FAQ - jacki890/Largo GitHub Wiki

A: The default color is light blue. Here is how you choose a different color:

• Under Appearance > Theme Options there is an Advanced tab that has an option to enable custom LESS to CSS for theme customization
• Check that box and save the theme options
• On the Appearance > CSS Variables menu that appears, you can now do some basic customization of the theme (mostly colors)
• You can use custom CSS to further refine the colors, but this will generally reduce the amount of custom CSS you need to use

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A: No, you can't change those values in the Admin UI. That can only be done through custom CSS. We have tested this theme extensively for appearance on desktop to mobile devices to ensure that these elements display properly in all screen sizes. Changing this is not recommended. While you may improve the appearance in one view, it will often look worse on a different device.

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A: When you edit a post you'll see a number of boxes in the right column with various checkboxes (categories, etc.) one of these is labelled Prominence. This controls where certain posts are displayed on the site (i.e. The top story on the homepage is selected by checking the Top Story box).

• By default, the footer has a widget called Footer Featured that will show up to three posts that you select by checking the Footer Featured widget box from this prominence box when editing a post
• If you don't see the Prominence box, make sure you're in the Post Edit screen, click on Screen Options at the top right corner of the screen and make sure the Prominence box is checked

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A: While the changes may propagate within a couple hours, it can actually take up to 48 hours for them to take effect. If you clear your cache and try the site from a new internet browser and still see the old site, or it's pointing to the old host, the changes have not taken effect yet, and you just have to wait it out.

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A: Largo is a theme on a network with many other sites. We keep control of the plugin installation so we can avoid conflicts with the theme and with approved plugins. WordPress has thousands of plugins available, and the potential for them to cause problems is pretty high. If there's a plugin you'd like to install, ask your Largo administrator to install it for you. If it's one of our approved and tested plugins, they will install it for you. If not, they'll discuss it on a case-by-case basis.

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A:

• Send us a list of the changes you are requesting and we'll work with you to implement them
• Make those changes in your staging environment and commit them to your Child Theme's repository so we can push them live for you

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A: Not at this time.

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A: Those come to us from the providers, so we have very little control over their appearance.

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A:

• We strip code from the html to prevent issues, like photos and embedded media, coming through to the homepage
• We also try to keep things looking good across a wide variety of devices with our responsive theme. What looks good in your desktop browser may look terrible in a mobile browser or vice versa
• We recommend using the custom excerpt field and writing a short, plain text excerpt for the best results

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A: Go to Appearance > Menus. The one you're looking for is called footer navigation. Here is more info on how to use WordPress menus

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A: Only one post can be sticky at a time. To make a post sticky:

• Go to post edit view
• Click the Visibility status (Public, Private, etc)
• Click the checkbox in front of Stick this post to the front page
• It will appear on the homepage

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A: Do the following:

1. Go to Appearance > Theme Options
2. Click on the Layout Options tab
3. Midway down that page, there is an area labeled Sidebar Options
4. One per line, you can enter names of additional sidebar regions
5. Save the Theme Options
6. Go to the Appearance > Widgets menu where the new widget area you created in step #4 should be available
7. Add the widgets you want to display (the same way you'd add them for the main sidebar)
8. Go to the edit screen for the post where you want to display the custom sidebar
9. Find Layout Options along the right side
10. Under Custom Sidebar, select the sidebar you created from the drop down menu
11. Publish the post, and it should now be displayed

Note: This option is only available on posts, pages and series landing pages, but will soon be available on category and tag pages as well.

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A: There's a plugin called Simple Tags on some Largo sites are using that helps to recommend tags for a given article. This is what is causing the behavior to differ from what you see in the WordPress documentation. You can find documentation for that plugin here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-tags/

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**A:**We have a great article on how Largo handles taxonomies (a way to label and organize posts on your site). Essentially, categories should be the top level containers for content, while tags are more for keywords (people, cities, organizations, narrower topics, etc).

Following that, we're working to build SEO rules into the theme (using the categories and tags as keywords for Google News, for example) so you don't have to do anything extra.

Writing good, keyword-rich headlines matters far more than categories and tags in determining how a given page ranks in search results for a given set of keywords.

There are a number of other things you can do to improve rankings:

• Make sure the authors on your site have completely filled out profiles that are linked with their Google+ profiles
• Make sure partners or sites that republish your content are linking back to you whenever possible
• Check out this beginner's guide to SEO

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A: Most often, this happens when a post is saved originally in Text edit view, and later it is switched to Visual edit view and saved. WordPress can strip out embedded JavaScript in posts when you switch between those views.

