How to Install and Use this Aurelius WordPress Theme

July 15, 2010 at 4:31 pm | Blog | 61 comments

 

If you like the style of this website, then you can have your own by several very simple steps and a little patience. English is not my mother language, so if you find yourself lost in the reading, please don’t call 911 but leave a comment and tell me which part you don’t get. Ok it is not funny right? Let’s begin then.

1. download and install wordpress

Aurelius is for wordpress up to 2.8, so first of all, download the wordpress from the official website wordpress.org. it is recommended to use the latest version which is 3.0. Then follow wordpress’s famous one click installation steps to install the blog. Ok this is really very simple, so i think you should have no problems on this. Let’s move to the next step.

2. A little configuration

It is very important that, to be a SEO friendly theme, the url for each post is the key. So this theme requires a custom Structure for permalink.
Go to wordpress dashbord, click Permalinks in the Settings section. check on the Custom Structure, and use the structure: /%category%/%postname% or something like this. It makes your site’s URL more user friendly as well SEO friendly. If you find that this setting does not work, you have to use mod_rewrite for this feature. Now instead of the default URL  http://example.com/?p=N,  url is more pretty  http://example.com/category/post-name/. For more details, check this url out: http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks#mod_rewrite:_.22Pretty_Permalinks.22

before that, your web server should be configured to support url rewrite (mod_rewrite).

and you will have a .htaccess file in the root folder (wordpress will generate this file automatically, if it does not, please copy the following to your root folder).

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

# BEGIN WordPress RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L] # END WordPress

the above example is for root url is “/”, for example http://pengbos.com, but if your root url is something like: http://localhost/wordpress/. the htaccess should be

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

# BEGIN WordPress RewriteEngine On RewriteBase /wordpress/ RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /wordpress/index.php [L] # END WordPress

3. download and install Aurelius

Just go to the download page or follow this link download to access the theme. After downloading, unzip it into your wordpress theme folder, and the structure layout is like “wordpress\wp-content\themes\Aurelius”. login wordpress site with your admin account and go to Appearance->Themes. do you see the Aurelius? Awesome, the new Aurelius theme is installed successfully. Just activate the newly installed theme and be ready to start configure your site with Aurelius!!

4. Add Categories and Pages

Aurelius is designed follow the rule: Convention over Configuration . You add categories and pages follow the name conventions instead of configurations.
a. Four Categories are predefined: Blog, Portfolio, Featured, Announcement. You have to specify the slug “blog”, “portfolio”,”featured” and “announcement” for the four categories.
In the home page, the featured section featches posts in “Featured” category. The Blog and Portfolio menu navigates to blog and portfolio categories. The Announcement section under the featured section is for Announcement category, it featches the latest post in the announcement category.

b. Two Pages are predefined: About and Contact.
The menus About and Contact link to the two pages.

5. Add Posts to different categories

Add a post to a category is very straightforward, however to display the proper images in the proper position is a little tricky.
As i have already mentioned, there are four predefined categories: Blog, Portfolio, Featured, Announcement. For posts, there is a customized form for the user to input custom field values. With this form, user does not need to type in custom fields manually. It really keeps the powerful custom fields simple and stupid.
Let’s go over through the categories one by one.
a. Blog category.
Usually, user wants to have a very nice image along with the post. to achieve this, just add a post image in the left custom field “Image for blog post”. And the great part is that you can upload image and insert the url into the field by clicking this upload button!!

b. Portfolio Category.
The Portfolio category is a little complicated compared to the former one. User can upload as much as 6 images for each portfolio. If you want to have different thumbnails for each image, there are still as much as 6 thumbnails custom fields. (the following diagram depicts how to add images)

After the contents and images are ready, don’t forget to check on the “Portfolio” checkbox for category selection.

c. Featured Category.
Add a post to the featured section in the home page is as simple as checking on the “Featured” category. But in order to have a featured image to be displayed, you still need to put a image url in the “Image for blog post” custom field. As posts in the “Blog” category already has a value for it, you just need specify a value for portfolio posts if you want to have the portfolio displayed in the home page too. Note: every post can be categorized into more than 1 categories. so a post may belong to “Blog” as well as “Featured”, or even “Portfolio”, although it is not that usual.

d. Announcement Category.
Announcements are displayed in the home page too. it is designed to put a title of news in the announcement section. so keep it simple and short.

<< Back to Blog Discuss this post

61 Comments to “How to Install and Use this Aurelius WordPress Theme”

1. Nic says:

   August 2, 2010 at 5:06 pm

   Hi There,

   Great that you transformed the aurelius theme into a wordpress theme, however, I am having difficulties with it..the rolling jquery is causing troubles on my site…

   “A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, or you can continue to see if the script will complete.

