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Microstock Photography Forum - General => Symbiostock => Symbiostock - General => Topic started by: Amanda_K on July 11, 2013, 14:01
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Hello all, I sent out a new version of CleanTheme last night but it appears there was an error that wasn't appearing on my test environment or demo site. (The joys of coding!) If you got that email please disregard and keep Cleantheme 1.0 until I send out the new update (hopefully tonight) Very sorry for any inconvenience, if you had already upgraded and need help please feel free to email me amanda [at] creativembers [dot] com.
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Update: The bug has been tracked down and fixed. Version 2.0.1 has been sent out to all previous purchasers and has been updated in the new store.
I decided to move to a dedicated site for CleanTheme and future child themes, which I've set up here: http://www.symbiothemes.com/ (http://www.symbiothemes.com/)
If you have any questions on CleanTheme version 2.0 please check out the dedicated support forum here: http://www.symbiothemes.com/forums/forum/cleantheme/ (http://www.symbiothemes.com/forums/forum/cleantheme/)
Thanks to those who helped trouble shoot today, I appreciate your input and patience! I'm back to SymbioGuides for a few days, feel free to message me any tutorial requests!
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Thanks Amanda :)
I have a question regarding licensing: is the license per user or per site as I'm planning to make more than one symbiosite?
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Update: The bug has been tracked down and fixed. Version 2.0.1 has been sent out to all previous purchasers and has been updated in the new store.
I decided to move to a dedicated site for CleanTheme and future child themes, which I've set up here: [url]http://www.symbiothemes.com/[/url] ([url]http://www.symbiothemes.com/[/url])
If you have any questions on CleanTheme version 2.0 please check out the dedicated support forum here: [url]http://www.symbiothemes.com/forums/forum/cleantheme/[/url] ([url]http://www.symbiothemes.com/forums/forum/cleantheme/[/url])
Thanks to those who helped trouble shoot today, I appreciate your input and patience! I'm back to SymbioGuides for a few days, feel free to message me any tutorial requests!
Amanda, I really would appreciate a tutorial about SEO, the next step I should invest (I fear a lot of) time and don't really know too much about. I have transferred my sitemaps to google webmaster tools but I am sure I should do a lot on every single image and page. But what exactly, I don't know ;D
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Update: The bug has been tracked down and fixed. Version 2.0.1 has been sent out to all previous purchasers and has been updated in the new store.
I decided to move to a dedicated site for CleanTheme and future child themes, which I've set up here: [url]http://www.symbiothemes.com/[/url] ([url]http://www.symbiothemes.com/[/url])
we'd all like that! there are various threads both in & out of the sym area. I highly recommend the Yoast SEO and Leo's sitemap plugin as good starting points
yoast has a great feature that rates your pages, giving more than a dozen specific tips - it's like playing a game to move your rating from red to gray to green!
If you have any questions on CleanTheme version 2.0 please check out the dedicated support forum here: [url]http://www.symbiothemes.com/forums/forum/cleantheme/[/url] ([url]http://www.symbiothemes.com/forums/forum/cleantheme/[/url])
Thanks to those who helped trouble shoot today, I appreciate your input and patience! I'm back to SymbioGuides for a few days, feel free to message me any tutorial requests!
Amand,a I really would appreciate a tutorial about SEO, the next step I should invest (I fear a lot of) time and don't really know to much about. I have transferred my sitemaps to google webmaster tools but I am sure I should do a lot on every single image and page. But what exactly, I don't know ;D
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Thanks Amanda :)
I have a question regarding licensing: is the license per user or per site as I'm planning to make more than one symbiosite?
That's a great question and a reminder to finish and publish my license somewhere between tutorials and designs! I think a lot of people will want to experiment with multiple sites maybe having a few for niches so here's what I've come up with:
The initial license covers up to two live Symbiostock sites.
For additional sites (beyond 2) I will be offering and add on license at 50% off the original, so $12.00 for an additional site license for CleanTheme.
I wanted to note too because it came up already that you can use the theme on any development or test sites you are building locally.
Tutorials: SEO, got it! I'll work on getting Yoast specific materials up it's a great plug in and I use it myself but I'm still learning my way around, so it will be good to study a bit. By the way if anyone wants to jump in with an article in an area you feel really comfortable in I'd be happy to include it with links back to your site.
