MH Elegance WordPress Theme is perfect for elegant and professional portfolio, corporate and business websites or high-class blogs. After you have installed this theme to WordPress, you can follow a few simple steps to configure the theme. In case you are new to WordPress, we recommend you have a look at a few basic WordPress tutorials first. A good place to start is the WordPress Codex: Getting Started with WordPress. Now have fun creating awesome websites with MH Elegance!
Step 1: Create a Static Front Page #
In case you want to configure your site like the theme demo, you'll need to create a static front page first and then place some widgets on the front page, in addition to your content. To set a static front page with the widgetized layout, please create a new page with name "Home" (or anything else) and select "Page - Front Page" as template. Then please navigate to "Settings => Reading" in your WordPress dashboard and set that page as static front page. If you need more help with creating a static front page in WordPress, please read and follow this tutorial: How to set a Static Front Page in WordPress.
Step 2: Place the Widgets on the "Front Page" template #
When you have completed the setup of your static front page, you can navigate to "Appearance => Widgets" in your WordPress dashboard and easily drag&drop widgets in the "Home 1" and/or "Home 2" widget locations of the widgetized “Front Page” template and the widgets will be displayed on your front page.
— Available Widget Locations of MH Elegance
MH Elegance WordPress Theme has in total 7 locations where you can place WordPress widgets, custom widgets or add any HTML code you like.
- Home 1: widget area on "Front Page" template above content
- Home 2: widget area on "Front Page" template below content
- Sidebar: widget area / sidebar on posts and pages (not front page)
- Contact: widget area on contact page template (premium)
- Footer 1: widget area in footer - first column (premium)
- Footer 2: widget area in footer - second column (premium)
- Footer 3: widget area in footer - third column (premium)
— How to place the Widgets as in the Theme Demo
If you want to reproduce the same layout as used in the theme demo, please place the widgets as stated here:
- Home 2: Text widget with portfolio shortcode (premium)
- Home 2: MH Latest News widget
- Sidebar: Search widget
- Sidebar: MH Facebook Likebox widget
- Sidebar: MH Authors widget
- Sidebar: MH Recent Comments widget
- Sidebar: Tag cloud
— Map of Widget Locations on the "Front Page" Template
Here you can see the locations of the widget areas on the fully widgetized "Front Page" template of MH Elegance WordPress Theme:
Images in MH Elegance WordPress Theme #
Usually WordPress themes have defined their own image dimensions and thumbnail sizes. These thumbnails are automatically generated by WordPress when you upload an image. When you change your WordPress theme, it can happen that the thumbnail requirements of your new theme do not match the sizes of the available thumbnails in your media folder. If that’s the case, your thumbnails won’t look consistent in size and you'll need to regenerate your thumbnails.
Image dimensions in MH Elegance:
- 440 x 280px (Thumbnails for blog and archives)
- 690 x 440px (Thumbnails for content area on posts)
- 307 x 195px (Thumbnails for portfolio)
MH Elegance WordPress Theme will use featured images for the thumbnails on archives and in the custom widgets. If you have uploaded images to your site or added images manually to your posts and if these images don’t appear as thumbnails, please read and follow this: How to use featured images in WordPress.
Use additional Features/Options #
If you have followed the first two steps of this documenation, you have completed the basic theme setup of MH Elegance WordPress Theme. Now you can start creating amazing content or have a look at the other available theme options and use additional theme features as you like. You can access the theme options panel through your WordPress dashboard at "Appearance => Customize => Theme Options", there you will find these sections:
- General
- Layout (premium)
- Typography (premium)
- Posts/Pages (premium)
- Custom CSS (premium)
If you want to learn more about WordPress, MH Elegance WordPress Theme or want to read additional tutorials, please have a look at our support center.
Custom Headers (premium) #
MH Elegance WordPress Theme has an awesome feature included where you can use the featured image as header image and also add custom text and banner to create appealing custom headers for your posts and pages. This is ideal as introduction or to create landing pages and call to actions:
The custom header feature won't work on your blog page, on archives and for portfolio posts. For all other posts and pages you can set a custom header as you like. You can find the input fields for the custom header as custom meta fields below the WordPress editor when you edit posts or pages:
When you want to use a featured image as header image for your custom header, please ensure that you upload an image in decent size as it needs to cover the background, also on high-definition screens. But don't worry, in case your image doesn't fit 100%, the theme will scale the image automatically to cover the whole space in the header. This is supported in most modern browsers.
Portfolio Custom Post Type (premium) #
MH Elegance WordPress Theme supports the MH Portfolio CPT Plugin, this plugin will add the "Portfolio" custom post type to your WordPress installation to ensure that you can create awesome portfolios to showcase your work, products or recent projects. You can find this plugin in the folder /add-ons of the theme download package.
— Plugin Installation
You can upload and install the plugin in your WordPress dashboard under "Plugins". Just click on "Add New", then on "Upload" and select the zip file of the plugin to upload it to your WordPress installation. When you have activated the plugin, you'll find the new "Portfolio" entry in the menu of your WordPress dashboard where you can start creating portfolio posts.
— Portfolio Archive
When you have published portfolio posts, you can find an overview of these posts under the following URL (replace www.example.com with your URL):
https://www.example.com/portfolio/
— Portfolio Shortcode
In addition to the portfolio archive, you can display your portfolio on posts, pages and even in text widgets by using the portfolio shortcode:
[mh_portfolio]
The MH Themes portfolio shortcode also accepts some arguments. For example if you want to display only three items from your portfolio and skip the first one in the order, you could do this:
[mh_portfolio showposts=3 offset=1]
Footer Logo and Social Icons (premium) #
In case you want to upload a footer logo, please navigate to "Appearance => Customize => Theme Options => General" in your WordPress dashboard where you can find the option to upload your footer logo.
The menu in the footer can be created in your WordPress dashboard under "Appearance => Menus". You'll just need to create a custom menu and assign the menu to the "Footer Navigation" menu slot and the menu will appear in your footer.
To display the social icons in the footer, you'll just need to create another menu with custom links to your social media channels and assign this menu to the "Social Icons in Footer" menu slot. The theme will automatically recognize the social networks based on their URLs and display the specific icons. Currently the following networks are supported: Behance, Dribbble, Facebook, Flickr, Google, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, Soundcloud, Tumblr, Twitter, Vimeo, Xing and YouTube.
Contact Page (premium) #
The theme has included a "Contact" page template with an additional sidebar to display a different sidebar on your contact page than on other posts and pages. If you use this template for your contact page, you could for example place the "MH Facebook Likebox" widget and a text widget with your contact details in the "Contact" widget location under "Appearance => Widgets". MH Elegance WordPress Theme also supports the popular "Contact Form 7" plugin to easily create working contact forms with only a few clicks. Please read this to learn more: How to create a working contact page in WordPress.
Font Awesome Icons #
MH Elegance WordPress Theme has included a collection of over 400 amazing icons by Font Awesome. You can view these icons in detail on the Font Awesome website and use them as you like on your own website to give your content a personal or professional touch. You can easily display the icons by adding the small HTML snippet of the specific icon in the WordPress text editor (not visual), for example a cloud icon:
<i class="fa fa-cloud"></i>
Shortcodes #
In case you want to use shortcodes to easily add styled elements like tabs, columns, boxes, accordions or else to your website, we recommend the "Shortcodes Ultimate" plugin. This plugin has included tons of useful shortcodes to easily customize your website. You can find more information and the documentation on the plugin site.
