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An introduction to the Openness theme

Openness is built from the popular default WordPress theme called Twenty Fifteen theme, but we made seveal changes and enhancements to give you the flexibility that you need. Openness is really the best choice for personal blogs, especially if you write articles with a lot of images. We even included some attention to detail shadow styling for images, so if you want to add some depth to your pages, Openness is perfect for you.

But start with visual style that is more refined, unlimited colours, at least a couple blog layouts that includes a grid concept, RTL support, show or hide various page elements, and of course support is always available for you.

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
  • 2 Blog Styles – Choose the layout that you want from 4 choices (15 on the Pro version)
  • 5 Sidebar Positions – Dynamic sidebars that give you widths that self-adjusts
  • Unlimited Colours – So if you do not like the colours, you can easily change them
  • Sidebar (Header) Backgrounds – Add images or a solid colour background to your sidebar column
  • 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 Openness” link.

about

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

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 (Openness Pro), is the “Free VS Pro” tab. This outlines a comparison between the two versions of Openness. 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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