New documentation (from pdf file) has been moved here to online documentation
created: Feb 25, 2019


Introduction

From our entire team at VolThemes, we want to personally thank you for purchase Kerli Theme or upgrade from Kerli lite Theme!
If you have any question that is beyond the scope of this documentation, Please feel free to create a ticket on the Support Forum.

This documentation covers everything you need to know to get the theme up and running in no time. Please read the documentation thoroughly.

Quick note:
Installation Requirements

  • This theme required WordPress at least 4.3. It’s highly recommended that you have the latest version of your WordPress installed.

All set? Let’s roll! 🙂


GETTING STARTED

To install your new theme you must have a working version of WordPress* already installed. For information on how to install the WordPress software, please visit the WordPress Codex Installing WordPress.
*Preferably the latest available version of the WordPress software.

Installing Theme

When you are ready to install your theme, you will need to extract/unzip the theme package first that you’ve download from Member area or Marketplace (where you purchase the theme).

Make sure you are uploading only the installable theme (that inside the package you download which is called kerli.zip) through your WordPress admin section.

When you have uploaded the theme, you will need to activate the theme itself.

There are 2 ways to upload your theme files:

Step 1: Install Theme Via WordPress Dashboard

1. Go to ‘Appearance Themes’ section
2. Click ‘Add New’ and select the ‘Upload Theme’ option

3. Choose the kerli.zip file and press ‘Install Now’.
4. Click Activate it.
5. Go to ‘WordPress Dashboard Appearance Customize‘ to get started customizing theme.

If you face any problem during upload through dashboard, please upload the theme using FTP as guided below.


Step 2 (Alternative) : Install Theme Via FTP

1. Access your hosting server using an ftp client like FileZilla
2. Go to the /wp-content/themes folder of your WordPress installation
3. Extract the kerli.zip file in the theme package and put in /wp-content/themes/ folder
4. Go to ‘WordPress Dashboard Appearance Themes‘ section, Click Activate to use your new theme right away.
5. To get started customizing the theme, go to Appearance Customize

Child Theme

It is better to use child theme as if you need to modify anything you modify in child theme only. This way you can easily update your parent theme whenever new update becomes available. Read more about Child Themes.

We have attached a basic child theme to the download package which contains the minimum of required files. If you are planing any code customization we highly recommend to do this inside the child theme! Learn more about Using Child Theme.

For minor CSS changes, you can also make use of the Custom CSS field inside the Theme Options Panel. A very simple and mighty tool. The advantage of this technique is quite simple. If you are running a theme update this data is stored inside the database and does not gets overwritten with the next update!

Installing Child Theme

To install child theme, you need to upload the kerli-child.zip and activate it in the same way as you uploaded and activated the parent theme’s kerli.zip.

Setting up your theme
Once you have uploaded and activated your theme, you’re ready to set-up your brand new theme.

You’re one step closer to getting your site up and running with Kerli theme!

The Customizer

All of the options provided in Kerli theme are handled using the WordPress Theme Customizer, which was added in WordPress version 3.4. This provides numerous distinct advantages over 3rd party options panels, including:

  • Utilizing native WordPress features.
  • A simple, intuitive interface.
  • Live preview of options changes before committing them.
  • Cutting down on code bloat.

To get to the WordPress Theme Customizer, go to “Appearance Customize” in the WordPress Admin Panel. Once you are there, you will be presented with a screen consisting of the options panel on the left and the preview of your site on the right. It should be noted that nothing you change in the Theme Customizer will be committed until you select “Save & Publish.”

This is an incredibly handy feature as it lets you to view everything you’re changing on your site before any of your visitors see anything you’re updating, allowing you to get 4 things exactly the way you want them before making them live.

Start using your new theme
Once you have uploaded, installed, active and set-up your theme, you’re ready to start using your new theme!


Activating Plugins (Required & Suggested)

After you have installed and activated the theme, there’ll be a message of Required & Recommends plugins at the top of the WordPress dashboard.