   Script: http://www.tacticalproductions.at/rockwallaby/wp-content/themes/Aurelius/js/jquery.roundabout-1.0.min.js:41”

   what seems to be the problem here ? Any idea?

   Thanks,

   Nic
2. Nic says:

   August 2, 2010 at 5:06 pm

   .
3. admin says:

   August 2, 2010 at 6:28 pm

   Hi Nic,

   Thanks for downloading the theme. I cannot figure out the problem from your description. But i suggest, try to use the development version of jquery roundabout to debug. you can download the debug version here
   http://fredhq.com/projects/roundabout/

   If you could tell me your run environment and reproduce steps, i may try to reproduce this bug on my host. and try my best to help.

   Thanks,

   Pengbo
4. adam lee says:

   September 10, 2010 at 12:56 am

   Hi, I’m new to WordPress (3.0) but really struggling installing this theme.
   I’ve installed the theme to the folder /tryout
   The problem is that the HOME link on the top menu is the only link that works. I’ve followed your instructions above but it still doesn’t work.

   For instance, ABOUT link goes to /tryout/about which doesn’t work, the page cannot be found. The ABOUT page does exist but it’s url is tryout/index.php/about
   The CONTACT link goes to /tryout/contact-us which cannot be found, but I can view the page at it’s permalink of /tryout/index.php/contact-us

   I have also created the portfolio category, and the top menu link url is /tryout/category/portfolio/ but it says the page cannot be found.
   I can however view a post in the portfolio category by browsing to /tryout/index.php/archives/category/portfolio

   Can you tell me how I can make the top menu links work please?

   

   admin Reply:
   September 10th, 2010 at 5:12 am

   Hi adam

   the tricky is that you have to use custom structure for your ule. Go to wordpress dashbord, click Permalinks in the Settings section. check on the Custom Structure, and use the structure: /%category%/%postname%. I am sure you have finished this part.

   before that, your web server should be configured to support url rewrite.

   and you will have a .htaccess file in the root folder.

   # BEGIN WordPress
   
   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteBase /tryout/
   RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
   RewriteRule . /tryout/index.php [L]
   
   # END WordPress

   if you still have any problems, please let me know.

   Thanks

   

   adam lee Reply:
   September 10th, 2010 at 11:55 pm

   Hello, thanks for the help.

   I think the problem must be my web server not currently allowing url rewrite, as I have the .htaccess file already in the root folder and pasted in the above. The links are still behaving as I mentioned in my last post.

   I’ll ask my host to allow this feature, otherwise WordPress isn’t going to work for me.

   

   admin Reply:
   September 11th, 2010 at 12:08 pm

   Yes, ask them for the info. Thanks.
5. opal says:

   September 28, 2010 at 8:57 pm

   Hi!

   Thanks for the sweet theme! How do I make the header logo clickable/linkable?

   Thanks again!
6. opal says:

   September 28, 2010 at 9:05 pm

   Nevermind! Figured it out. For others who want to link their header logo, simply:

   1. Navigate to header.php file
   2. Insert: between the and ?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?> under the tag
   3. Close code off with at the end of code line

   Voila!

   Note: Be sure not to remove existing and tags or else the layout spacing will become misaligned.
7. SK says:

   September 29, 2010 at 5:08 am

   Thanks for the awesome theme. Can I modify the menus to add my own ? In the Menu settings page, it says “The current theme does not natively support menus, but you can use the “Custom Menu” widget to add any menus you create here to the theme’s sidebar.”

   Does this mean I cannot change the top menu ?

   

   admin Reply:
   September 29th, 2010 at 5:14 am

   Hi SK,

   Thanks for downloading, currently, the menu is coded in the template, it is not configurable. It should be a good suggestion to add this feature in the new release.

   but if you want to add menu items, just go to the header.php file to change the code. If you have any questions, i am happy to help.

   Thanks

   

   PN Reply:
   February 19th, 2011 at 9:57 am

   can you show me how to hard code a menu option that will link to a specific page via the Header.php file? ie. more than just the about/contact us page.

   

   admin Reply:
   February 19th, 2011 at 3:34 pm

   hi PN
   go to the header.php file, follow the about page pattern, add a new

8. element.

                      <li><a <?php if (is_page('about')) { ? rel="nofollow"> class="current"<?php } ?> href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/about" title="Go to the About page"><span class="meta">Who am I?</span><br />About</a></li>

   for example, the new page is “service”, which is created at the backend. so add your li after the about element

                      <li><a <?php if (is_page('service')) { ? rel="nofollow"> class="current"<?php } ?> href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/service" title="Go to the Service page"><span class="meta">What we provide</span><br />Service</a></li>

   That’s it!