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An introduction to the Moderne theme

Moderne is a unique design concept where retro and modern merged into a vibrant and dynamic theme designed for bloggers that love to tell stories and express words to capture attention. With a choice of many customization settings, Moderne provides all you need to quickly and easily create a stunning blog that you and your readers will love.

Even though this theme is designed for blogging, it’s also a great solution to start up a simplified blog magazine based website. The design gives you a retro starting point to build your own magazine with what this theme offers, but to also take advantage of the 1000’s of plugins to add even more to your website.

Key Features

First, you are getting a theme with more features, functions, and options, but ultimately, here is a key list of features:

  • Mobile Responsive – View your website in many mobile screens
  • Responsive Typography – We started to implement responsive typography to auto resize based on screen size
  • Recent Posts Widget w/thumbnails – Give additional article suggestions to your readers
  • Related Posts with Thumbnails – A step up from the default (boring) WP Recent Posts widget
  • Built-in Owl Slider – Enjoy a very popular feature amongst themes; a column based slider that is also responsive
  • 4 Blog Styles – Choose the layout that you want from 4 choices (15 on the Pro version)
  • 10 Sidebar Positions – Dynamic sidebars that give you widths that self-adjusts
  • 4 Full Post layouts – In addition to blog layout options, you can also change the full post layout
  • Boxed Layouts including Full Width – New with our themes, you can adjust the width to your preference
  • 4 Page Templates – including a Template for many Page Builders
  • Unlimited Colours – So if you do not like the colours, you can easily change them
  • Drop Shadows – Adding depth to Featured Images and other elements
  • Built-in Theme Customizer – With the WordPress customizer, you can make a ton of customizable changes with live preview.
  • Social Menu location – Special menu locations to create social linked icons
  • Custom Error Page – Letting your site visitors know a page is missing
  • Custom Excerpt Sizing – You can choose to use excerpts for your blog post summaries and change how many words show.
  • Show or Hide Page Elements – You can show or hide various elements like the author, post date, edit links, and more.
  • Customizable Page Backgrounds – This theme has a default dark blue background, but you can also add a photo or graphic
  • Auto Create Blog Featured Images – You get the option to enable blog featured image cropping to maintain consistent sizes
  • Custom WP Gallery Viewer – If you use the WordPress Gallery shortcode, we included a nicely styled image viewer
  • Translation Ready – If you need to create new language versions

Modifying Your Theme Files

As I will keep saying this for every theme I release, there is one important element to consider when setting up your theme and website, is customization. If you plan to modify the theme at some point in time, such as modifying a theme template, or perhaps you want to add something more, I strongly recommend using a child theme. I may create a tutorial about child themes, but the WordPress.org website has a Child Theme tutorial that you can follow.

Ultimately, using a child theme will prevent you from losing any changes you make whenever this theme has an update. Making changes to the theme’s files will result in being overwritten when you update, which is why using a child theme is critical.

Theme Info Page

When you are in your site’s admin area, you have a theme information page available to you with quick links to resources and support. Go to the Appearance menu group and look for the “About Moderne” link.

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You will see a page with tabs, each containing valuable information for your reference.

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One in particular is the CHANGELOG tab which outlines what changes were made in the current and previous versions of this theme.

The Pro Version

Another tab to check out if you feel you may want to take advantage of the premium version (Moderne Pro), is the “Free VS Pro” tab. This outlines a comparison between the two versions of Moderne. From there, you can decide if you want to opt in for an upgrade or to stay with the free one.

How to Begin

Now that you’ve installed the theme, the fun begins, so I recommend exploring the customizer (found under the Appearance menu group) and all of its settings. From there, start planning out your website (if new), otherwise start adjusting your site to the new theme and features.

Support – Important

If you need support or you discover a missing or outdated tutorial, please visit the support forum for this theme and post your questions. Once you submit your question(s) to the forum, we get email notification to our inbox and will be more than happy to help you out. If you discover something about the theme that does not have a tutorial for it, you can also let us know in the forum and we will create one.

Theme Support

NOTE – We do not provide theme support from our “Contact Us” form.

Theme Review and 5-Star Rating

Although this is optional, we would love to get a 5-star rating and a review of our theme. If you feel there could be some improvements, we would also welcome your suggestions on how we can make it even better. Feedback is very important because the end-user (you) is how we know what works and what doesn’t.

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