Theme Options

Theme options are a great way to quickly customize a theme to your own needs. But I personally don’t like themes that flood you with a thousand checkboxes and form fields, so I tried to keep it simple.

Logo

To be able to upload your logo, make sure to first create the uploads/ directory (inside the wp-content/ directory), and that it is writable (using the chmod 777 command). Check out this article for an in-depth and more secure guide.

Note: If you get this type of error:

Warning: getimagesize([…]/wp-content/uploads/your_logo.png) [function.getimagesize]: failed to open stream: Connection refused in [...]/wp-content/themes/silverio/header.php on line 66

Then please follow the instructions on line 63 of header.php to manually set your logo’s dimensions.

Portfolio Category, Blog Category, and Homepage Slideshow Category

WordPress is smart, but not that smart. So it can’t know for sure which category you intend to use for your portfolio, blog, or homepage slideshow until you tell him. Of course, you will need to create those categories yourself first.

Slideshow timer and effect

These fields let you control the homepage and project slideshow (they apply to both slideshows).

  • Slideshow timer: the time before the slideshow moves on to the next slide, in milliseconds. Enter “0″ to deactivate automatic play and stay on the same slide until the user clicks a thumbnail.
  • Slideshow effect: choose the slide transition effect. Possible values include: cover, fade, toss, wipe, zoom . Check out the effects browser for the full list.

Theme style

Here are the three options you get to manage the theme’s style:

  • switcher: displays a style switcher, and stores the selected style in a cookie. Useful when you want to test out the styles before making up your mind, or if you want to over more variety to your users.
  • classic: the classic light grey Silverio theme.
  • dark: a dark grey version of the theme.

Drop-down menus

You can enable or disable drop-down menus for the main navigation. If a menu item is a category, the drop-down menu will automatically display all its sub-categories. If it’s a page, it will display all its sub-pages.

Call-to-action button text, link, and color

For licencing reasons, I couldn’t package the ITC Chino font with the theme. So instead I decided to pre-render some popular buttons choices. You can pick the button text, the link where it will point to, as well as pick a color: either black to blend in with the rest of the theme, or blue to stand out a little more.

Navigation Menu

[note: WordPress 3.0 introduces its own menu management system, but this was developed before version 3.0. So I decided to keep my own custom menu system for now]

Silverio lets you customize the main navigation menu with three item types:

  • Page: just pick a page from your site (for example: about, contact, etc.)
  • Category: pick a category (i.e. blog, portfolio, etc.)
  • Link: use any URL along with a custom link text (useful for linking to twitter, another site, etc.)

You can also drag items up and down to reorder them in the menu.

Custom CSS

Sometimes you want to make your own modifications to the theme, but the problem is that every time you update the theme files you need to port them over to the new version. This is why the CSS code you put here resides in your database, and will not be erased if you change your theme files. It will be automatically inserted after all the stylesheets have loaded.