A guide to build awesome WordPress sites with SWIFT theme

Background Images

Child Themes

Child themes is a new feature added to SWIFT themes in version 5.40, the idea is to make it easy for you to share your customizations and also to copy your customization from the development server to the live server. This option is clearly explained in this page .

Next you have the option to add background images to three important parts of the site and specify their position. The following screenshot gives a clear idea of what each term means. Yeah, I know thats an awful selection of background images 😛

If you want to have more control over the positioning of the background images, read this page about background image positioning and use the custom CSS option to add the CSS code.

Adding custom backgrounds to your SWIFT theme
Adding custom backgrounds to your SWIFT WordPress 3.0 theme ( Click to enlarge )

Layout Options

With images added to the options page since version 5.42, this section is self explanatory so I’m not discussing it here. If you have any questions, post them in comments I will update this page then.

Fonts

Font family

The font family selected here will be the primary font used on the entire blog.

Primary font size

Size you select will be the primary font size used on the entire blog, All other font sizes will be multiples and multiples of it.

Next there are options to select the font size of Sidebar, Footer and Post content. Font size is proportional to the primary font size. This parameter determines by how much it must be multiplied. For example, if your primary font size is 10px and you select .8em here, the footer font size will be 80% of 10px = 8px.

Colours

Next you have this awesome colour picker to pick the colours of almost every section of the site. When you are picking colours be sure to check that you selected the correct colours for sliders,magazine boxes,comments template, subscribe box, author info at the end of the post on single pages,post meta, footer and copyright notice. These are easy to miss.

Rounded Corners

Rounded corners don’t look good when the header and body background images are different, so this option lets you disable rounded corners. If you dont like the rounded corners for sidebar widgets, you have an option to disable them to.

Custom CSS

This my favorite option in the entire design options section, possibilities of using this are endless. If you have good knowledge of CSS, you can do almost anything with this option.

When ever you want to modify the CSS files, paste the CSS code you want to modify here, instead of actually modifying the core files. By doing it this way you wont loose your customizations when you update your theme.

CSS code pasted here has the highest priority and overrides other CSS rules

Never edit template files unless its absolutely necessary, You should never edit the CSS files. Use custom CSS instead.

17 Replies to “A guide to build awesome WordPress sites with SWIFT theme”

  1. I’m trying to use the custom css option to create a new table class that does not have borders or a background color. I’m having trouble. Any suggestions? Thank you!

  2. Hi,
    Love swift themes but want to remove ‘no comments/edit post’ on each page as using as a static site rather than blog. Have tried everything I can think of – please help.
    Thanks,

      1. Sry, idk why my code tags aren’t working. Basically, just look for the line that says “Comments are closed” (after the author’s note in the php saying to leave a note if there are no comments allowed, around line 54), and remove the paragraph and text. I would leave the ifs around it though.

  3. After customization, how can i transfer the theme to my blog at wordpress.com? I can’t install it from the back end and it doesn’t appear in the search results either!

  4. Hi you customize the theme and make it look alike shoutmeloud or callingallgeeks

    can you use lavalamp on the jquery menu.

  5. Thanks for the great theme. Really loving it.

    I have been having one issue here, though. I have read about it on the forum, too.
    I have the latest version. Apparently, setting a background image for the content doesn’t work. It puts the image in the header for me. Which is very sad because I had some great ideas for the content background. Is there a fix or something?

    Thanks=)

  6. Hi, I like so much the example of swift here: http://demos.swiftthemes.com/ I’ve tried to make it the same for my site, but I’ve 2 problems: 1. The wide sb top doesn’t work with hompage (full_magazine). 2. I don’t know how to make appear the categorie on post (for example Architecture or border, buying).

    Many thanks

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