Tweak Theme Documentation: General

Overview

Thank you for purchasing a theme from Porter and Stout! Please read through all of the documentation thoroughly before asking for support on the theme's Themeforest page or emailing us.

This theme has been designed to work in TweakCMS, but it also will work as well as a standard site. If you are familiar with coding, go ahead and edit the code in your preferred editor.

Tweak has a side panel on almost every page that will explain what different elements are and help you out.
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Installing Your Theme in Tweak

  1. If you haven't already signed up for a Tweak account, you can do so here: http://porterandstout.tweakcms.com/setup/. Just follow the steps and choose one of the stock themes inside for now, you can upload your own after filling out your account details.
  2. After filling out the account details, you will be emailed a verification email. Click the link in the email and follow the steps to activate your account.
  3. Your purchased theme should be in a zipped file. Unzip that file to see two more zipped files. The one named '_______theme' is the one you will upload into Tweak.
  4. You can upload your theme in two different places:
    1. The first option is to do it during the Welcome process. Tweak askes you a few questions, one of them is "Do you have a theme you would like to use?" with a place to browse for and upload your theme.
    2. The second way is after you have signed in. Go to Administration > Theme Files and click on Manage your themes. Then upload the zipped theme file under 'Upload a New Theme' and click on Apply when it shows up under 'Available Themes'.
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Creating Pages

When you recieve your welcome email, there is a link to a Tweak support site that contains a lot of helpful information, including a video about the Interactive Sitemap. You can watch the video here. There is also a newer video that shows how to move pages to a different location in your sitemap, watch it here. Remember that no one is seeing anything you do online until you publish, so go ahead and play with the sitemap to really understand how it works.

Here are the basic steps:

  1. Go to Manage Content > Interactive Sitemap
  2. Hover over the name of the page you want to add a subpage to until the mini-menu shows up.
  3. Click on the Add Page icon
  4. Once your New Page is displayed in the sitemap, hover over the title of that page and then click on the Page Properties icon in the mini-menu.
  5. Edit the Page Properties to suit your new page, and hit Submit.

When creating new pages, it is important to give it a proper file name. That is one of the things search engines check out. When you go to a page's Page Properties you can edit many things about that page, including the page name and file name. The Page Name is what will show up in the site navigation and be the title in the internet browser. The File Name is what the url will be, it should be appropriate for the page content and cannot contain any spaces. ie. www.mypage.com/contact.html is better than www.mypage.com/6.html Your home page must have a file name of index.html

One of our blogs has an article that can help you decide how to organize your site's pages. Read 5 Tips for Making Your Site More Effective.

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Adding Content

Use the Correct Page Template

Your theme contains multiple page templates (different layouts). Tweak will apply a certain template to the home page, and a different one to all the subpages by default.

  1. Go to Manage Content > Interactive Sitemap, click on the name of the page you want to add content to.
  2. You will now be looking at the preview editing version of your page. If the layout is not the one you want, change it on the page's Page Properties by clicking on the button with a check mark on it in the menu at the top of the screen.
  3. Scroll down until you see a selection box labeled 'Template' and choose the appropriate template for your page.
  4. Hit Submit at the bottom of the page and you will be redirected back to the page you were on, with the new template applied.
Templates can be switched as much as you like, but if you have content in three content areas and switch to a template with two content areas, the content in the third area will be lost.

Assets

It is important to add your assets-pdfs or images-to your account in the Asset Library before you add them to your content.

Just go to Manage Content > Assets and then to the section you need. Add what ever you need to your library, pdfs can go under Documents

If there was a second zip file called 'assets' in when you unzipped the initial file, you can upload it under Images, so you can use available images how ever you like in your content.Editable Content Areas

There are two types of content areas. The first has a red dashed outline and will have content that is for that page only - a standard content area. The second is outlined in dark blue dashed line and is for content that can be reused on as many pages as you like. The footer content for example, should be used on every page, so making it a reusable content area makes it easy to update by only having to edit that content in one place.

Standard Content

 
  1. Go to the preview editing version of the page you want to add content to. Click on the edit content button and type your content into the input area.
  2. Highlight a section of text you want to edit, and choose a style from the drop down menu's to apply.
  3. Hit the Save button in the editor window. The window will close and the page view will refresh with your new content.
You can type your content in a document editor first if you like, but use the Paste as Text button to paste in your copied text. There are hidden style tags around that text that will be copied and can make the look of your site inconsistant if you miss this step.

Reusable Content (Content Blocks)

 
  1. Go to Manage Content > Content Blocks.
  2. Click on Create Block and fill out the title and the content.
  3. Go to the page you want to use it on and hit the select content block button. Then choose the content block you want to use.
    • Clicking on set as default will make it the default content block for every page using that template.
    • Just clicking on save will apply it to only that page.
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Publishing Your Site

Tweak does not host your site, it is a tool that lets you easily manage the content and page organization. In order to make your site live you will also need a domain name and web host.

Most companies that offer domain registration and hosting will let you purchase both as a package. Who ever you go through, if given a choice, it is best to choose Linux hosting. They accept different code languages for some things and most Porter & Stout themes will only work with a host that supports php. Once you are registered for a domain and host, log in and find your site url, the ftp account user name and password and if you need to publish a remote folder like public_html. Use all that information to fill out the form on Publish Website > Publish Settings in Tweak. Once all that is correct and you hit publish, your site will be live!

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For Developers

These files have been organized to work within Tweak, but will also work fine without Tweak. The theme templates are in the root, with the css, js and images in their respective folders. When you unzip the initial zip file there will be two smaller zip files. One is the theme, the other is any image assets, like icons that you are free to use how you like. You do not need to unzip these two zipped files.

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Theme Specific

If this document were for a specific theme, this is where any special instructions would be. To see the specific ones for your theme, go to the staged version of your theme on Porter & Stout and read the Theme Documentation there.

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If after reading the documentation you have any issues installing and using this theme, please email us at contact@porterandstout.com.

Don't forget this page will always be at www.porterandstout.com/tweak-doc.html if you have printed it out and need the online version again.