Blog style and options

This theme comes with several blog styles that you can take advantage of, including a few extra customizing options for various elements relating to the blog. More on this in a moment, but to get started, we will look at our blog styles in relation to the screenshots you see below.

 

Choose Your Blog Style

  1. Go to Appearance >> Customize >> Blog Options
  2. Look for the “Blog Style” setting and make your choice
  3. Click “Save & Publish“

Position Your Featured Image

When you choose your blog style, you can also decide if you want your featured image above or below the post summary title.

Above the Title - Default

Below the Title

  1. Go to Appearance >> Customize >> Blog Options
  2. Look for the “Featured Image Position” setting and make your choice
  3. Click “Save & Publish“

Choose Your Full Post Style

In addition to the blog style, you can also decide on the layout of your full post (Single Post) view.

  1. Go to Appearance >> Customize >> Blog Options
  2. Look for the “Single Full Post Style” setting and make your choice
  3. Click “Save & publish“

Use Excerpts for Post Summaries

For more information about using excerpts, you can refer to this introduction and tutorial before proceeding. However, the following steps below will enable excerpts for your blog post summaries.

IMPORTANT One note to be aware of is that this option will only affect the “Standard Right Sidebar” and the “Standard Left Sidebar” blog styles because the remaining options are coded to only use excerpts.

*Also be aware than when using excerpts, your summary will have all HTML formatting and images stripped out until the full post is viewed. This is a function of WordPress, and not the theme.

  1. Go to Appearance >> Customize >> Blog Options
  2. Look for the “Blog Summary Excerpt” setting and make your choice
  3. Click “Save & Publish“

Change Your Excerpt Length

In addition to using excerpts, you can also manage the size (length) of your excerpts. If I remember correctly, the default WordPress excerpt size is 55 words, but Emotions has this set to 50.

  1. Go to Appearance >> Customize >> Blog Options
  2. Look for the “Excerpt Size” setting and change the size to your own preference by entering in a number or use the arrows when you mouseover the field.
  3. Click “Save & Publish“

Turn On/Off Select Blog Elements

There may be some people who don’t want to see certain elements like the author, comments, post date, post navigation, and many other parts of a blog post, so Emotions has made it easy to enable or disable each one. Here is a list of what elements can be managed in this fashion:

 

Each one has a brief description of what it does, but if you are unsure, you can use the support forum to ask for confirmation.

  1. Go to Appearance >> Customize >> Blog Options
  2. Go through the various settings to choose what to enable (checked boxes) or disable (uncheck the boxes).
  3. Click “Save & Publish“

Enable Thumbnail Creation

With this theme, you can turn on automatic thumbnail creation for specific blog styles and also for the included “Related Post” feature. For example, if you select the “List“, “Grid“, or the “Masonry” style, you can use this built-in option to create your featured image sizes for you; all you need to do is upload your photos.

  1. Go to Appearance >> Customize >> Blog Options
  2. Look for the thumbnail settings, and then choose the one you want to use. I recommend choosing only one that matches the blog style you plan to use, otherwise you end up with extra featured image sizes that never get used.
  3. Click “Save & Publish“

Show Post Animation Effects

By default, this theme offers a zoom-in animation effect for all posts, but if you decide you do not want to show this, you can disable it from the Blog Options panel.

  1. Go to Appearance >> Customize >> Blog Options
  2. Look for the “Show Post Animation” setting and check the box to show the animation effect or uncheck it to disable it.
  3. Click “Save & Publish”