Getting Started

To get started with Venue you'll have to install the theme first. You will need the Installable WordPress file only which you can grab from the Themeforest download page. The other option you can select is the All files & documentation. You can go to your download page now to follow along (you may need to log in).

If you download All files & documentation and extract the archive to your computer you will see that it includes the installable file and a bunch of other things. By itself it can not be installed as a WordPress theme.

Installing The Theme

Once you have the installable WordPress file (it will be a zip archive) you can install that directly. Go to the WordPress admin and navigate to the Appearance section. Once there, click the Add New button near the top of the page and click Upload on the following page. Browse for the theme, select the installable file and click Install Now

Allow some time for the theme to upload. Once instaled you will see the option to activate the theme, press the activate button to activate the theme on your site.

Installing WooCommerce

WooCommerce is not required for the theme to function but you will only be able to sell tickets online if you download it. WooCommerce is free and downloading and using it is cinch.

The easiest way to install WooCommerce is to go to Plugins ▸ Add New and type "WooCommerce" into the search bar. The first result should be named "WooCommerce - excelling eCommerce". Click Install Now under the title and follow the on-screen instructions until your plugin is installed and activated.

Installing Sample Content

Once everything is set up you can add the sample content. You can find the sample content in the all files & documentation package or you can download the sample content.

To install the sample content you'll need to use the WordPress import tool. This can be found in Tools ▸ Import. You'll need to click the WordPress option, the bottom most one in the table. If you haven't used the importer yet, you'll need to install it. Just follow the prompts and when installed click Activate Plugin & Run Importer.

In the importer, select the downloaded venue-sample-content.xml file and click Upload file and import. On the next screen you should see a list of authors to import. You can leave this as is (it will create new users for you), or you can use the select box to assign all items from the indicated author to one of your existing ones.

The most important bit is to make sure the Download and import file attachments checkbox is checked. This will make sure that all images are imported into your site as well. Once checked, click the Submit button.

Setting Up The Sample Content

Once all the content has been imported you'll still need to do some work to make sure your menus and widgets are created and your home page is set. To set up your widgets head on over to Appearance ▸ Widgets and drag-and-drop widgets into the sidebars. To set up your menus go to Appearance ▸ Menus and select pages or custom URLs to place into a menu. Make sure the menu is set to be shown in a menu slot. To set your home page go to Settings ▸ Reading and click the A static page radio button, then select a page for your front page. If you would like your site to be exactly like ours, choose the page named Home.

The Ticket Form

Creating a ticketing form is a simple matter of creating a WooCommerce product for your ticket. Instead of reading loads of text about this, here's a quick 4 minute video which has all the info you need to get started!

Shortcodes

Shortcodes allow you to add great functionality into your post content such as columns, social icons, forms and more. Here are the shortcodes you can use with Venue by default but with additonal plugins you can add more!

Gallery

This shortcode can be used in all themes because it is a default WordPress shortcode. It allows you to create galleries easily. Nowadays it is much easier to create a gallery using the Add Media section in posts, but using the shortcode is still possible.

Example

[gallery include='12,44,41,34,552,23']

This shortcode comes with a number of parameters that you can customize to get the exact gallery you'd like:

orderby

Specify how to sort the display thumbnails. The default is "menu_order". Options:

• menu_order
• title
• post_date
• rand
• ID

order

Specify the sort order used to display thumbnails. ASC or DESC.

columns

Specify the number of columns to use.

id

Specify the post ID. The gallery will display images which are attached to that post. The default behavior, if no ID is specified, is to display images attached to the current post.

size

Specify the image size to use for the thumbnail display. Valid values include "thumbnail", "medium", "large", "full" and any other additional image size that was registered.

link

You can set it to "file" so each image will link to the image file. The default value links to the attachment's permalink.

include

Comma separated attachment IDs to show only the images from these attachments.

exclude

Comma separated attachment IDs excludes the images from these attachments. Please note that include and exclude cannot be used together.

Embed

WordPress uses oEmbed which allows you to embed lots of media easily. You can do this without a shortcode by adding links to items on a separate line. You can embed videos from Vimeo, Youtube, music from Soundcloud, tweets, and more. Check out the Embeds Documentation for more info.

In some cases you might need to use the dedicated embed shortcode if you want to specify the width and height of the embedded object explicitly. The parameters of this shortcode are:

height

The height of the embedded object in pixels, without the px suffix

width

The width of the embedded object in pixels, without the px suffix

The content of this shortcode should be the URL to the embedded object.

