Home page options

Visit the theme’s option pages in order to customize the pages and subpages that are displayed in the navigation bar, as well as the number of “subposts” (post excerpts that are displayed under the featured post) to be displayed on the home page. You can also decide which category to designate as the “feature” category, or turn this function off and let the most recent post be the the featured post.

The options page also allows customization of the way that the feature post is displayed. You can elect to display the full post instead of the post excerpt (thus removing the ‘Continue Reading’ link), and you can also reformat the main page to accomodate longer excerpts and long posts (NOTE: If you select only the “Full Post” option, your post will still be cut off at the bottom unless you also select the option to reformat - “Full Post” just removes the ‘Continue Reading’ link, but does not change the format).

Viala also has 2 separate sidebars, one for the home page and one for all other pages. These can be customized in the Widgets menu of your wp-admin screen. In the drop-down menu, select “Homepage Widgets” to start adding widgets to the home page. The widgets you select will fit right alongside your homepage ’sub-posts.’

The image that you see on the homepage, called the “header image,” can be customized - simply go to “Design->Custom Header Image” in your wp-admin screen. This header image will appear next to any feature article on the homepage.

If you wish to temporarily replace the header image with another image that should be associated directly with a given post, see the explanation of the  use of the custom field “pic” in “Special Custom Fields,” below.

The “intro” paragraph

By default, the text of the first paragraph of each feature post and single post will be displayed in Palatino font and a larger font-size. This is implemented through the CSS selector “first-child,” and may be thrown off by the inclusion of images, lists, or other elements at the beginning of a post. You can manually apply this effect to any other paragraph by adding the class “intro” to the paragraph in the HTML editor window of the word press Edit Post screen.

Special Page templates

Viala comes with some ready made page templates: a Contact page, an Archives page, and a Links page. To use them, simply create a new Page, and then scroll to the bottom of the edit screen and click on the drop-down menu entitled Page Template. Select the template of your choice. The Contact template includes a contact form, the Archives template presents your last 50 posts in a list, and the Links page displays the links in your blogroll along with each link’s description (you can add and edit the descriptions of your links in Manage->Links in wp-admin [WP 2.5 and later]).

Special custom fields

You can further customize the appearance of your blog through the use of custom fields. These are added through the edit screen of your wp-admin, by clicking on “Custom Fields” under “Advanced Options.”

If you would like to display an image that is associated with a specific post on your home page, without replacing your header image, you can do so by adding a custom field entitled “pic” to the post, and inserting the URL of your image. NOTE: for best results, these “pic” images should be the same size as the header image, ie  400px X 300px.

Single posts can include a table of contents. In your post editing screen, simply create a list of links to anchors within the post, then cut and paste this list into a custom field called “toc.” The list will now appear in the left sidebar of the single post page - post meta info is deplaced to the bottom of the post.

Image alignment and borders

Images within posts or pages will “float” to the left by default, causing text to automatically wrap around them. If you wish to align your images to the right, or not wrap the text at all, simply assign the images a class of “alignright” or “alignnone.” You can do this manually in the HTML window of the text editor in the editing screen, or, when you import an image through wordpress “Add Images” screen (wordpress 2.5 or later), just click on the alignment option that you want

Also, all images will automatically be presented with a polaroid-style border and drop-shadow effect. If you wish to remove this effect from a certain image, simply assign the class “noborder” to the image.

Viala in your language

Viala is fully internationalized (i.e. all of the theme’s static text are “tagged” so that wordpress knows how to present them in the appropriate language), and version 1.3 comes with French and Spanish translations. If you wish to create a new translation for viala, or improve upon the existing translations, the theme’s .pot and .po files are included for your use. Please contact me if you have a new translation - I’ll include it in the next release and credit you as a translator!

For more information, please feel free to leave a comment below.

What’s new in this version (1.3) :

• Increased subpost display options to a maximum of 12.
• Added an option in “Viala Options” to adapt the layout for full posts and/or long excerpts, plus a field for custom “Continue Reading” text.
• Fixed a bug in search.php that was causing empty searches to display a 404 result (created the file nosearch.php).
• Fixed CSS handling of images in posts for better compatibility with basic WP outputs (alignright, alignleft, alignnone).
• Matched the output of the default sidebar to the widget sidebar in functions.php and sidebar.php
• Matched output of home subposts and search/archives.
• Included support for WP image gallery captions in posts.
• Added CSS rules to support wp-smileys.
• Fixed search field so that the text “search” disappears when clicked (thanks to Sadara for the tip)
• Added gravatars to Author pages
• Fixed numerous typographical discrepancies
• Changed layout of Links page from blocks to list with link descriptions

A note about using “pretty permalinks” with Viala : Due to the way in which Viala handles the “subposts” on the first and subsequent pages, if you choose to alter your permalink structure, you should change your “Settings->Reading->Display at most ” posts” in wp-admin to less than or equal your Viala subposts options + 4 (i.e., if you choose to display 3 subposts on the home page, change the ‘Display at most’ setting to 7 or less). Otherwise, the pagination function may be thrown off slightly.

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