All our Themes include a suggested plugin selection for each theme. Our themes work best with the suggested plugins. Activate the plugins for the best experience.

kerli-activating-plugins
*Click image to enlarge

– Click on Begin Installing Plugins and it will take you to Appearance Install Plugins.
– Select Plugins you would like to install (we recommend activating Contact Form 7, Jetpack, WP Instagram Widget and WooCommerce, as they work well on Kerli Demo site)
– Click Install
– Click Activate
– Read through plugin details, read plugin documentation to learn how to use
– Use plugins for additional functionality.
1. Go to “Appearance Menus”
2. Select “create a new menu” at the top of the page.
3. Enter a name for your new menu in the Menu Name box.
4. Select the “Pages” by clicking the check box next to each “Pages” that you want to include in the menu.
5. Click the “Add to Menu” button located at the bottom of tab to your menu.
6. Click the “Save Menu” button.

Note: if you want a new menu just click “create a new menu”, then you can move the items from the left side.
At the bottom “Menu Settings Display locations”, checklist the menu position you want to display “Topbar Menu or Primary menu” and click “Save Menu”.

kerli setup menu


Configure Slider

Go to Appearance > Customize.

You can feed slider contents from following sources:

  • Post Category – It will attach properties to your slides (Very easy to use)
  • Post/Page IDs – You can display slider by entering Post/Page IDs (Multiple ID use separator: comma). example: 208,1907,1656,1407,1433

How to Find the Post ID in WordPress
The easiest and quickest way to find a post ID is done from the All Posts screen.

In the WordPress dashboard, navigate to Posts > All Posts.
Simply hover your mouse over the post you want to find the ID for. Take a look in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen.

How to Find the Post ID in WordPress

More specifically, the post ID is the number that comes after the post= and before the &

Creating Posts

Make sure the “Vafpress Post Formats UI” plugin installed and active. (see menu section number 5. Plugins Suggested)
Kerli supports the following post formats:

– Standard
– Image
– Gallery
– Video
– Audio

kerli post format

To learn more about post formats: WordPress Post Formats

Example Audio Post Format:
– In the WP Dashboard, Add New Post and select Audio tab and enter full audio link url or Embed Code under post title.

kerli post format audio

Preview:


Add Featured Post

Featured images also known as post thumbnails are a popular feature in WordPress themes.

To add a featured image in a WordPress post, simply create a new post and scroll down a little to see if there is a meta box called featured images on the right hand side of the screen.

This will open the WordPress Media Uploader. You can use that to upload an image from your computer or use an existing image from your media library. Once you select the image, simply click on Set Featured Image button.

*Ideal Image size: 650x430.

Post Excerpts

The availability of this theme can create full article without ‘read more’ button or excerpt post.

To edit a post that already exists on your site, go to Posts > All Posts in your WordPress dashboard. Click on the title of the post you want to edit in the list provided.

Place your cursor at the spot in the post where you want the More Tag to appear.
In your Visual Editor’s toolbar, click on the the “Insert Read More tag” button. You can find the More Tag button in the first row:

Widgets

Kerli theme currently have 6 additional widget:

– [Kerli] About Widget
– [Kerli] Ad Widget
– [Kerli] Contact Widget
– [Kerli] Custom Posts
– [Kerli] Social Widget
– [Kerli] Media Embed

About Widget

Example Adding About Widget
Kerli About Widget
To add The About Widget,

1. Go to Media > Add New
2. Click on “Select Files”
3. Upload a square or circle image of you. (Ideal size 250x250px)
4. Click on “edit”
5. Copy the link from “File URL”
6. Go to “Appearance > Widgets”
7. Move/ drag the “[Kerli] About Widget” to the Sidebar
8. Paste the url in the “Image URL”
9. Write a text in “About Description”
10. Add the url of your social profile
11. Click on “Save”

Social Widget

To add Social Widget,

1. Go to “Appearance > Widgets”
2. Move/ drag the “[Kerli] Social Widget” to the Sidebar widget
3. Enter your social profile links to displaying social icons in the sidebar. (Leave blank the text boxes to not display icons.)

Add an Author Info Box

The theme have built-in support for author bio boxes. which is no need to install additional plugin.

Login to your WordPress dashboard and Go to “Users Your Profile.” Under the Contact Info & About Yourself title and Fill out the the form with your information.

This is example how the author info box looked on our demo site.
Kerli Author Profile

Contact Page

The theme supports the popular plugin Contact Form 7 to easily create working contact forms.

Please read this to learn more: How to create a working contact page in WordPress.


