Thank you for purchasing the TownPress theme!
The goal of this theme is to provide a powerful set of tools for small to medium municipality websites right out of the box. Being a WordPress theme, it can benefit from the whole ecosystem of this wonderful platform. There are thousands of free plugins which can extend your site's features and plenty of helpful resources where you can find answers to your WordPress related questions.
We hope you will find this documentation helpful and will enjoy working with TownPress theme as much as we enjoyed developing it.
The very first step is to install WordPress itself. Once installed, we can proceed to the theme and plugins installation.
If you haven’t already, download the full package from your downloads on ThemeForest.
When you unzip the downloaded file, you will see a bunch of folders. The most important one is the THEME folder which contains the installable theme .ZIP.
Open your WordPress admin and navigate to Appearance / Themes
Upload the installable theme .ZIP file
If you don’t know what a WordPress child theme is, please read this article in the WordPress codex. The article also explains how to create a child theme, but don't worry, the TownPress child theme is already included in the package.
This documentation assumes that you are running the child theme, so it is highly recommended to install it. The Child theme .ZIP can be found in Child Theme folder. Install it in exactly the same way as parent theme, described in previous steps.
Once you have both parent and child themes installed, you need to activate the child one.
Before we proceed to plugins installation, let's talk about them a little bit first. This theme comes prepackaged with several plugins. Basically, any major functionality (like events, directory, galleries, etc.) has a separate plugin. This has one big advantage - you can choose which one you need. For example, if you don't need the events functionality for your site (or you plan to use a 3rd party plugin for that), there is no reason to install the LSVR Events plugin. And same goes for LSVR Notices, LSVR Directory, LSVR Galleries, LSVR Documents and LSVR People plugins as well. But let's do a quick overview of all of those plugins so you can decide for yourself which ones you need:
One last thing. You may be worried that so many plugins can have a performance impact on your site. The truth is that the number of plugins alone has no real impact on the performance. It's the way they are coded that's important. Since almost all of those plugins were coded in-house, their optimization and performance is fully under our control. Also, don't forget that the quality of your hosting plays a very significant role in overall performance of your site.
Let's finally install some plugins. Once you've activated the theme, you should see a prompt message at the top of your admin informing you about recommended plugins.
After you activate plugins, head to your Dashboard and that’s it. Plugins should now be installed and activated. Remember that all bundled plugins can be found in the Plugins folder in full package, so you can install any of those plugins manually anytime you need (via Plugins / Add New / Upload Plugin).
Here is a list of some useful 3rd party plugins. You can install them by typing their name in the search box under Plugins / Add New:
The quickest way to import the demo data is using the Theme Demo Import plugin. To install it, simply go to Plugins / Add New and type "Theme Demo Import" into the search field. Once installed and activated, go to Appearance / Import Demo Content where you can import content, customizer settings and widgets separately (they should be imported exactly in this order).
Once you've imported all three (content, customizer settings and widgets), continue here.
If you want to have more control over imported data, you can do it manually. Demo data can be found in the Demo Data folder in full package.
You will notice there are several .xml files in the Demo Data folder. You can decide to import either all posts and pages or just specific post type posts.
To import the content, navigate to Tools / Import and click on WordPress. You may be prompted to install the Importer plugin if you don’t have it already. After you install and activate it, go back to Tools / Import / WordPress. Now choose which content you want to import. If you want to import everything, choose the content.xml file. If you want to upload events only, choose events.xml. You can of course do multiple imports if you want to import more than just one .xml file (for example events.xml and then documents.xml).
If you haven't installed all bundled plugins but are trying to import the content.xml file, you may notice several errors during the import process. Those are caused by the fact that posts related to missing plugins can't be imported (for example event posts without LSVR Events plugin installed). You can ignore those error messages, as they shouldn't affect the import of the other posts.
You will need the Customizer Export/Import plugin to import customizer data. Once installed and activated, go to Appearance / Customize / Export/Import and upload the customizer.dat file from the Demo Data folder.
You will need the Widget Importer & Exporter plugin to import widgets data. Once installed and activated, go to Tools / Widget Importer & Exporter and upload the widgets.wie file from the Demo Data folder.
If you did quick import or manual import with events, head to Tools / Regen. Events and hit the Regenerate button. You won't be able to see any imported events on your front-end unless you do that. If you are experiencing any issues with this tool, you will have to resave each of the event posts one by one (at least those event posts you want to display).
Another important thing to keep in mind when importing events is that by default, events archive will show only the upcoming events. But some or all of the demo events may have already ended by the time you purchased the theme and are doing the import. The demo data may not be kept up to date with current demo site. The solution is to simply change the start/end dates for each event post you want to display on your site.
You will need to set your front page and news page under Settings / Reading.
You may notice that some of the menu links won't work because they were saved as absolute URL. To make them work, either edit them manually under Appearance / Menus, or use a plugin to change them to the correct URL. Basically you need to change "http://localhost/wordpress/townpress-content" to your site's URL.
