as it goes up. Otherwise, the featured image will scroll with the content.

A featured image does not display on Post archive type pages.

For the best fit, we recommend making the featured images at least 1280x600. Images will be resized down to fit the 1280px width and cropped from the top down to 600px high. Images will also be resized to be full width if they are smaller than 1280px wide.

Page Features & Templates

Full Width Template

The default page template in Shrake limits the content to 1040px wide on large screens for optimal reading, but a Full Width page template is also included for allowing content to expand the full width of the screen.

  1. Create a new page or edit an existing page
  2. Find the Page Attributes box and select the “Full Width” option in the Template field

Grid / List Template

Shrake includes a special functionality that allows you to display child pages in a visually appealing grid or list view. Here’s how the Grid Page template looks in the demo. The following documentation covers how to setup the Grid page template, however, the List Page Template is identical.

To begin adding your Grid Page items, you first need to set up the grid parent page archive:

  1. Go to Pages → Add New
  2. Give the page a title (we used “Books” in the demo)
  3. Find the Page Attributes box and select the “Grid Page” option in the Template field.
  4. Click the Publish button to create and save the page

You can also enter a short introduction in the main content editor, but it’s optional for this page. Now that the page template archive is set up, you can start adding child page items:

  1. Go to Pages → Add New
  2. Enter the title of the record
  3. Set the grid page thumbnail as the Featured Image
  4. Find the Page Attributes box and change the Parent to the page you created as the Grid/List Page template setup above (this is important)
  5. Optionally, add a short excerpt to be shown below the entry title on the Grid page archive. We’ve done this in the theme demo by adding “View | Buy” book links.
  6. Click the Publish button to create and save the page

Now when you visit your Grid page, you should see your first child page listed. Continue adding new child pages by following the same steps (always be sure to set the “Parent” page as the Grid parent page).

Other Options

More options can be set via the Customizer.

Custom Background

To customize the background — the default is white — go to Appearance → Background and either choose your own color or upload a background image.

Read more about customizing your background.

Archive View

The Archive View setting offers more control over how the content on archive pages of your site appears. It can be found in the Theme section of the Customizer.

By default, content for standard posts won’t show on archive pages unless a custom Excerpt has been saved. Content for other Post Formats will always show.

The “Full Text” option will display the post content in full. The post content may still be truncated using the More Tag.

The “Summary” option will display an excerpt of the content. By default, WordPress will create an automatically-generated excerpt from the post content. Alternatively, a custom excerpt can be created using the Excerpts module.