The slideshow shows title, excerpt and the featured image of the last 4 posts.

To get your slideshow adjusted perfectly for your website just check the following steps:

1. Theme Settings Page
Here you can enable the slideshow for your homepage, your starting page. This works just for the auto-generated homepage (which is showing your latest posts). Below you can choose of which category the posts for the slideshow should be taken from. If you use another static page as homepage, have a look at point 2.

2. Page Edit Screen
If you want to enable the slideshow on any other page, just go into the edit screen of that page. At the bottom you will see an extra field called “Custom Community Settings”. There you can choose, if you want to enable the slideshow for that page and which category to display.

So, now you should have a slideshow on that page, and your posts should be shown.
No images? Check if you activated a featured image for the posts shown in the slideshow! You will find the “featured image” option when editing an article, on the right side below the tags-field.

3. Getting the images adjusted
The slideshow does not resize the images. The images are aligned centered. So your images need to be big enough.

Default size of the big image in the slideshow: 756x250px, but the image should be bigger than 756x567px.

Why? When you create your feature image, you have to keep in mind that it will be displayed at 756 x 250. That is the big image you have in your slideshow. However, doing this, will cut your image on the small preview-menu in the slideshow.

Best is to create images at 756 x 567. This will keep the 4:3 ratio in the menu, and your image will be displayed as usual. You just have to center what you want to be in the big image on the slideshow.

For the full width slider images use 1008 x 756 px as featured image size.

If you checked these points, all should be fine now. If not, maybe you found a bug…

Slideshow shortcodes

You can also insert the slideshow anywhere you like by using its shortcodes. Check out here many examples to copy and modify for you: http://custom-community-pro.themekraft.com/slideshow-shortcodes

Your custom slideshow

There are several ways to make your custom slideshow:

1. via shortcodes, check out example here:

http://custom-community-pro.themekraft.com/slideshow-shortcodes/#customized-slideshow

2. make a child theme, copy the original function slider() from core/includes/wp/shortcodes.php (starting line 667) and modify it for you so you’ll have your custom slider.

if you like to have the slideshow inside its own container and above the content (like the home slideshow, not the ones inserted via shortcodes), then you need to copy the function slideshow_home() from core/includes/theme-generator/theme-generator.php (starting line 294)

notes:
in this function slideshow_home() you have to call your own slider() function!
rename and modify it for you, and adapt the CSS to your needs.

and then you will also need your own featured image size, so add this into your functions.php but with your own image sizes:

// post thumbnail additional sizes
add_image_size( ‘your_sliderfunction_name’, 1000, 400, true );

…hope this is a good starting point to play around with your own custom slideshow.

By WordPress default setting, your homepage (“home”) is created automatically and shows your latest posts of all categories.
Now, if you’d like to create a custom homepage, start like this:

1.) Create a new page, and call it for example “Welcome to xyz”.
2.) Write some content, and save/publish it. You can edit it later again.
3.) Then go to “Settings” >> “Reading” (down in the menu on the left side),
and choose “a static page” and select the page you created in step 1.
Then save. Now, this page is your homepage.
4.) That’s it.

If you didn’t already, now you should create a custom menu.
Look here how it’s done: http://themekraft.com/faq/custom-menu/

Inspiration: you can still list your latest posts in that page, even in your own style and from a selected category!
Have a look here: http://themekraft.com/faq/list-your-latest-posts/

Since WP 3.0 you can create custom menus easily via drag and drop.
Just follow these steps:

Go to “Appearance” >> “Menu” in your backend, and create a new menu first:

Now you can add pages, posts, categories or simply links to your menu.
Every new item you add to your custom menu,

Don’t forget to save this menu (on the right top is a save button), and then to choose this menu as your main menu on the left top side. Here’s a screenshot of the steps:

The Community Navigation Item

If you like to move or customize the main menu item for the community pages (the dropdown menu activity/members/groups) there are several ways to do that:

1. just floating it to the right side of the menu
go to the theme settings page to the CSS tab and insert this:
#nav-community {
float: right;
}

Additional tip

You can also add custom links in your wp menu. so you can also add just “members” and label this menu point for example “experts” or whatever your community is for… or make a custom drop down with just members and groups and your own labels.

Change the menu labels

To make the menu labelling different than your page title, do this:

1. Create a page and write the title as you would like to have it

2. Create the custom menu in APPEARANCE -> MENU

3. There you can add just a different label for each menu item!

In case something is totally messed up and you have a blank screen also in your wp-admin, don’t panic.

Do this:

Delete all custom community folders and then go back to your backend.
Go to “Appearance” >> “Themes” and activate the default theme, if didn’t happened automatically.

Switch to your FTP program and upload the theme again (don’t change names in the template files or folders, won’t work then).

Go to “Appearance” >> “Themes” and activate your theme again.

Do you want to disable comments for a single post or globally?

Disable comments globally

…to disable your comment settings globally, please have a look at Settings -> Discussion

Disable comments for a single post or page

When editing the page or post, you have a discussion box under your content, where you can check if to allow users leaving a reply. In case you don’t see that box, check the “screen options”, which you can find at the upper right of your screen.

