Royal Estate Theme

Page Templates and Sidebars

The theme offers several page templates, so that every page can be styled accordingly. Each page template either has  its own sidebar area or no sidebar at all. Whenever you create a new page, under the Page Attributes section, you can see a Template field. All the page templates are listed in this field. The template selected there will render that page. Let's look at the different page templates avaliable:

Default Template

This template is used to render all the non-listings pages by default. It has one sidebar area. This template can be used for general pages like FAQ, Blog, Services, etc.

Home_Page Template

This template is used to render the Home Page of the theme, which contains the Slider area and several widget areas like: Home Sidebar Wide, Home Narrow 1 and Home Narrow 2.

FullWidth_Page Template

This template doesn't have any sidebar, and thus uses the full width of the page to render the content. This template can be used for Contact or Services Pages.

Sidebar Areas

The theme has many Sidebar(Widget) areas, that are used in different sections of the theme.

Slider

Now that we've installed the theme you'll see the homepage of the theme in the front, with the slider area. Although the slider area is being shown on the homepage, there are no slide items being displayed. Let's create some slides to show on homepage.

Under Appearance tab, click on Slider Manager. You'll see the Slider Manager page offers an easy to use user interface to quickly create a few slides. You can easily upload an image to be used in the slide, add new slides with a click of the button, drag and drop the position of the slide with respect to others and remove slides easily. However, there are some prerequisites for slider to show up properly:

• The Slide images should be exactly 680px wide and 290px high.
• A Slide Title must be provided.
• The slider area shows maximum 5 slides. So any more slides will not be included in the Slider.

Menu

The theme comes with an added functionality of WP menus, an effective way to create and manage custom menus. The Royal Estate theme uses WP Menus to show the top menu bar.

To create the menu simply go to Appearance >> Menus and create a new menu.

After creating a menu, from the "Theme Locations" block dropdown choose the menu you've created and click Save. Then using "Pages", "Custom Links", "Categories" blocks, etc add items to your menu and Save it. You can drag and drop the menu items to easily manage the items and create dropdowns.

When you first activate the theme, you'll see that a default menu bar is created automatically.

Showing Listings Archive

Now, lets create a page where all your Real Estate listings will be displayed.

This theme uses Pretty-Permalinks feature of Wordpress to function. Before moving on to the next section to create your first Real Estate Listing, you should make sure that in 'Settings -> Permalinks' you select any permalink structure but the Default. This is required for the Listings Page to function correctly.

After you do this, you'll see that your site's listings appear on this page: http://YOUR-SITE.com/listings/

Next you can easily add this Listings page to your site's menu. Just create a new Menu item with the url of the listings archive page. As said earlier your site's listings page will be at http://YOURSITE.com/listings

Create Listing

The theme comes with 'Listings' Custom Post Type. This feature lets you add Real Estate Listings easily. Let's see how it works.

Apart from the standard Post features, you'll see a 'Listings Info' section and several Categories(also called Taxonomies) to choose values from. We'll see how these Categories(Taxonomies) work in the section 'Configuring Search'. In this section we'll look more closely at the 'Listings Info' section.

The values you select in the fields shown above are displayed on the Listing's page. Here is a little more detail on them:

• Rent/Buy : Select if the listing is available for sale or rent. This field is also used in the Search box's configuration.
• Property Status
• Price : This field is also used in the Search box's configuration.
• Property Area : This field is also used in the Search box's configuration.
• MLS # : (Optional) Enter the property's MLS# if any.
• Lot Size : (Optional)
• Address : (Optional) The complete address of the property. This will be displayed in some widgets as well as in the listing's own page.
• Map ID : (Optional) Read the section 'Map' for this.

Listing Images

Adding images for Listings (as well as posts) is easy with this theme. The theme uses Wordpress' 'Featured Image' functionality.

The Listing items can have more than one images, all you need to do is attach an image to the Listing. To do this, in your Edit Listing Page, click on 'Add Media', then upload the image. Simply doing this would attach the image to your Listing. You may Insert this image into the Listing's content too by clicking 'Insert into Post', but if you don't want to do that, don't click the link 'Insert into Post', just close the dialog box.

