Candid WordPress Theme Documentation by Ludovico Fischer v1.0

Candid

For WordPress 3.0 or higher

Created:
14 Jul 2010
By:
Ludovico Fischer
Contact:

Candid is a fresh, minimalistic theme for your blog, with a totally fluid layout, optimized for modern browsers and mobile devices. This file will help you to use and customize it.

Customizing your Candid theme through the WordPress interface

Creating menus

Candid offers two distinct locations for your custom menus. By default, both locations are empty, so no menu is visible. To create one go to Appearance > Menu. You can drag and drop menu element to change their order. Candid does not support submenus.

Changing the background

To change the background or simply choose a different colour, go to Appearance > Background

Using widgets

Widgets are placed in the sidebar. By default, the sidebar contains no widgets and so empty space is displayed instead. If you want to use widgets, go to Appearance > Widgets and drop any widgets you like on the sidebar. Candid styles all core WordPress widgets. Many plugins offer additional widgets which may require new CSS rules to match the appearance of the rest of the site.

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PHP/HTML files and structure

As WordPress is a dynamic publishing system, template files end with the .php extension and contain a mixture of HTML and of the PHP programming language. To learn more about the PHP programming language, visit the official website.

Candid makes use of HTML5, the latest HTML standard, and supports the following microformats: xfn, xoxo, hcard.

Pages are wrapped in a div with an id of container. Each page except error pages contains a main content (#content) area and a sidebar (#sidebar-main).

<div id="container">
    <div id="header"></div>
    <ul id="sidebar-main"></ul>
    <div id="footer"></div>
</div>
The site title is nested inside the header div in a separate div (#branding). The header menu area has ID #main-nav, the footer menu area #footer-nav. The menu areas disappear completely if no menu elements are defined.

Each individual entry, whether displayed on an index or by itself, is a div with the hentry class.

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CSS files and structure

  • Most of the CSS is contained in style.css. Typographical settings are at the top, then we style each main area as each appears on the site, from top to bottom. Widget styles are at the end. ids are styled before classes
  • rtl.css inverts the direction of floats, paddings and margins for use with right to left languages, such as Hebrew and Arabic.
  • editor-style.css contains the styling for the TinyMCE visual editor in the administration area, to let you preview the final appearance while you are typing.

Sizing is done in em and percentages and all main layout components are positioned using floats, to allow Candid to adapt to different window sizes. A media query declaration which makes the sidebar glide below the main content when the window width is less than 600px, for example on a mobile phone.

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Javascript

Candid does not supply any Javascript functionality of its own.

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Translations

Candid is ready to be translated. To use Candid in the language of your choice, you need to install WordPress in that language, as explained in the online WordPress documentation:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress_in_Your_Language
For a list of available translations and corresponding language codes, see http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_in_Your_Language.

The .pot file is already in the candid/languages directory. You only need to create a .po file for your language. You must use the appropriate language code to name the file. If you are unfamiliar with editing .po files, I recommend the Poedit program.

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FAQ

I want to display ads on my blog

A popular choice is the Advertising Manager plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/advertising-manager/

I want to display my tweets

You can use the Wickett Twitter Widget.

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Additional help

For questions concerning WordPress installation and WordPress daily usage, the best resource is http://codex.wordpress.org/

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