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Amanda, I sent you a PM...I had an issue with 2.0.1. I reverted back to 1.0, as it broke the header area of my site. When you are around, I will reinstall 2.0.1 so you can see what it's doing.
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Thanks Amanda :)
I have a question regarding licensing: is the license per user or per site as I'm planning to make more than one symbiosite?
That's a great question and a reminder to finish and publish my license somewhere between tutorials and designs! I think a lot of people will want to experiment with multiple sites maybe having a few for niches so here's what I've come up with:
The initial license covers up to two live Symbiostock sites.
For additional sites (beyond 2) I will be offering and add on license at 50% off the original, so $12.00 for an additional site license for CleanTheme.
I wanted to note too because it came up already that you can use the theme on any development or test sites you are building locally.
Tutorials: SEO, got it! I'll work on getting Yoast specific materials up it's a great plug in and I use it myself but I'm still learning my way around, so it will be good to study a bit. By the way if anyone wants to jump in with an article in an area you feel really comfortable in I'd be happy to include it with links back to your site.
Thanks Amanda I will contact you then they are public
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Amanda, I sent you a PM...I had an issue with 2.0.1. I reverted back to 1.0, as it broke the header area of my site. When you are around, I will reinstall 2.0.1 so you can see what it's doing.
Got it resolved, Amanda. I had to actually delete and re-create my above header menu and my main menu. No problem, I took screen shots and then just duplicated what I had. It looks like all is well. I am going to do a test registration, since fixing that Thank You page was one of the fixes for this update.
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I am so confused...
I have CleanTheme 2.0 and Symbiostock 2.6.0
If I try to use the home page template HomePage CTAs that your example page says you can use to produce something looking like your example page..
http://www.symbiothemes.com/cleantheme/ (http://www.symbiothemes.com/cleantheme/)
I can't get the Solioquy slider or the latest images/featured images to span the full page width. I can do that if I switch to the "Default" template. I can change your template to 1 column and that still leaves me with the shrunken image displays in the left column only.
I've switched to Home Page Simple, which gets me a page-wide Sililoquy slider, but still the midget Latest and Featured Images. I switched to the non-slider versions of Latest Images & Featured Images and they span the whole page with Home Page Simple or Home Page CTAs
I thought that buying the template would make it easier to make pages that looked similar to yours, but I'm obviously missing something (and I know only the most basic things about Word Press). What am I missing?
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I just took a look at your page, Joann, and Clean Themes. Your page is looking good!
What is on the Clean Themes page that you want to show on yours? To add the three columns of type under your Recent and Featured Images, you have to go to Appearance>Widgets and in the right hand column, add type to Home Page Bottom Row 1/3, 2/3 and 3/3. I use a plugin called Enhanced Text because you can add html, css, into the type blocks. So you would drag the Enhanced Text widget (or whatever widget) from the left blocks to the right column. screenshot attached.
If you want Top Posts and Pages under the main image like on Clean Theme, make sure you have Jetpack installed. That is a plugin also. Then drag the Top Posts and Pages into the right column, under the Sidebar. Click on the little triangle to the right of the word Sidebar to open that area, and thats where you drag the widget into.
Hope this helps.
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Thanks Cathy. Truthfully, I don't understand the differences between HOME Page CTAs and HOME Page Simple!
When I looked at the example (demo) page for CleanTheme, it said "This is the HOME Page CTAs page template. This is the main body copy..."
So I made my home page use the HOME Page CTAs template just like the sample, but when I used the slider at the top - just like the sample - mine was half the width of the page, not like the sample. Even if I changed from 2 columns to 1, the Soliloquy slider stayed in the first column.
What I have now is using the HOME Page Simple template, but I'm concerned that there is something I'll be missing - something that's in the other template but not in this one. As I said, I have no idea what the differences are, but wanted to start with a home page similar to the sample but with my own logo, menu and images.
I do have Jetpack installed (I was using it before) and I didn't want Top Posts, so it's more a frustration that I can't follow the demo site directions for some reason I can't fathom. Possibly the demo site is wrong and it isn't using that template at all :)
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I couldn't get the slider to go full width on the standard home page template, so I decided to use the home page simple and it worked, giving me the look I wanted and took all those WordPress sections away on the right hand side. I also added the homepage widgets for text in the lower thirds, just to get some text on the homepage for SEO. I cannot however get the featured images to display on the home page. Like you I don't know what I might be missing using a different homepage template, but it gave me the look I wanted for my site, so I have moved on from thinking about it.