Configuring Search

When you create a new Listing, you'll see a lot of Category Areas (Taxonomies) to select values for. These include 'Location', 'Bedrooms', 'Bathrooms', etc. All of them, except 'Additional features', are used as configuration for the Search box. You can add any kind of Values for these fields. But, only in the case of 'Bedrooms' and 'Bathrooms' must you only have Integral values like 1, 2, 3, etc.

Additionally some fields in the 'Listings Info' section are also used in the Search Box. These include 'Rent/Buy', 'Price' and 'Property Area'

Map

To include a map to the Listings page you can use the Wordpress plugin MapPress (download it here). After installing the plugin, go to any Listing Edit page, create a new map and save it. After the map is saved, you can copy its id and paste it into the 'Listings Info' field 'Map ID'. For detailed instructions on how to use this plugin visit the plugin's official page here.

Additionally, when you creat a listing with a map, you'll see that the map is being loaded twice in the Single Listing page. To fix this, go to MapPress' Options in your Dashboard and select 'No Automatic Display', like is is shwon in the image below:

Agents

This widget only appears on the Single Listing Page.

When a new Listing is created, the author of the post is marked as the Agent for that listing. So if there's only one agent for the site, you might not need this widget at all. You can easily add an Agent contact widget in the 'Main Sidebar' area. This shows the Agent's contact info as well as a contact form that sendsthe message directly to the Agent's email address.

As for the Agent's contact details like Phone Number, Fax, Email Address and Name, these details are fetched from the User's Profile page in the WP Dashboard. The Agent can add/edit these details in 'Dashboard -> Users -> Your Profile'. The fields that need to be filled here are:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Email
• Mobile Number
• Office Number
• Fax Number

Apart from these, the Agent can also add a photo of his. For this, you'll need to install the plugin: User Photo. Now, in the User Profile page, the Agent will see a new field to upload his image.

Widgets

Royal Estate theme comes with 5 custom widgets. These are:

• RoyalEstate - Agent Info : This widget, when added to the 'Main Sidebar' displays the agent's contact details as well as a contact form that send the message directly to the Agent's email address. For detailed info about this widget, read the section 'Agents'.
• RoyalEstate - Contact : This widget shows your contact details like Address, Phone, Fax and Email ID. This could be placed in the footer widget areas.
• RoyalEstate - Listings : You can place this widget in the Homepage Sidebars to display recent Listings. This widget should ideally be placed in the 'Home Sidebar Wide' area.
• RoyalEstate - Listings Narrow : This widget also fetched the recent listings. The difference with this is you can put it anywhere including 'Main Sidebar' and Footer sidebars.
• RoyalEstate - Testimonials : Easily show reviews from your latest clients.
• RoyalEstate - Twitter Updates

Shortcodes

The Bellissima theme comes with over 18 shortcodes installed. But that's not all, the Shortcode Generator that comes installed for the post editor makes it extremely easy for you to include any shortcode and its attributes' data without having to remember the shortcodes' names.

A click on the Shortcode Generator button opens up a frame. Here you can select any shortcode. If the shortcode has any attributes it will ask you to enter its data, and if there's no attribute you can just click on Insert.

Although almost of the shortcodes' names are self explanatory, I'll go through some of them here to give you a more in depth understanding:

raw

In the post editor Wordpress, sometimes, automatically adds random <p> and <br> tags, which can break the layout of the content area. Enclosing any content or even other shortcodes inside this [raw] shortcode fixes this issue.

[raw]
  This is some textual content.
  [contactform sendto="admin@site.com" /]
[/raw]

clear

Whenever you're working with columns or images, you may find some content stacking up on the side of other content, unintentionaly. This can be solved by using [clear /] shortcode.

column shortcodes

The theme offers [col2], [col3], [col2_last], etc shortcodes. You can use columns like this:

[col2]Your content ...[/col2]
[col2_last]Your content ...[/col2_last]

or

[col3]Your content ...[/col3]
[col3]Your content ...[/col3]
[col3_last]Your content ...[/col3_last]