Best practice is to only save posts in the Text edit view.

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A: We have a list of recommended plugins that were originally created by NPR project Argo, which Largo is based on. We also have a list of curated plugins that we know to work with Largo. Utilities are there as well as Unsupported Plugins which we know to be incompatible with Largo. Check those lists first before choosing plugins and that should cover most of the functionality you need on your website. There are thousands of plugins out there and they vary as greatly in quality as they do in functionality. Keep this in mind when choosing to download one that isn't on our list and be sure to backup your site before activating it so you can revert back if it causes problems.

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A: There are many reasons why you might want your readers to see some categories of posts, but not others on the homepage. We have a way to explicitly specify that in the Largo Theme Options.

1. First, find the category ID for the post in question.

   • Go to Posts > Categories and click on the category as though you were going to edit it
   • The URL will be something like "http://.../wp-admin/edit-tags.php?action=edit&taxonomy=category&tag_ID=62&post_type=post"
   • The tag ID is the number you want. It's 62 in this example

2. Once you have that ID, go to Appearance > Theme Options and choose the Layout Options tab

3. Scroll down to the section labeled Other Homepage Display Options

4. To exclude the category in this example, put "-62" in the box in front of Categories to include or exclude

   • A minus will exclude a category
   • no minus will limit the loop to that category

5. You can add more as comma separated values

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A: With Google Analytics, you can do everything from very basic traffic analysis to more complex analytics by tagging links, creating goals, etc. There are many resources available. Here are just a few:

• Overview of Google Analytics with WordPress
• Info on setting up goals
• Some of our members use Chartbeat
• This site is great and offers free services for nonprofits Web Analytics Demystified

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A: Not specifically at this time. We're planning to add some additional (optional) custom fields to address this need and also for things like tweeting text selections if somebody shares via the Twitter button, etc. and modify the theme accordingly to handle it in the background, but that has yet to be implemented.

We don't recommend using SEO plugins, because they duplicate much of the functionality built into Largo. e.g.

• Twitter card markup
• Open graph tags
• Canonical URLs, etc.

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A: While that isn't a global option, you can set this on a case by case basis. When you insert a link into a post, there is a check box labeled "open link in a new window." Check it for external links and leave it unchecked for links to other elements on your site.

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A: The excerpt is determined by the first few sentences of the post, so edit that to your liking. If you want a post to be displayed in the footer:

• Open the post's edit screen
• Go to the Post Prominence box on the right
• Check the box for Footer Featured Widget

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A: Go to Appearance > Theme Options on the Basic Settings tab. There is a section labeled Donate Button and an option to show/hide it in the top header as well as to enter the link to your donation page and the text displayed on the button. "Donate Now" is the default.

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The current version of Largo (v0.3) shows other stories in the same category or with the same tags in a tabbed widget at the bottom of posts, ordered by the most recent.

This will be improved significantly in our next release of Largo (v0.4). There will be a "Read this Next" widget that follows logic along these lines:

1. Stories in the series
2. Stories by tagged, starting with the least common
3. Stories in the category, starting with latest posts

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A: There are too many variables to answer this question generally, but often a good place to start is with the size of the pictures on the site. If a picture is displayed on a WordPress site as 150x150px, but the actual image is 4000x4000px, it's the large image that's actually loaded into memory.

Go through your site and note the largest display size of each picture. It may be displayed in many places, (i.e. a thumbnail in a sidebar, or a featured image on the home page) so be sure to find the largest use. Reduce all images to the largest size they will be displayed at on the site and that should improve performance significantly.

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A: Not at this time. In v0.4, we are using a more generic and flexible recent/featured posts widget and will no longer be using the current widgets.

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A: Under Appearance > Menus, the main navbar is broken into two different menu areas called navbar categories list and navbar supplemental links. The supplemental links are the ones that appear in the dropdown on smaller screens. Here is more info about menus.

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A: Currently, all but one of our INN Member sites are hosted and maintained by us. The one site that doesn't has a dedicated tech staff to maintain their site, because their needs are very different from most of our members. Hosting with us, you get:

• Free hosting on WP Engine, which is one of the best and most high performance hosts for WordPress sites available
• Updates
• Security and performance tuning
• Support

Self-hosting is fine for non-INN Members, but what we offer in our hosting is a great benefit and value with your INN Membership.

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A: We set the font size for the body type based on well established typographic conventions regarding readability. The main consideration here is line length rather than absolute type size.

Therefore, we recommend that you do not change the the font size using custom CSS as that will interfere with our line length optimization and would likely negatively impact the readability of your site.