It is an uphill struggle for someone like me with no WordPress knowledge or coding skills, it's just trial and error and searching this forum and asking questions here. Cathy has been very helpful to me.
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Joann, i dont think you are missing anything. I used home page ctas template for my site, but i didnt use the solilo[size=78%]qy slider. I had another type of full width slider in there but it was flash and on a report it said it was sometimes taking long to load so i took it off and went simple. Now i just have the enhanced text widget in the above content space, and used html to place the image.[/size]
You do have to just kind of doink around with different things to get them to work and get what you want. When more people jump into this, maybe more ready-to-use templates will be developed, which will be helpful for people like us who have no php knowledge and little ( in my case) wordpress knowledge. But i am glad i did it because i learned a lot about wp and that came in handy here at my day job.
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Hi Joann, sorry for the confusion! The home page CTA template has full width widget areas above the content and below. In the demo that is where the slider is added (above the content) and the latest images widget is in the below content area. You can find these under Appearance > widgets.
The actual content area of the Home page cta template is a two column area with the left being about 2/3 of the page. It sounds like that's what the problem is. If you put things in the main content area they won't span the whole page. Hope that helps!
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Aaah! That explains a lot :)
But what, if anything, am I losing by using Home Page Simple?
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It's just personal choice really, some people like to have the extra widget areas other want more flexibility, so feel free to use either!
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Thanks
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I have just bought and installed installed cleantheme.
After I have conformed with the instructions, my site look like this:
http://stockabily.com/ (http://stockabily.com/)
This is not very much looking like the demo. What do I wrong?
Thanks for your help!
Jean
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Perhaps this is best discussed over on the Symbiostock forums (http://www.symbiostock.org/), but you need to edit the menus if you want the main list to be across the page instead of above the search box. Appearance/Menus and the Manage Locations tab is where you do that.
You need to pick which page template you want to use for your home page and then add sliders (the Soliloquy Lite free slider is what's shown on the CleanTheme demo page), latest image, featured image, etc. depending on how you want your home page to look. I'm using CleanTheme as well.
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Perhaps this is best discussed over on the Symbiostock forums ([url]http://www.symbiostock.org/[/url]), but you need to edit the menus if you want the main list to be across the page instead of above the search box. Appearance/Menus and the Manage Locations tab is where you do that.
You need to pick which page template you want to use for your home page and then add sliders (the Soliloquy Lite free slider is what's shown on the CleanTheme demo page), latest image, featured image, etc. depending on how you want your home page to look. I'm using CleanTheme as well.
Thank you Joann; I see; I though the template was comming along as defaut with cleantheme; I cannot see where I can find and change this template; I had a look at your site; it is very nice. I would love to have a similar design! So I'll definitively go for the Soliloquy if I can manage!
Jean
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Thanks. You edit the page that is your home page in WordPress (Pages/All Pages) and in the Page Attributes section you'll find a list box for the templates you can choose from in your current theme. You'll find the Widgets (Appearance/Widgets) for placing items on the side, below the content, in the footer, etc.
It's very confusing at first if you're not a WordPress expert (which I'm not) but it gets clearer as you keep working on it
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Thank you, this is more clear now. I will have to look at it a bit later on Again as I cannot just now, but this has already been a great help!
Jean
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I may have missed something, but I cannot really see the added value of the clean Theme. I thought that once I had installed it I will have a kind of template as the demo.
The whole interest for me was to buy this not to have to design all Things myself. I don't see a big difference in the two sites with or without the clean theme and I'm missing some instructions on how to go ahead with it. Thanks to Joann I have progressed , but now I'm stuck Again and I'm missing a guideline, is there any somewhere? I feel like I have bought a box, but the content of the box is different from the Picture on the box....
I have found the Soliloquy (took me some time to realise it was a Pluggin. Now the Next step to have the slider working is the Next challenge.....I have uploaded the Pictures and it is there, but I dont see the slidder appearing in the list of widgets.
Maybe the best wouold be to pm Amanda.
jean
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I found it frustrating at first too - your description is good (that the picture on the box doesn't match).
To use Soliloquy you can read how to put the slider into the area you want.
http://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/how-to-easily-create-a-responsive-wordpress-slider-with-soliloquy/ (http://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/how-to-easily-create-a-responsive-wordpress-slider-with-soliloquy/)
At the beginning I had used "Add Slider" button when editing the home page which is another way to place it
As far as the differences, I just liked how the clean, no clutter pages were put together (versus the free child theme) so that's why I still think it was a good buy for me.
