Gemini Support Documentation

Background

This is the documentation page for the Gemini WordPress Theme, where you will find out about how to install and modify the theme to suit your needs after you purchase it. This theme is for online magazines, but also can be used for personal blogs with lots of content because Gemini is organized in such a way that all articles can be seen from the home page.

Theme structure

Gemini is originally designed and organized with 2 color schemes. The Home page displays the menu with categories and sub categories, featured 5 posts (latest posts) and latest 3 updated categories with 6 latest entries in them. Also, it shows latest video and sideblog posts on the home page. For these sections to display properly, you have to make “video” and “asides” categories. It’s important to use exact names for these two categories.

Extract and Activate the Theme

After you purchase and download the theme, extract it. Before you do anything else be sure you have WordPress all set up and ready. Upload the gemini_theme folder to your Themes folder. Next, upload the content of the plugins folder (not the entire plugins folder, just its content) into the plugins folder online (which you will find in wp-content).

Go to your WordPress administration panel, Themes (under Appearance). Select the Gemini theme and activate it.

Basic WordPress settings

If you haven’t changed your WordPress name description etc, now you will learn how to do it. Go to WordPress admin -> settings -> Change blog title and tag line, save it. Then click reading also in settings menu and change number of posts (“Blog pages show at most”) to 9 as in demo (of course you can change it to what ever you want but we suggest numbers like 6, 9, 12.. for this theme because posts are organized like that). Next, change the permanent links. Click Permalinks in settings and “Day and name” for now. (NOTE: Be sure your .htaccess file is writable!) You may change the Permalinks style later, but to make sure all the links work for now, use that setting. Save everything.

Author description
Since Gemini is using it you should put some author description, which you will be able to see on all post pages. Go to users -> admin (or some other author) -> put some description to “Biographical Info” and save everything. Also is good to put name, and display in public field. User image is gravatar from your email and that is also one of the things you should have in mind.

Activate Plugins

Now your theme is ready and you can fill it up with content. Next thing to do is to activate and setup plugins. Gemini is using just two plugins: feedcount and excerpt reloaded. Now these plugins should be uploaded to your plugin directory (see above) and now you have to activate them all. You can do that from your WordPress admin -> Plugins -> activate one by one.

Excerpt Reloaded
This plugin sets your excerpt length to 40 words so search and rest of the pages with posts will be symmetric. After you activate it, you don’t have to do anything else. In case you don’t activate it, you’ll have default short WordPress excerpts it is suggested that you use it. The plugin is modified for Gemini, so if you use the original one, you’ll get a different result.

Feed Count
This plugin is also modified for Gemini, so please use this version instead of original one. It displays your FeedBurner feed count instead of using the default button. If you don’t feel like using it, you’ll just have “Subscribe, others did” text. After you activate it, go to Settings -> Feed Count and just fill in the feed url with yours (example http://feeds.feedburner.com/site) and you’re done.
NOTE: Be sure that have Awareness API for your feedburner account enabled (to enable it, log in to your feedburner account, go to the Publicize tab, click on the Awareness API service and enable it).

Add new pages

Home Page.
Go to Pages -> Add New -> put “Home” for title, for content put some intro text like on demo. We’re using: “Welcome to Gemini – a versatile WordPress theme!” So, you can use HTML, links etc… for the large link use span tag. Also for the page template choose “home” and you’re done! To order pages use “page order” at the bottom of the page.
IMPORTANT STEP: Now go to Settings -> Reading -> for “Front page display” choose >> “A static page”; for the “front page” select “Home”. Save.

Archives and Sitemap Page.
This page is also dynamic, so go to Pages -> Add New -> put “Archives” for title and don’t fill in content. For the page template choose “archives page”. Publish it.
Do the same thing for Sitemap – just for page template choose “sitemap” and publish it.

About page
The About page, as well as the rest of the pages you’ll add, is static, so don’t use “page template.” Just add in some title and content for those pages.

Add new posts

Asides
Within wp-admin, go to Posts -> Add New
Fill it up with content and choose “asides” for the category. If you haven’t already, make such a category. IMPORTANT you have to use that exact category name.

Video
Same as for asides, go to Posts -> Add New
Choose “video” for the category. If you haven’t already, make such a category. IMPORTANT you have to use that exact name for the category.
In the content area, just enter the video embed code to embed the video (you will need to first click on the “HTML” tab so that you can enter the video code in that tab of the content area). Edit parameters in the video embed code such that the width is set to 320 and height is set to 240. There may be 2 areas in the embed code where you may need to change each parameter.
Enter any other content that you wish in the content area.
To enter description summaries of the in the video, type it into the “Excerpt” field.

All Other Posts including Image Posts
Again same, go to go to Posts -> Add New
Fill it up with content, and choose or make some category you want. To display a large image, you will have to make and add a custom field named “image” and for the value of the “image” custom field, use the full url path – for example, http://somesite.com/wp-content/gemini_single_2010/images/image1.jpg (where image1.jpg has been uploaded to that location).
IMPORTANT: Try to use landscape images, and some larger images because of the posts listings and featured content. Basically you can use every site, it will be scaled on all pages except post pages. In the demo, we are using 630×325px images, so we suggest that size.

Changing the Color Scheme

To change a color scheme from dark to light, you have to rename style.css in header.php to style2.css. Also, if you want to make any other design changes you can mostly do it all from css file it self, without making any images etc..

Out of the admin settings

There are two things you need to change from php files. First one is the email subscribe link and the second is that advertisement on the top. To change the first one open header.php and on line 107 change url for this part <a href=”#” class=”letter”>Subscribe via email</a> That url you will find on feedburner after you activate email subscription.
Now the second thing, also open header.php and on line 95 change url and image path for
<a href=”#”><img src=”<?php bloginfo(‘template_directory’); ?>/images/advertise.jpg” alt=”advertise” border=”0″ class=”advertise” /></a>
Don’t forget to upload new files to your server!

** Please note that starting in version 3.1 of WordPress: If WordPress blog administrators are logged into their WordPress Administration Panel, and then visit the home page of that site, a horizontal bar displays the administration panel at the top of the page. If that top bar is not displayed properly, the theme’s footer.php file (accessed through the WordPress administration panel >> Appearance >> Editor >> then clicking on the right column’s footer.php file) must have <?php wp_footer(); ?> added to the line before the </body> tag near the bottom of that file, if the file does not have that code already added.   Remember to save changes.