Due to some limitations of the importing functionality, some sidebars and menus may not be set properly after the import. Just go to Appearance / Widget to configure your sidebars (for example you may want to set the menu of TownPress Menu widget to "Main Menu" in the Default Left Sidebar).
Your first post-installation steps should head into Settings / General.
Time Zone, Date Format and Time Format settings will be used to display date info for all post types (including event start and end dates), so make sure they are set correctly based on your locale.
Now head to Settings / Permalinks and change Common Settings to Post name. You can also change URL slugs for all LSVR custom post types and their taxonomies below if needed.
If you've imported the demo content, head to Settings / Reading and choose which pages should be used as your Front page and Posts page. If you haven't imported the demo content, then don't forget to come back to this option once you create your front page and blog pages. More info.
If you already have some pages / posts on your site (for example via importing demo content), you should check out Appearance / Menus to manage your site's menus.
Head to Settings / Media and change the settings to the following values:
If you already have some images on your site, use a 3rd party plugin to regenerate new image sizes based on the settings above.
If you are going to use the Directory or Events functionalities via bundled LSVR plugins, or a header map, you will need a Google API Key for Google Maps to work. Here is more info on how to obtain your API key (double check the allowed domain of your API key to match your site domain, since this is the most common issue preventing Google Maps from working).
Once you have the API key, insert it under Appearance / Customize / Google Maps.
If you are going to use the TownPress Weather widget, you will need a OpenWeatherMap.org API Key, which you can insert under Appearance / Customize / Misc.
If your site is running in a language other than English, you should check out Appearance / Customize / Typography and set the Font Subsets option accordingly. Please note that not all font families support all font subsets.
You may also notice that not all Google Fonts are available - we handpicked only the most popular ones. If you need to use font which is not available, disable Google Fonts (uncheck Enable Google Fonts option) and use some 3rd party plugin instead.
The following tutorial assumes that you want to create a front page similar to the "classic home" from the demo. The preferred way to create a front page is using the WPBakery Page Builder for WordPress (formerly Visual Composer), which is bundled with the theme, so make sure it's installed and active.
Theme colors can be managed under Appearance / Customize / Colors. You can either choose from predefined color schemes, pick your custom colors or create your own color scheme. The difference between Custom Colors and Custom Scheme is that the latter is much more involved and requires some coding. On the other hand, it gives you more freedom and it is the recommended way for customizing theme's colors.
Since the Predefined Scheme and Custom Colors options should be pretty much self-explanatory, let's describe the process of creating your own custom color scheme.
$accent1: #ec5237; // primary accent color
There are many online tools where you can generate a hex code for your color, for example colorpicker.com. Just change #xxxxxx to the hex code of your custom color (don't forget that it has to start with the # sign). Feel free to change values of other color variables in the file as well.
If you are going to use this theme in any language other then English, you will need to translate it. The important part is that you need to translate the theme and all LSVR plugins you are using. Most of the translatable text is part of the admin area, so if you plan to translate only the front-end, there won't be that much text to translate.
There are two general approaches to translation. You can either use a 3rd party plugin, or do it the old-fashioned way via the Poedit software. If you prefer the plugin approach, check out their respective documentations on how to do that. We will describe the manual process of translation via Poedit.
Before we begin, download and install Poedit to your computer.
The whole process is very similar to theme translation, you just need to do it separately for each plugin. Let's translate the LSVR Events plugin for example (but it is the same for all LSVR plugins).
TownPress comes with a bunch of custom post types. Working with them is very similar to working with standard WordPress posts.
TownPress shortcodes are used primarily to build the front page. If you are in need of some basic design elements like accordions or tabs, use the bundled page builder for that. Also, the official WordPress plugins repository contains plenty of slider plugins or general shortcodes plugins.
This shortcode displays a simple icon.
[lsvr_townpress_icon icon="icon-check" id="my_unique_id"]
This shortcode displays standard (blog) posts.
[lsvr_townpress_posts title="Latest News" icon="icon-reading" category="123" limit="8" featured_limit="1" more_label="More News" id="my_unique_id"]
This shortcode displays standard (blog) posts as a slider.
[lsvr_townpress_post_slider category="123" limit="8" align="left" show_excerpt="true" autoplay="5" overlay_opacity="90" id="my_unique_id"]
This shortcode displays a custom menu. Menu can be created under the Appearance / Menus.
[lsvr_townpress_sitemap menu_id="123" columns_count="4" id="my_unique_id"]
Check out the list of all built-in icons here.
If you want to add an icon into your content, use the [lsvr_townpress_icon] shortcode.
More icons can be added via 3rd party plugins.
Please note that TownPress 1.x and 2.x are NOT compatible. If you want to update your existing site which runs version 1.x to version 2.x, you will have to basically configure the whole site from the scratch. That applies to theme options, menus, widgets, any custom theme's elements or shortcodes, but most importantly to custom posts (events, documents, galleries, notices).
Redux Framework and and LSVR Toolkit (TownPress) plugins are no longer supported in 2.x, so if you decide to update to 2.x, feel free to remove those plugins.
You can find the latest version of TownPress 1.x in the full package in "Old Version" folder.