Example

[embed width='804' height='620']https://vimeo.com/92930373[/embed]

Separator

Venue comes with two separator styles. The simple separator allows you to add a horizontal dotted line with optional centered text. The shortcode uses the following parameters:

title

The text to center between the dividers.

heading

The heading level to use. Defaults to h1, use numbers from 1-6 to designate a different heading level

margin

Set the margin of the element if necessary. The full margin should be set in shorthand. If you'd like a 10px top margin you should use: 10px 0 0 0

If used without any parameters a full width separator will be used without a title

Example

[separator title='CONCTACT']

Separator With Image

The second type of separator is much the same as the simple separator, except it uses an image instead of text. This allows you to create some nicely customized separators. The shortcode uses the following parameters:

image

Set the URL of the image to use. You can set the default image for separators in Venue &9656; General. If this parameter is omitted, the default is used.

width

This parameter is only needed if a url is given for the image. In this case please specify the width of the used image in pixels, without the px suffix.

margin

Set the margin of the element if necessary. The full margin should be set in shorthand. If you'd like a 10px top margin you should use: 10px 0 0 0

Example

[separator_image image='http://bonsaished.com/separator.png' width='24']

Icon

Our icon shortcode allows you to create social sharing icons for all large social networks, or create other links choosing from over 350 icons.

icon

Set the name of the icon to use. Take a look at the Font Awesome Icon List for a list of available icons. For Facebook use 'fa-facebook' for example.

background

A CSS color to use as the background color for the icon.

color

A CSS color to use as the color for the icon

size

Set the size of the icon's box in pixels, without using the px suffix.

url

Set the URL the link should point to.

Example

[icon size='38' icon='fa-facebook' background='#3b5998' url='http://facebook.com']

Columns

The column (and row) shortcode allows you to specify columns in which to place your content. We use Foundation 5 which is a 12 column grid system so your column widths always need to add up to 12.

To create columns you must wrap all columns within a table in the [row] shortcode. The column shortcode itself only takes the width as its parameter which must be a number: 1,2,3,4,6 or 12.

Due to the way WordPress handles nested shortcodes we advise writing the row and column shortcodes on the same line as the content they contain.

Example

[row][column width='6']content here...[/column][column width='6']content here...[/column][/row]

Buttons

The button shortcode allows you to create great looking buttons with flexible options. You can control the color and size easily, here are all the parameters:

background

A CSS color to use as the background color for the button.

color

A CSS color to use as the color for the button text

radius

Set a border radius for buttons in pixels, without the px suffix.

size

Set the size of the button in pixels, without the px suffix. The size controls the font size, the paddings are calculated based on this

url

Set the URL the button should point to.

Example

[button color='#ffffff' background='#3b5998']Find Us On Facebook[/button]

Widgets

Venue Supports all the default WordPress widgets such as the archives, categories, search, RSS and other widgets. In addition, we've added some of our own to give you some nice options. All properly coded third party widgets should work with the theme, if you are using one where the style doesn't match the site, let us know and we'll try and build it in!

Awesome Weather Widget

This is a 3rd party plugin which our theme supports. It allows you to add a great looking weather forecast in your sidebar. You'll need to grab it by searching for "Awesome Weather Widget" in the plugin section or downloading it from The Plugin Repository.

The widget gives you a host of options from location to weather unit to forecast counts, custom background images and colors, linking to weather maps and more.

Venue Featured Widget

This widget allows you to create an animated sliding tile image. It is perfect for eye catching images with a little bit of info, linking to a page somewhere on your site.

The widget allows you to choose the title, the image, the description and the link, giving you full control over the widget.

Venue Social Widget

This widget allows you to create icon-links to your social sites. The widget uses Font Awesome so you can actually choose from a list of 350+ icons, not just social icons. View all the available icons on Font Awesome

To add an icon you will need to enter 3 pieces of information on each row, separated by commas. The first is the name of the icon (you can find this on the Font Awesome icon page), the url it should point to and the box background color.

fa-facebook,   http://www.facebook.com/bonsaished, #3b5998 

fa-twitter,http://twitter.com/bonsaished/, #55acee

Updating The Theme

Updating the theme is a simple affair. Before you update make sure that you haven't modified any theme files. If you have modified theme files you will loose those changes when you update. If you need to modify your theme you can do so with a child theme. That way you retain the ability to update. For more info take a look at the Modifying The Theme section.

The easiest way to update your theme is to delete the theme and then install and activate the update. Here are the steps required to do this in more detail.

In the admin, go to Appearance. Hover over one of the default WordPress themes (Twenty Fourteen, Twenty Thirteen or Twenty Twelve) and click the blue activate button. This will deactivate Venue.

Once deactivated, hover over Venue and click the image, this should bring up the theme details window. There should be a delete link on the bottom right of the window. Click it, then click ok to confirm deletion.

The next step is to install the update. You'll need to go to Appearance and click on the Add New button near the top. Then upload the update and activate it. If you need more info on this, take a look at the Getting Started section.

Frequently Asked Questions

This section provides answers for the most common questions based on emails, support requests, comments and other communication we've had with buyers. If you have a problem, please take a look here first, chances are you'll be able to figure out your issue.

Optimizing Your Theme

The theme has already been optimized for the most common settings but there is still a few things you can do, the most important one is merging our dynamic styles into a static stylesheet.

Since Venue is highly customizable, it allows you to choose a number of color options. These options have to be calculated dynamically on each page load, increasing the loading time. There is no way around this on our end (other than disabling customization), however, you can solve this once you have set up all your options.

