Idiot-Proofed Revolution Theme
I’m very impressed with Jason Schuller’s Revolution Office Theme. See the demo. But since my clients aren’t that technical, I found it’s not quite ready for prime time.
(Note that I don’t think my clients are idiots – they’re actually unbelievably brilliant. They chose me, didn’t they? By Idiot-Proofed, I’m referring to the “Wordpress for Idiots” type idiot, not stupid idiot, thank-you-very-much!)
Anyway, to make Revolution Office just a bit easier to use, I changed a few things in the backend.
First, I changed the small front page blurbs to use pages instead of posts. Most people using a CMS want to use pages for pages, posts are for blogs.
Second, I added some code to allow the pages to show “Read more…” just like a wordpress post. This allows the user to add small starter blurbs on the front page, then if the reader is interested, they can click for more. Note that this works ONLY for the front page. Inserting the Wordpress “more” tag in a page will do nothing if it’s not the front page.
The above two changes will help the theme perform better as a CMS theme. Pages are best used for websites/CMS, posts make the most sense when used solely for blogs.
Third, I added code to list the actual pages/categories, instead of having the user find them using the Reveal IDs plugin. This lets you skip a couple steps and avoids mistakes. No need to go looking for anything – the pages/categories are listed right there in the options page.
Almost all of the needed changes are to function.php. Download the update here and rename it to functions.php. Also, you must change all “p=” query_post entries to “page_id=”.
If you find any problems, please leave a comment.
Anyway, thanks, Jason. Hope you find the code helpful enough to include in future updates.
8 comments
I am having issues inserting grapics into the carousel on the front page of revo-office. Would you mind informing me on how to accomplish this task?!
D.
Hi Darius,
Sorry, yes I would mind. Brian Gardner and Jason Schuller were very generous in releasing these themes to the public. They depend on providing support for the money they should otherwise be receiving
See their support forum for this. Sign up here.
Good job on the modifications. I was just curious if you have sent these modifications along to Jason and Brian. It would seem to me that these kinds of modifications would be nice to have in the 2.7 compatible version that hasn’t come out yet.
Thanks, Don. I linked to Jason’s post on this, so he’d get a trackback, and it’s there. Just left him a comment.
I’m also looking at jtip for the tooltip effect over the images. The current tooltips are cool, but I’d like to be able to have formatting, especially paragraphs. If I get around to it and get it working, I’ll let you know.
Fatal error: Call to undefined function add_filter() in /home2/burtonke/public_html/wp-content/uploads/functions.php on line 51
My bad. Thanks Simon. I renamed it to functions.txt so it would download instead of being interpreted.
Brian Gardner just emailed me the office theme for free when I asked about support for it, and offering to pay the $59, so it appears that he is no longer selling or supporting it. It is no longer on his rebranded website:
http://www.studiopress.com
Is there some trick to getting the photos to show in the slider at the top? I mean besides editing the php files directly, don’t want the user to have to do that…
Since you seem to be the only one improving upon this theme would you trade support for $59 donation?