When installing a CMS, one of the first steps you would normally take, is install a theme. We wanted to give you a head-start and give you a theme that gives you plenty of options to customize your site, colors, social media icons, and even a hero style homepage. In ContentBox 3.1 we even updated Themes to have better documentation, so it's easier to get started with your theme. Let's see what the default theme can do for you.
Theme settings is where all of your configuration happens. In ContentBox 3 we added a lot of functionality to make the Theme Settings easier to work with, for Devs and Users. The first you will see if the groupings of settings. This allows a User to focus on one set of settings at a time. With a complex theme, having all of the settings visible at once can be very overwhelming.
Since each theme controls their own settings, lets look through the Default Theme's settings.
When you expand your group, you will see all of the settings of that group, displayed with a Group Introduction, a label for each setting, optional setting description ( not shown in the example below ) and an optional help modal ( the blue ? Icon below ) . In colors, you can choose one of many Bootswatch themes. Bootswatch is a set of color swatches made to extend the traditional Bootstrap framework. Below you will see a selection of the swatches.
Here is an example of an optional help modal, for settings that require more information for the user.
Changing the color dramatically changes your sites appearance. Lets look at your site default ( green ) and some options.
Of course you have plenty of options, visit bootswatch.com for thumbnails and more information on each swatch.
Logo URL:
You can choose whether you would like to use Text for your Logo, like the screenshots above, or you can choose to use a logo. One important thing to note here is the size is not restricted, please ensure your resize your logo.
Show Search form field in Header.
Not a fan of the large search box, change your selection here to hide it.
The footer is just a text field, so you can add some copy to your footer. I decided to spice things up with Bacon, here is a footer with Bacon Ipsum.
The home page has lot of options, as you can see in the screenshot below. You can change the header title, add some text, give text for the button and add the link that the button links to, as well as selecting a preselected background image, or your own custom background.
After changing a few settings, your homepage now has a nice hero image, like the screenshot below.
When looking at the blog part of ContentBox, you'll see you have loads of options on the right hand side.
This might be too much for some sites, so you can choose whether to show / hide some of those mini widgets.
Turn them off, and hey presto, no more side bar mini widgets.
This is just the default theme. We have many more, and others are being developed, and can be shared easily through Forgebox.
Widgets are small pieces of software that you can add to your ContentBox website to perform a specific function. There are several Widgets built into ContentBox that are used for various parts of your website, and you can insert widgets into blog posts and pages to make your website even more dynamic.
Widgets are one of the ways ContentBox is extendable, you can install modules and themes that overwrite existing widgets, or are brand new... or you can create or customize your own widgets.
Widgets are maintained through the Administrator under Look & Feel > Widgets. You can managing existing widgets, upload new widgets, or download widgets from Forgebox.
In this section of the documentation, you will learn how to use Install, Manage and Use Widgets To learn how you can develop your own widgets, read this section under Developing for ContentBox
Lets add a widget into a page. In this example, we're going to insert a simple ContentBoxBadge Widget which has no parameters or arguments. We show you how to create this Widget in the Developing for ContentBox section of the documentation.
Lets browse in the admin to Content > Sitemap and click on a page. Find the location in the text you would like to add your widget, and click the Green ContentBox Widget icon ( circled below ).
Pick a Widget out of the list, you can filter the widgets, or select by category ( categories are defined in the Widget properties ).
Click anywhere on the Widget itself, and the Insert Widget Dialog will open like the screen below.
If there were arguments, you could adjust them here. If this is the widget you want, and the preview looks good, click Insert Widget. Back to Widgets allows you to return to the Widget list to look for a different widget. Cancel returns you to the Content Editors.
Once inserted, click Publish, and then you'll see a Widget placeholder like this.
If you right click on the widget, you can get a Widget Context menu like below. You can edit, or remove a Widget through that context menu, or just double click the Widget placeholder to edit directly.
This example has no arguments or parameters to change, but if you did, you would be able to edit those here, and click Update Widget to save those changes.
You can preview the page using our Responsive Previewer which allows you to see what your page will look like, in desktop, tablet and phone views ( horizontal and vertical ).
When you are happy, ensure you save / publish your page to keep your changes. Once saved, you can view it on the front end of the website.