…or just watch the short video!

WordPress and BuddyPress are available in many languages.

Firstly you’ll have to install WordPress in the language you need:
http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_in_Your_Language

If you use BuddyPress, you can also change your language for all the BuddyPress elements,
by just adding the language files you need.

Here’s how it works:
http://codex.buddypress.org/developer-docs/translations/

You can find all the language files on the right.

This should be all, have fun!

Never change theme files – create a child theme.

If you change theme files, all your changes will be lost with updating the theme, as all theme files are replaced everytime you update. So before just “running” into the code, always…

Check the following before:

1. Theme Settings:

First always check the theme settings page if there’s an option for that. If so, it’s done!

2. CSS:

Often you can do it just via CSS. For example just hiding things, too. You can add your custom CSS styles into the CSS tab in the theme settings page. This way you stay update safe. Yay!

3. Child Theme:

That’s the clean and solid way for your custom code. Create a custom child theme of Custom Community and stay update safe! More info in this FAQ: http://themekraft.com/faq/child-themes/

The FAQ is going to be merged with our knowledge base. This means step by step you will see the FAQ disappearing and popping up in the knowledge base, which will be full of good help very soon!

About creating child themes please have a look here:
http://support.themekraft.com/entries/20916508-create-child-themes

Just follow these steps for best results:

1. Installation

Install like any other WordPress theme. Download Installation Guide for further info.

2. Theme Settings

Go to “Appearance” >> “Theme Settings”.

Click yourself through the several options to customize the theme to your needs. If you think an option is not described easy enough or should be done else, please give us feedback, we’d love to improve it!

3. Page Templates, Shortcodes and more

When creating the posts and pages, you can use many other features like page templates, listing your latest posts, using a slideshow, or nice shortcodes. Just in case you’d like to do more…

How to use them? There are demo sites with many examples and explanations of all features:

Free version demo: http://www.custom-community.themekraft.com/

Pro version demo: http://custom-community-pro.themekraft.com

Browse through the pages to get an overview and see how each of the features work and to get some inspiration and tips for tweaking.

And it will probably save you some time to have a quick look in the FAQ, for example for topics like creating your custom homepage and listing your latest posts in it…

4. Customizing more…

If you are about to customize more and change or add code, please read about changing theme files and create a child theme for your purposes. That’s the easy, clean and hassle-free way!

5. Get some further inspiration

Take a quick tour through our showcase and see what others made with Custom Community!

http://themekraft.com/showcase/

Don’t forget to show off your new creation to the community and post your site to our showcase!
 

We hope that was helpful, if you miss something, please let us know. Enjoy it!

Every post or page can have a specific featured image. It will be used e.g. for listing the posts or showing the images from the posts automatically in the slideshow.

You can define it when creating a post/page, at the right side below the tags field (for posts) or the page attributes field (for pages).

You can lists your latest posts from a certain category under your pages. Check these steps:

1. Creating or editing a page
When creating or editing your page in the backend, you will see an extra field with Custom Community settings. There you can select if you’d like to show up your latest posts.

2. Choose a category
You can choose from which category the posts should be taken from. Just select a category in the drop down menu.

3. Choose a template
How should the list look like? Select a template, e.g. image left, content right, or just images with a fancy mouse over effect…

Your posts should be listed right now. Think of making the right categories for your posts so that you can sort them as you want.

4. Check out the demo site for examples and more details:
http://custom-community-pro.themekraft.com/list-posts/

Have a look at the sub pages to see some examples of the different styles you can choose from.

Alternatively, you can also use this list-post function as shortcode. This way, you can list your latest posts easily somewhere within your content. Check out the shortcode pages:
http://custom-community-pro.themekraft.com/list-posts-hortcodes/

You can also use this function for a custom homepage instead of the default home.
Look here how to create a custom homepage:
http://themekraft.com/faq/making-a-custom-homepage/

How to change or customize the position of the community navigation drop down menu?

Enable / disable

Go to the “Theme Settings” page, then to the tab “Menu” -> “show community navigation”:

ENABLED = you will see the point “community” as drop down in your main menu, containing activity, groups, members (and forums)
DISABLED = Now the menu “community” is not available. You have to create those links by yourself if you want to show them in the main menu.

Customizing your community navigation

Firstly, you need to create a custom menu before. If you haven’t done already, have a look here at first:
http://themekraft.com/faq/custom-menu/

Now, for building your own commmunity navigation, go to “Appearance” -> “Menu” in your backend, and just add a link to your menu.

You just have to set the right url and labeling for each menu item:

As example for a community with just companies as groups, you could do
url: http://www.example.com/groups
labeling: companies

You can do this for goups, members, etc.
This way you can also create your own drop down menu for BuddyPress, like

Network
-> Organisations
-> People

“Network” could be the link to the activity stream,
“organisations” the link to the groups directory and
“people” the link to your members directory.

Saving the menu!

Don’t forget to save this menu (on the right top is a save button), and then to choose this menu as your main menu on the left top side. Here’s a screenshot: