Changelog

View the changelog for more a detailed record of all the changes made to Americanaura.

Homepage

Create a page titled “Home” to use as your homepage if you don’t already have one. Then head to the Settings → Reading screen in your WordPress dashboard and change the “Front page displays” setting to the following:

1. Choose the “A static page” radio button.
2. In the “Front page” dropdown, select the “Home” page.
3. Click the Save Changes button.

The homepage content in Americanaura uses the front-page.php template in the theme, which consists of two widget areas: The Marquee and The Pinboard. To edit these widget areas, head on over to the Appearance → Widgets screen.

The Marquee

The Marquee is the big feature area at to the top of the homepage just below the main site navigation. It can contain multiple slides, which are added as widgets. Each slide consists of a title, a media item (image or video), a short description, and possibly a link.

To add a slide, open the Marquee widget area by clicking on it in the right sidebar area. Once it’s open, you can drag widgets from the Available Widgets area to the Marquee area, where you can then customize their settings.

The record, text and video widgets are all designed to work in the Marquee. Support has also been built in for the Simple Image Widget plugin from the WordPress plugin directory if you want to add an image-oriented slide to the Marquee.

The Pinboard

The Pinboard is the widget area below the Marquee on the homepage. It allows for featuring additional content on your site that may not be as important as the features in the Marquee, but nevertheless, it offers unique ways of interacting with the various widgets it accepts.

Record, text, track, video and the custom Americanaura Posts widget are all supported, in addition to widgets provided by the Simple Image Widget and Twitter Widget Pro plugins in the WordPress plugin directory if you’d like a few more options.

Give each widget a shot and see how flexible it really is. We think it’s pretty dang cool!

Blog

Similar to the homepage, you need to create a page where your blog can be accessed if you haven’t already done so. Create a new page titled “Blog,” then head to the Settings → Reading screen in your WordPress dashboard and select your blog page in the “Posts page” dropdown. Be sure to save your changes.

You blog is now accessible by viewing the page you just selected.

Menus

Menus provide granular control over the links that appear in the various navigation elements on your site. Americanaura supports three different menu locations out of the box, which generally work like menus in standard themes if you’re familiar with them. If not, brush up on their use in the WordPress Menu User Guide in the Codex.

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

Social Menu

The Social Menu in Americanaura allows you to list links to your various social media profiles like Twitter and Facebook as icons, however, the menu items need to be named correctly in order to get the icons to work.

Each menu item should be added as a custom link with the label matching the name of the site it’s linking to. For instance, when linking to Twitter, the label should be “Twitter,” which will be replaced by the Twitter icon.

Here is a list of sites with bundled icons that you can include in your Social Menu:

• Facebook
• Feed
• Flickr
• Google Plus
• Instagram
• LastFM
• Pinterest
• Rdio
• SoundCloud
• Spotify
• Twitter
• Vimeo
• YouTube

Special Features

Gig Carousel

At the top of the site is a feature we call the Gig Carousel. It contains a variable list of upcoming gigs and is positioned offscreen whenever a visitor initially loads a page. The gigs can be viewed by clicking the “Upcoming Gigs” tab, or simply scrolling up. Try it out on your phone or tablet.

The Gig Carousel can be disabled by visiting the theme options screen at Appearance → Theme Options.

Plugins

Limited design support has been built in to Americanaura for additional plugins that provide functionality that is currently beyond the scope of the AudioTheme Framework and theme (although we may bundle some of these features in the future).

• Contact Form 7
• Gravity Forms
• Simple Image Widget
• Simple Page Sidebars
• Twitter Widget Pro

Customizing Americanaura

Americanaura is considered a parent theme within the WordPress platform and any customizations should be made to a custom child theme extending it, rather than directly. Any other method can’t be supported and changes made to files in a parent theme will be wiped out when the theme is updated via the automatic update feature in the future. That would suck. Please don’t do it.

Read more about Child Themes in the Codex.

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

• Contact Anna DiTommaso for WordPress Services for Musicians.
• Fill out the customization request form.

Templates

Default Templates and Template Parts

Default template files that are part of the WordPress template hierarchy are included in the root theme folder. Some templates are broken into smaller parts to allow them to be easily reused or replaced in a child theme — the parts generally reside in the /templates/ folder.

Read more about the Template Hierarchy on the Codex.

AudioTheme Templates

Template files that are unique to AudioTheme are included in the /audiotheme/ folder. They generally include templates for displaying discography (records and tracks), gigs, and videos, in addition to the archives for each post type. Which templates are included depends on the level of support built into the theme.

Functions.php

The functions.php file in Americanaura registers support for features and hooks into WordPress at various points during the request to customize the way it behaves. It also loads several additional files from the /includes/ folder that have been separated for better organization.

CSS

If you’re making customizations using a child theme (which you should be), the default styles can be overridden using vanilla CSS without having to understand LESS or how it works. The information below is for the sake of documenting how the theme is configured.

Americanaura includes support for the LESS CSS preprocessor via wp-less, which can enhance performance of the theme and allow for greater customization abilities to be built in via the Customizer. However, this can make working with CSS a little different than most themes if you don’t have any experience with it.

The standard style.css style sheet is included to allow WordPress to recognize the theme and as a fallback for servers that aren’t configured correctly to work with the LESS library. The CSS rules in the main style sheet are compiled during development specifically for this purpose, but otherwise the file mostly serves as a placeholder.

For reference, the styles used to display the theme will be generated from the LESS files in the /assets/styles/ folder.

Read more about LESS.

Loading Child Theme Style Sheets

Americanaura uses a slightly different process for loading style sheets since it builds the styles from LESS automatically. Going this route creates a bunch of possibilities for loading child styles. The easiest is to enqueue a child theme style sheet like any other style sheet. Drop this snippet in your child theme’s functions.php file to do that:

/**
 * Load the child theme style sheet.
 */
function americanaura_child_enqueue_scripts() {
	wp_enqueue_style( 'americanaura-child', get_stylesheet_uri() );
}
add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'americanaura_child_enqueue_scripts', 20 );

Assets

Additional assets such as scripts, images, and webfonts are located in the /assets/ folder.

Languages

The /languages/ folder contains files for translating the text in Americanaura. Custom language files should not be saved in this folder, otherwise they will be wiped out during an update.

Read more about translating WordPress on the Codex.