A couple of questions on Finesse

[Dale Eby]

Hi Bill,

I am looking forward to building my first site in a while. I am trying finesse theme for the first time. Things have changed in the configuration.

I was hoping to get your help on a few things if I could. I am reading the documentation and cannot seems to find out a few things.

1.) I want to add a page before the footer. Prior to this you had a widget for featured page where you could list the page you wanted. I cannot find that now, please can you tell me how to add a page or perhaps post before the footer. Just like in your demo. It must be painfully obvious I apologize I cannot find it.

2.) I have added contact 7 plugin to the site. When I click on the “contact button” on the navigation bar it brings up the contact fields within the hero image. It does not change to white page. Is there a flag where I indicate what page to display? I checked within the customization and cannot seem to find a place to set the page.

3.) I would like to be able to set the blog title in the home page to the left and center of the hero image. I tried some custom css you gave me for another site. It did not seem to work.

Thank you Bill for your help.

[Bill Robbins]

Hi Dale,

You are right that Finesse takes a different approach from the previous themes. Let’s see if I can point you in the right direction for these items.

1. I would skip including a page’s content via a widget and instead just use the Visual Editor widget that comes with the recommended BlackStudio TinyMCE plugin. Truthfully the page content widget was just there because the built-in text widget that comes with WordPress is so spartan. But I needed a rich text widget for this page builder plugin so the theme recommends the BlackStudio plugin to give you that. I would use it to add text.

2. It’s been around in WordPress for ages, but honestly I’ve never used Contact Form 7. Before Gravity Forms, I used CForms 2. Ever since Gravity Forms came out of beta, it’s been the only one I’ve really ever used. I’m afraid I don’t know how it goes about inserting forms into a page.

The hero caption can take shortcodes or HTML, but it does not run the WordPress content filter. Sometimes when random content ends up in an odd place (like misplaced sharing buttons) it’s due to the content filter being used outside of the content.

3. What’s the URL to your blog. I’ll take a look at it and see what I can spot there.

Bill

[Dale Eby]

Thank you for always for such excellent support. I really appreciate it. I will be working on this.
today.

I have the site parked at http://www.daleeby.com

Thank you

[Bill Robbins]

Happy to help out Dale. One thing I did notice is the large image that’s set on the home page there is set to the site’s background image. That’s perfectly fine to do, but if you want to use that for the hero image of a page, you’ll want to take that out of the site background.

Then edit the page where you want that to be the hero. Look down below the main content area and you’ll see the spot for the hero options. That’s where you can add in your slides and set how they look/function. To keep it static and not rotating, just add a single slide.

Let me know as you have questions

[Dale Eby]

Hi Bill,

As always, your instructions are dead on. Thank you.

I am getting the swing of the layout builder and the visual editor and I have installed the Black Studio plug in.

I had a couple of other questions for you. Thank you in advance for all your support as I am transitioning to the new format.

The website is parked at daleeby.com

1.) On you demo with finesse template on your site you have color background transitions happening as a user scrolls downward. I have installed as a widget the layout editor, and then added the visual editor. I have tried to change the background color to a grey for example. While a part of this panel changes it does not change the whole background in the visual editor part, in this case where the images of books are located. Have you installed a colored back ground image to add color to the transition?

2.) On the the home page, if you scroll beneath the first hero image, I have a transition panel which only has the title of home page. I have been trying to understand where the flag is to eliminate this?

3.) In Addition I was trying to understand how to change the color of the buttons for the mail chimp integration you have.

4.) Last is where do i find the youtube and facebook integration you have included with this.

Thank you for your patience.

[Bill Robbins]

Good Evening Dale,

Glad that’s helped out so far. Let’s see if we can work on these other issues for you.

1. It sounds like the background color may have been applied to a widget. What you’ll want to do is apply it to the row. When you’re using the layout builder, at the top of each row there is a wrench icon that you can use to edit that row’s settings. The background color for that row will be there.

In the home page of the demo, some of the rows have background images and some do not. When they do that’s how they were added.

2. There is a page template called “Full Width Page Builder” that sounds like what you want to use. It’ll replace everything from a default WordPress page with the builder.

3. In the customizer, inside the styling section there is a section for buttons. You can change the theme’s buttons there.

4. What are you looking to do with Facebook and YouTube?

Bill

[Dale Eby]

Thank you Bill. I will fix these today.

For facebook and youtube I wanted to put Icons on the website. In prior versions you had areas to put the URL and magically the icons appeared.

Thank you again for the support.

[Bill Robbins]

I understand what you’re looking for. You’ll want to use a plugin for that this time around. One that adds in the social icons via a widget like Simple Social Icons (https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-social-icons/) for example. There are quite a few out there that can do that. There are also some ones that can add them to a navigation menu for you if you’d rather go that route. Either way you’l need to handle it via a plugin this time around.

Let me know if you have any questions

[Dale Eby]

Thank you again Bill for all your help and your plug in suggestions. I worked through your directions and I am on track again.

I had a few more questions for you. The site is parked on daleeby.com

1.) I changed the color of the row in the layout builder where you had directed me. My question is how do I get the row the full width of the screen. I tried playing around with the padding and other boxes to no avail.

2.) This may be a similar situation. I used the layout builder to add in the mail chimp widget. I edit the row as you directed me and made a different color for the row. The color only changes at the very end of the tips on each side and does not produce box like affect like the row above it. Is there a way to make this like your demo version?

Thank you

[Bill Robbins]

Hi Dale,

It looks like that page builder is inside the footer. That’s a perfectly fine thing, but it’s not how the demo is set up. In the demo, the rows on the home page, except for the newsletter widget are actually in the home page and not the footer. It uses the full width (page builder) page template in conjunction with the page builder. That gives you full width content and no page title. That way you can have rows that go edge to edge. I’ve attached a screenshot of the backend of the home page from the demo so you can see what’s happening there.

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Sorry for making this confusing. Inside the customizer’s styling section, there is a spot for “Before Footer” where you can find color selectors for that area. If I remember correctly, I set it up that way in case people placed widgets other than the page builder one in that spot so they could still adjust the colors. I probably shouldn’t have done that in retrospect, but at this point with the theme being out there so long, I can’t really go back on it.

Try picking the colors inside the customizer and see if that won’t do the trick for you. If you run into trouble, let me know.

Take care,
Bill

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