Encore Documentation

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Overview

Information described in this documentation will give you an idea of how to setup your site to look and function like the theme demo. View the changelog for more a detailed record of all the changes made to Encore.

Note: This documentation is for the self-hosted version of Encore sold on AudioTheme.com. If you purchased Encore on WordPress.com, support is available here.

Quick Specs

(all width measurements in pixels)

  1. The main content width is 800.
  2. The main content width for unboxed content is 880
  3. The widget area width is 230.
  4. The record archive thumbnail size is 1:1 aspect ratio.
  5. The video archive thumbnail size is 16:9 aspect ratio.

Getting Started

After activating Encore and the plugins mentioned above, you can start customizing the theme under Appearance → Customize, where you’ll find the main customization options like changing your background color, uploading a logo image, and choosing custom menus.

Detailed instructions for working with the theme’s unique features are included below, but if you run into any issues or have a question and have an active AudioTheme license, you can get in touch through the priority support form.

Encore requires WordPress 4.1+

Site Logo

Your site’s title and tagline will be displayed in the header area of Encore by default, but you can easily replace the text with your own logo or custom image in the Customizer:

  1. Go to Appearance → Customize
  2. Click the Site Title section to expand it
  3. Upload a new image in the Logo field

You may also customize the site title and tagline text in this section, or hide them to display the logo by itself.

Homepage Setup

Read the instructions for setting up a static front page if you’d prefer to use a page for your homepage. You’ll also want to create a page for displaying your latest posts — see the Blog section below.

Homepage Logo

When using a static front page as the home page, you can set a Featured Image. If set, the featured image will be used as the homepage logo.

Blog

When using a static front page, you’ll also want to be sure to create a page for your posts. If you haven’t already done so:

  1. Go to Pages → Add New to create a new page for your posts
  2. Give the page a title (“Blog” or “News” work well)
  3. Click the Publish button to create the page
  4. Go to Settings → Reading
  5. Select the page you just created in the Posts Page dropdown
  6. Click the Save Changes button

Now when visiting that page on your site, it will display a list of your latest posts. Be sure to add it to your Primary Menu so your visitors can easily find it.

Site Wide Player

The site wide audio player in Encore relies on the Cue plugin, which gives you the ability to easily create custom playlists and display a site wide player.

Once Cue is activated, go to Playlists → Add New to create a playlist. After creating at least one playlist in Cue, you can assign it to the CueBar player area by going to Appearance → Customize → Cue Players. Select a playlist for the “Site Wide Player” setting.

Featured Images

Posts and Pages can be assigned a Featured Image to display as a banner image at the top of the page, below the title. Featured Images are cropped to be 880x500 in size.

AudioTheme Support

Encore requires the AudioTheme plugin to be installed and activated to function as shown in the theme demo. AudioTheme provides the ability to manage your Gigs, Venues, Records, Tracks, and Videos. The plugin can be downloaded from your account dashboard.

Gig, Record, & Video Archives

Be sure to read the documentation about setting up your archives to add links to your discography, gig, and video pages.

Gigs

Help on how to setup gigs can be found in the AudioTheme plugin documentation.

Records

Help on how to setup records can be found in the AudioTheme plugin documentation.

Videos

Help on how to setup videos can be found in the AudioTheme plugin documentation.

Photos

The photos page in the theme demo is displayed using a WordPress gallery shortcode. To display the photos in a tiled grid, you will need to install and activate the Jetpack plugin, then enable its Tiled Gallery module.

Once Jetpack is activated, you can create your Tiled Gallery by following these steps:

  1. Go to Jetpack → Settings
  2. Activate the Tiled Galleries module
  3. Edit an existing page or create a new page
  4. Create a new gallery with the “Tiles” option selected
  5. Optional: To make all of your galleries tiled by default, go to Settings → Media in your site’s dashboard and select the checkbox next to “Display all your gallery pictures in a cool mosaic”

Custom Menus

Custom Menus provide granular control over the links that appear in the various navigation areas on your site. Encore supports two menu locations: the Primary Menu navigation and the Social Menu (the social icons on the lower left sidebar in the demo).

You can create and assign menus by going to Appearance → Menus.

Primary

The Primary Menu appears just below the Site Title and is the most important tool for helping visitors navigate your site. It supports up to three levels of nested menu items.

Social

The Social Menu allows you to display links to your social media profiles as icons. Each menu item should be added as a Custom Link. Encore will automagically display the correct icon based on the link URL. For example, a link like https://twitter.com/audiotheme will display a Twitter icon because the theme has detected it is a URL pointing to Twitter.

The following icons are bundled in Encore for use in your Social Menu: Amazon, Apple/iTunes, Bandcamp, Facebook, Flickr, Google Play, Google+, Instagram, Last.fm, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Rdio, ReverbNation, SoundCloud, Spotify, Tumblr, Twitter, Vimeo, WordPress, and YouTube.

Widgets & Sidebars

Encore features a single widget area which is nicely tucked out of the way in an offscreen sidebar. When the widget area has widgets, a button with a Plus icon will display in the top left on larger screens. On smaller screens, the site navigation and social links are also displayed in the offscreen sidebar. When this happens, the widget area will be displayed below each area. Read more about managing widgets in the documenation on using Widgets & Sidebars.

Custom Sidebars

It’s also possible to create custom sidebars for individual pages using a plugin like Simple Page Sidebars.

Another option is to use the Widget Visibility module in Jetpack to control which pages individual widgets will show.

Plugin Support

Encore also has built-in support and styles for the plugins listed below. Each plugin can be installed and activated from the Plugins screen in your WordPress dashboard.

WooCommerce

We’ve added basic support for WooCommerce to ensure its templates load correctly within Encore, however, you will need to customize the WooCommerce styles if you want a more seamless integration.

Customizing Encore

Custom CSS

For making minor CSS customizations, we recommend using a plugin that allows you to easily add your snippets in the WordPress admin panel. If you’re already using Jetpack, it ships with a Custom CSS module, otherwise, Custom CSS by Dev7studios is a good standalone option.

Child Theme

When looking to make more advanced customizations to Encore, make your changes in a Child Theme to ensure your modifications aren’t lost when we release updates. You should never directly edit code in a parent theme.

You can download a sample child theme here. In the sample, we’ve changed the site content background color to red as a way to demonstrate the changes are working.

Need Customization Help?

If you need help customizing your theme, you can find help in the following places