The beauty of OnePress as a WordPress theme is the flexibility and functionality that you inherit upon activating it to drive your WordPress powered site. With that flexibility, however, comes a relatively blank canvas that you will need to paint to really expose the power of OnePress in representing your site’s content. Your site consists of a number of “layouts” that you need to appropriately configure to your liking.
Each layout type in OnePress has the potential to have its own unique layout. For instance, the display of search results can be totally different than the display of all posts matching a particular tag. If you have not customized the layout for that that is being rendered, OnePress will use your default configuration. The default layout is the backup, if you will. Since this is the case, setting up your default layout the way you wish is a logical first step.
To set up your default layout, log into your administration panel and navigate to Design (Appearance if you’re using 2.7) and choose “OnePress Layout.” Here, you can easily choose how many columns you would like and you can also rearrange their order by dragging and dropping the columns. Once you have set this up appropriately, save changes and navigate to “Widgets.”
OnePress Layout Selector
OnePress sets up your layout using WordPress sidebars correlating to the columns you have chosen. In my case, I have chosen to use a one sidebar (Sidebar1) layout. When choosing the widgets for your layout, your must first select the appropriate sidebar in which to place them. Here, use “Default Main” to adjust the way the main column of your site looks. Once you have “Default Main” active, notice that the “Featured Posts Carousel” and “Content Body” widgets are already there. This is because upon activating OnePress for the first time, these are inserted to maintain basic WordPress functionality. Let’s go ahead and add pagination to your site so users can easily move among the pages of posts. Doing this is simple, just find “OP Pagination” and add it! Let’s go ahead add it twice so there’s pagination on the top and bottom of the page. You might also find at this point in the process to edit the “Content Body” widget, which defines how posts look. We’re not going to make any changes to the default sidebar, but if your wanted to that could be edited by selecting “Default Sidebar1.”
Widgets added to Default Main
Select Default Main Sidebar
Customizing Content Body Widget
Now that you have your default layout set up as you would like, head back over to the “OnePress Layout” screen. Since you more than likely want single posts to display completely different than those pages showing multiple posts, choose to customize the “Single” layout. By doing this, you will now have new sidebars in the widget selection menu. Back on the Widgets screen, choose “Single Main” and add the “Content Body” widget. Go ahead and edit the widget to reflect however you want your posts to look in single mode. Make sure to add the “comment-form” component so users can leave responses to your posts.
Customize Layout for Single
Select Single Main Sidebar
Customizing Content Body Widget
Now that you have customized your default and single layouts, you are well on your way to harnessing the full potential of the OnePress layout. Go ahead and choose other layouts to customize and build out the rest of your site the way you prefer. Keep in mind that you can easily change your layout down the road so be sure to experiment and have fun!