I am thinking more and more that if there were some sort of packaged setup that was closer to a complete site it would help new users get started. If I were done, I might think about working on that, but I'm not :)
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Thanks Joann; I have made some Progress Again with your help.
Setting all those things up is really time consumming and not necessarely my strong side...I sure that many like me would prefer to pay for templates that are fully functional once installed.
Jean
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I'm very sorry you are frustrated. I've read through and it seems this issue seems to have more to do with the nature of Wordpress and themes than the product not being as described. It can be frustrating at first if you don't understand that the content is always separate from the theme.
There main concepts of setting up your home page are no different with Clean Theme than they are with the base theme or any other child theme. There are many threads here on different aspects of that, I know it can be very time consuming to go through them and get answers but that is one of the challenges with a do-it-yourself type deal like Symbiostock. I feel we are very lucky to have such an active community of helpers.
What you seem to be looking for is someone to actually set up your homepage content for you. That is not typically something any theme can provide automatically. Unfortunately there will be some level of learning and set up that needs to be done on your own for every Symbiostock site.
Jo Ann, I really appreciate your input and I will be incorporating your suggestion on the functions.php addition for the next release. I've never used the slider you mention in your message so I'm not sure why it would be breaking the layout. This is another tricky aspect of offering themes, there really is no way to test every use case with all the possible plugins out there.
Just a personal note, because this is frustrating for me too. I started selling Clean Theme because people liked my design and wanted something similar. It was suggested by several users that making commercial child themes available would save time for those who aren't knowledgeable in editing CSS and wanted a different style. That is what I hope to provide for people who purchase it.
I've spent many many hours creating documentation at Symbioguides.com and exchanging messages with Symbiostockers to help with set up. Currently I'm struggling to keep up with the development of the main theme to keep Clean Theme working for those who are happy using it. I've had much less time lately to be here on MSG walking people through things for which I apologize, but it can't be helped at the moment.
I'm learning that being responsible for a commercial child theme is difficult business. To put it in perspective compared to selling stock, if one theme sale is equal to one large image sale at istock, it would be like having to provide on-going support for each image you sell and exchanging a few emails with customers instructing them how to use your image after they buy it. And on top of that having to worry about upgrading your image to play nicely with their graphics software every time that changes! :)
I am going through all of my messages today and sending out answers where I can. I'll be updating the SymbioThemes support forum (it seems there was an issue with my alert emails not being sent) and adding a contact form where I can be reached directly. The MSG forum is not the best way to get a hold of me these days, but it is still a great place for community help!
A front page building tutorial is on my long list of things to do as soon as I have the time to spare. In the mean time, if you have any specific issues please feel free to email me: amanda [ at ] creativembers [ dot ] com
Sorry for rambling a bit here, just know that I am doing my best to make sure things are running smoothly and fighting with limited time.
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Thanks Joann; I have made some Progress Again with your help.
Setting all those things up is really time consumming and not necessarely my strong side...I sure that many like me would prefer to pay for templates that are fully functional once installed.
Jean
For what it's worth the template is fully functional, it does exactly what it's meant to. What you are looking for is someone to set up your site. That is a service that Leo and some others are offering.
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Amanda and jeancliclac- Just some random thoughts.
My background is Information Technology and customer service, 35 years before I retired last year. So I have some experience in working with both technical and not technical clients.
I like the Clean Theme and how it makes my site look. But I did not try to load and use it until after I had worked with Leo's theme for several months. I know that someone just starting out will have a very steep learning curve with WordPress, Symbiostock theme and then CleanTheme. I had never used WordPress prior to this so I had a lot of learning to do. That included lots of mistakes and having to retry different options. In fact I revamped my site just this week. Taking examples from other Symbiostock members.
This forum is great for getting help when you are stuck so keep at it. Ask for help, have patience and most of all have fun. :-)
David
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Thanks Amanda and David for your positive answers. And Joann for your help!
I also have to blame myself, for not having really read what I was buying. I'm not completely lost (I think) it is just that I was not expecting this. I will now just have to work on my site and learn more. You can be sure that I would also (in between frustrations) enjoy it!
Thanks for you kind support and good spirit!
Jean