A guide to styling

May we present you a fresh, clean site for science communicators! With new Post Archive cards, Single Post Heros, Sidebar Author Box and revisited Featured Post Navigation all built the use of blocks.

Spiral galaxy

Where to begin

There are 3 main interfaces that are used to customize and build the site.

  1. The Customizer
    this is where you will find the global styling controls for the theme. From Colors and Typography to Navigation and Widget Areas. If you find theres not a control for one the elements your trying to style then check out #3.
  2. The Post Editor
    In Volume our posts are simply Block Based content. But we have included a Manual Excerpt in some of our Posts that is displayed in a Page Hero Block Element and our Custom Archive Post Cards. If theres some content above or below your post that you cannot see in the editor then once again check out #3.
  3. The Elements Module
    This is where the cool stuff happens. Across the site you will see a Custom Single Post Hero, Custom Post Cards on our archives, an Author Box at the top of our right sidebar, and Custom Navigation on archives and Single Posts.

Wherever possible we have defined our default styles in the Customizer. However some Elements are directly styled in the Elements Module.

What Elements are in place

Head on over to Dashboard > Appearance > Elements to check out what we have prebuilt for you:

  • Archive Navigation
    A simple previous / next Page button configuration located after the post archives and home page.
  • Post Navigation
    A previous / next post navigation with post title and featured image background located just before the footer on every single post.
  • Author Box
    Positioned over the sidebar, the author box will display Avatar Name, the User Bio and a link to the authors archives.
  • Post Cards
    here is our Content Template for our Blog / Post Archives. This is the global style for all cards except for the First Featured Post. Which is using the following Child Element
  • – First Post Template
    Set specifically to display for the first post of the first page of your archives.
  • Single Post Hero
    The Full Width responsive Hero element for our single posts. Please note the following Merged Header
  • Merged Header
    This simply applies a Merged Header for our single post, where custom site header and navigation colors are set to give them their transparent background.

A note on Images

Preloaded are images whose sizes are: 1024 by 576 pixels which is a nice 16:9 Aspect ratio. In general the images are set to medium-large which displays the image at 768px x 432px.

You can of course choose to upload large images, but its always best to maintain your images sizes and if you choose to use larger ( or smaller ) image size then try and keep the aspect ratio the same.