Page Templates

In an empty page you can choose some page template under “Page Attributes –> Template” Full-width (No Sidebar), Left Sidebar Page Template, or No Sidebar (Centered)

for example, see below

Fullwidth Page template

To create a Fullwidth Page:

  • Step 1 – Go to your wordpress admin >> Pages and click the Add New button or Edit the page you need to make Fullwidth page.
  • Step 2 – Find the page attributes box and locate the template select box and choose “Fullwidth”.
  • Step 3 – Save or Publish the page, by click the appropriate button in the top right of your screen.
  • Step 4 – You will see a page that looks like the one below. Edit the fields for the desired output.

How To Create Tiled Galleries

To use Tiled Galleries, make sure the Jetpack WordPress plugin installed and the module is activated in your Jetpack dashboard. (see section number 5. Plugins Suggested)

With Tiled Galleries you can display your image galleries in three new styles: a rectangular mosaic, a square mosaic, and a circular grid. The rectangular and square tiled layouts also have hover-over captions to save space while making captions accessible.

You can create your Tiled Gallery by following these steps:

1. Make sure the module is activated in your Jetpack dashboard
2. Create a new gallery with the “Tiles” option selected.
3. Optional: To make all of your galleries tiled by default, go to “Settings > Media” in your blog’s dashboard and select the box next to “Display all your gallery pictures in a cool mosaic.“tiled gallery

Shortcodes

On the live demo you can find the page SHORTCODES where you’ll find a lot of code snippets ready to copy and paste wherever you want.
View Shortcodes.

Example Page/Post combine with shortcode:

Additional CSS

You’ll be able to add you custom CSS if you want. Add any custom css here. It will override the default values.

To add additional CSS go to “Appearance Customize Additional CSS” and simply put your CSS here.

kerli-custom-css

You may also like: Master The Basics Of CSS3 Video Guides


Additional Features/Options

If you have followed the above mentioned steps of this documentation, you have completed the basic theme setup of Kerli Theme. Now you can start creating amazing content.

Image Sizes

If you are migrating to Kerli from another theme you may wish to resize your images first so that they fit better within the new theme.

To do this, install and run the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin. Get the plugin here

Translation

Although Our themes are in English, you can easily translate your new theme you wish.
We recommend that you download and install POEdit to translate your theme. https://poedit.net
Once downloaded, open up the application.

Within the theme files, we have included a .pot file that you will need to use to translate the theme. To locate the .pot file, unzip and open the ‘yourtheme.zip’ folder and locate the Language folder. The .pot file will be inside this Language folder.

In POEdit, click on the ‘Create New Translation’ button and then open the .pot file.




Next select or type in the language of the translation.


Once you have selected the language, you can start performing the translation of the theme’s strings. Go through each line of readable text in your theme and enter in the translated text in the Translation field to the language that you have chosen. There may also be some translation suggestions that you can choose from in the panel on the right.

When you have translated each line, go to File > Save and save this .po file into the same folder as the original .po file. Please note, POEdit automatically changes the file name to reflect the language selected, for example if you have chosen to translate the theme to French, the file name will be fr.pot. However you may need to adjust it to your selected language. POEdit will also automatically create a .mo file.


You can now change the language in your WordPress admin area.

Go to Settings > General > Site Language and then choose the language you want to load for your website and click Save Changes.
To get the theme strings to change language too you now need to upload your edited language files from POEdit to the /language/ folder on your live website.

Share your language files with others

If you’ve already translated a theme then many of our users would be delighted if you could share your translation files with the community. Just get in contact with us via our Support forum or send an email to: support [at] volthemes.com and we will include the translation files in the next theme update if possible.

Support

If you need help, please do not hesitate to contact us!
All of our Product Support is conducted via our Support Forum.

Channeling all requests at one place keeps and makes it simple, easier and even more effective for every customers to get quick help. All issues, requests and questions can be discussed and answered at one place.

Please follow the steps below before submitting a support request.

  • Make sure you are running the latest version of the theme and the latest version of WordPress.
  • Have a close look at theme documentation for the answer to your question.
  • Have a close look at the support forum whether the question has been asked before.
  • Disable all additional 3rd party plugins that you are using to check if it fixes the issue.

If the above steps didn’t fix your issue please post your ticket at Support Forum.

Support includes:

  • Responding to questions or problems regarding the item and its features
  • Fixing bugs and reported issues
  • Providing updates to ensure compatibility with new software versions

Item support does not include:

  • Customization and installation services
  • Support for third party software and plug-ins

Each of our themes is a final version when offered for sale to you. If you’ve got some issues – we gladly help you out.
Eligible customers get support for free. However, there are extra charges for customization. If you are interested in having a product customized, email us.


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