Getting Started with Hardy

Do you need help installing or updating Hardy?

Sample Content

If you’d like to start with some example content, here’s the content from the demo. Download and unzip the file. Then use the Tools → Import tool in your WordPress admin. Need step by step directions?

Download Demo Content

Theme Options

In your WordPress admin, click on the “Theme Options” button located under the “Appearance” tab in the left menu. Here you can configure a number of options to tailor the theme to fit your needs.

General

Logo: Upload your own personal logo. If no logo is uploaded, your website’s name will be displayed in
plain text.

Favicon: Add your own favicon.

Custom CSS: Add your own custom styles.

Footer Text: Edit the footer text. Add your own copyright info, links, etc.

Appearance

Set button and link colors.

Typography

Fonts: Specify fonts from Google’s Web Font Directory for headings, body text, and home message. Be sure to type the font name exactly as it is listed on their site.

Slideshow

Here you can control the speed and animation of all slideshows created with the slideshow shortcode.

Posts

Here you can set what info is shown with your posts, and choose from large or small featured image size. You can also choose to show full blog posts instead of excerpts on archive and index pages. And set your blog to be full width with now sidebar.

Creating the Main Menu

In your WordPress admin, click on “Menus”, which is located uner the “Appearance” tab on the left. Start by creaing a new menu in the panel on the right. Once the new menu is created you can add pages, categories, and custom links from the panels on the left. You can then re-order and create submenus by dragging the menu items. When you’re finished, click the “Save Menu” button.

Adding Widgets

This theme has several custom widgets and a number of widgetized areas in which you can use them. To add widgets, click on “Widgets” under the “Appearance” tab in your WordPress admin. Click and drag a widget to one of the boxes on the right. Then set your options for that widget.

Custom Widgets

Hardy Recent Posts: Display a list of recent posts from a certain category or all categories, with the option to display an excerpt from the most recent post.

Hardy Twitter: Display your most recent tweets.

Hardy Flickr: Show thumbnails for a Flickr account. Please note the Flickr widget uses your ID not your username. If you don’t know it, this will help: http://idgettr.com/

Setting Up the Home Page

By default, this theme will display your latest posts on the front page. To activate the home page as seen in the demo, first create a new page and name it something like “Home”. As you’re creating this page, select the “Portfolio” page template in the Page Attributes box found in the right column. After you publish your page, go to Settings → Reading. For “Front page displays”, choose a static page and select your newly created “Home” page. Then save your settings.

Home Page Slideshow

This theme has a slideshow that you can display on the home page. You can enable and disable it in Appearance → Theme Options under the Home Page tab.

You can add and manage slides under the “Slides” tab in the main WordPress admin menu. By default, slides are made up of a Title, image, and description. In the Slide Options box you can enter a description, set the alignment of the text, and choose to hide the text. The recommended image width for the slides is: 1300px. Images should be inserted into the main content area.

Setting Up a Blog

If you’ve followed the steps above to set up your home page, you’ll probably want to display your posts on a different page. You can easily do this by creating a new page and giving it a name like “Blog”, “News”, or whatever you’d like to call it. After you publish your page, go to Settings → Reading. For “Front page displays”, choose your newly created “Blog” page for Posts page. Then save your settings.

Building your Portfolio

This theme uses a custom post type called “Projects” to help you manage your portfolio. To display your projects, create a new page and select the “Portfolio” page template. To add a new portfolio piece, select “Add New” under “Projects” in the left hand menu. Use the main text editor on the Project edit page to insert the main images or video for your project.

Skills

Skills are categories for your projects. In this theme, they are only used to specify what projects you want to show on a portfolio page. This is handy if you want to have more than one portfolio page.

Project Options

Here you can give your project sections a unique look, by controlling the position of the project header, setting a background image or color, as well as entering a project description that will appear in the project header.

Using Button Shortcodes

You can add beautiful buttons to the content of any page, post, or widget using the following shortcode:

[ssc][button label="Launch Project" url="http://themetrust.com/hardy" color="#f05134" target="_blank"][/ssc]

The button shortcode takes 4 parameters: url, target, and label, and color.

Slideshow Shortcode

This theme comes with a special slideshow built-in that scales with the fluid layout which is all part of the responsive design. All you have to do to turn a set of images in your content into a slideshow is wrap them in this shortcode:

[ssc][slideshow][/slideshow][/ssc]

See the example below:

[ssc][slideshow]
<img src="http://domain/imageurl-1.jpg" />
<img src="http://domain/imageurl-2.jpg" />
[/slideshow][/ssc]

It’s important to note that images in a slideshow can not be linked.

Column Shortcodes

This theme comes with column shortcodes, which allows you to easily create columns within your content. You can create columns that are one third, two thirds, or one half of the content area’s width. Here’s an example. Notice the additon of “_last” to the name of the last column’s shorcode. This is important.

[ssc][one_third]

...your content here

[/one_third]

[one_third]

...your content here

[/one_third]

[one_third_last]

...your content here

[/one_third_last][/ssc]

Here are the available column shortcodes: one_third, two_third, one_half. Use these in the format demonstrated above.