The first thing you'll want to do is set everything up completely. Once you are happy with how your site looks, go to the main page and view the source code. You can do this by right clicking on the page and selecting View Source or similar from the context menu.

You should see a lot of code, you'll have to find the styles here. We've marked the start of the styles you need with /* START OF DYNAMIC STYLES */ and the end with /* END OF DYNAMIC STYLES */. You will need to copy everything between these two lines.

Once you've copied out everything, go to Venue ▸ Custom CSS and paste everything into the second code box labeled Dynamic Styles. Then, go to Venue ▸ General and check the box under Disable Dynamic Styles

That's it! You've saved your website a lot of calculation time! Beware, any changes you make to color, font and other style related settings will now not show up on your site!

Modifying Settings

If you need to make changes you'll need to go through the process above again, here's what to do:

1. Enable dynamic styles
2. Modify any theme options you need
3. Go to the main page, view the source and copy the dynamic styles
4. Paste the styles into the Dynamic Styles box in the settings
5. Disable dynamic styles

Modifying Your Theme

While we made Venue as flexible as possible, there are plenty of cases wehre you might want to modify the theme. However, note that there are no situations where you should modify theme files directly. Even if you're just adding a little CSS to the style.css file you are breaking your ability to update the theme. What's worse, if you do update, all your changes will be lost.

Simple Style Changes

We've added a facility to add style changes to the theme pretty easily. Go to Venue ▸ Custom CSS and just type away there. Styles you add here will be loaded on every page.

Note that many styles (mostyle colors) are controled by dynamic styles which are output using PHP. These are the colors which can be changed from the theme options. If you need to change the colors for elements which use these styes you will need to add important rules to your styles or use a child theme to modify the theme.

If you are using a child theme (see below for details) you can modify includes/style.php. You can also include your own dynamic styles instead, make sure to hook it to the wp_head action and give it a priority higher than 99.

Child Themes

Themes should be modified using a method known as child themes. Child themes are essentially standalone themes which take all their data from a parent theme, unless otherwise specifiied.

The great advantage of using a child theme is that you can modify any aspect of the theme without loosing the ability to update, you will not loose your modificatiosn if you update your parent theme.

Creating a child theme is not difficult, you can find instructions in the WordPress Codex. However, we have gone ahead and created a child theme for you if you need it. Once Venue is installed you can install the child theme as well, here's how.

Customizing The Child Theme

The first thing you'll probably want to do is give the child theme a name of your own, perhaps add a description. Extract the All files & documentation file downloaded from Themeforest (see our Getting Started section for more info) to your computer. Inside you should see a folder named venue_child.

You can rename this folder to whatever you'd like but use only lowercase characters and underscores if needed. It is a good idea to base it on the theme name so if you plan on calling your child theme My Venue you could name the folder my_venue.

Next, go into this folder and open the style.css file you see there. There should be a block on the top which contains the details of the child theme. You can modify any info you see there except for one, the line which begins with Template. This should always be named according to the name of the parent theme's folder which is venue.

Once you're happy with what you have you should create an archive of your theme folder. Make sure to create an archive of the folder, not just the contents in it. Name it just like you named your folder - my_venue.zip. This file is a WordPress isntallable theme, if you have Venue installed you can install it in the usual way.

If you want to modify some functionality in the parent theme you'll need to copy-paste the relevant file into your child theme and modify it there. This way all modified files are in your child theme, the parent theme remains untouched. For more info about all the useful things you can do with a child theme take a look at the WordPress Codex.

For Developers

Our goal is to make this theme developer friendly. To do this we've made sure the theme is child-theme compatible in all regards, we've added actions, filters and pluggable functions. If you think something is missing please let us know, we'd be happy to accomodate if it makes sense for other buyers as well.

Documentation

The source code, especially in the functions.php file is heavily documented using standard phpDoc methods. This should help you find what you need very quickly. If you notice anything which should be added, please do let us know!

Pluggable Functions

Pluggable functions are defined in a special way in the theme. You can overwrite them by simply defining them. The easiest way to do this is to just copy-paste the original function into your functions file and modify it there.

venue_comments

This function handles the comment display. It is originally defined in functions.php

Actions

venue/create_order

This action is run right after an order is created. An order is created when the user clicks on the "Pay With PayPal" link in the order form. The following parameterss are passed:

• $order_id: The ID of the order created

venue/intercept_ipn

This action is run when the IPN data is sent and intercepted by the website. It receives the IPN data and the order ID as parameters:

• $_POST: Contains the IPN data sent by PayPal
• $order_id: The order ID which has been paid

Filters

venue/archive_title

This filter allows you to modify the title of WordPress archive pages

venue/content_class

You can modify the classes the content container receives using this function. By default the classes are used to create the grid system which is based on the Foundation 5 framework.

venue/sidebar_class

You can modify the classes the sidebar container receives using this function. By default the classes are used to create the grid system which is based on the Foundation 5 framework.

What's New

This is the initial release of the new Venue so there's nothing new just yet. Whenever new versions are added we'll list the new stuff here with a changelog included underneath.