Although this theme uses the popular Font Awesome icon set, you can use a plugin for more flexibility. This theme lets you disable Font Awesome that is already included if you want to use the plugin method. If you decide to use a plugin, I recommend Better Font Awesome.
Setup Aberration
Create a Contact form like the demo site
This tutorial will be quite easy because to make the contact form shown on the live demo site for Senses, you simply need to copy some code.
The plugin I used for the form is the popular Contact Form 7. I will let you go through their documentation for setting up your form configuration, but for the form itself, this is the code you can use to get the layout I have on the demo:
Typography management
This is probably one of the most complex things for any website, regardless of the theme you use because within your site pages, there are many typography elements happening. When you consider that there are literally 1000’s of font styles available, you cannot possible include them all into a theme. Each person has their own preference as to the font and styling they like, so this also creates a challenge in theme development.
Landing Page templates
Aberration includes a few front page options:
- Using the default blog home page that WordPress starts you off with
- Static Front Page which WordPress lets you select any page you make
- Landing - Info
- Landing - Gallery
- Landing - Splash
The first two are WordPress based, but for Aberration, you can see what each of the Landing pages offer:
Customize your Error 404 page
This theme offers you a nice custom designed Error 404 page that you can change the various elements within it. To give you a quick peek at the error page, here is a screenshot:
Create buttons and customize the colour
This will be a simple tutorial to help you make any text link as a button, including adding styling attributes such as colour and size. When creating buttons, you can use the code in this tutorial or you can go to the original theme download package and inside a folder called “snippets” is a text file for your button code and styling that you can use.
Add Banner Images to your pages
When you see the live demo site for Aberration, you will notice I have a banner image showing on the front page. This tutorial will help you to add one to your page like I did. Although there are a few ways you can do this, I will help you based on my method. There are plugins that lets you install an image or banner widget, allowing you to upload and set an image, but we are adding a caption box so this will require a text widget because we need to add some HTML code.
Choose your blog style and layout
Changing your blog style is not just for layout, but also for what style of featured image you want.
An introduction to the Gallery Post Format
When you have seen WordPress themes with post formats, you may notice that they mostly look the same without any special custom style…very boring. So with Aberration, I decided to apply a little portfolio concept in with a gallery concept to display your posts that are assigned to the Gallery Post Format. Because this format has a unique style, I would recommend you separate your gallery post formats from the standard blog home page by using a plugin called “Simply Exclude” to give you a lot more flexibility, but also because of the styling this format offers won’t look that great in a typical blog.
An introduction to the Quote Post Format
This theme includes a few Post Formats for your blog. This tutorial will give you an introduction to the “Quote Post Format” and how it works for the Aberration theme. There are many styles for post formats with different themes — basically no real standard, so many theme authors create their own styles and methods. For Aberration, I do mine in a unique way that capitalizes on the “Featured Image” for your posts in addition to the default colour background that is normally displayed.