Themify builds its themes on top of its Themify Framework.
This shared foundation makes it easier for Themify to keep all its themes update, freeing resources for new developments rather than maintenance. Which of course benefits the site owners depending on a theme from Themify – especially when these are a member of the Themify Club.
In this post, I concentrate the features of the Themify Framework, and how to configure your Themify theme with the options as provided by the theme options.
Although this review is based on the Themify Landing theme, the majority of the features described here are available in all Themify themes – because of that shared foundation.
Themify Theme Options
The Themify Theme Options include five components, accessible form a menu bar:
- Settings
- Skins
- Transfer
- Demo Import
- Update
- Options
The Themify Options used to be integrated with the Themify Settings panel as the Styling Options. These options have been moved and integrated with the WordPress Customizer.
This way you do not have to switch back and fort between the Customizer and the Styling Options when styling the theme, and you are able to get a direct feedback with the live preview.
We will save to the Settings to last, so we start with the Skins.
Themify Skins
The Skins section is the place where you select you desired colour scheme. Most of the time you can choose from eight to ten predefined skins. As you can see in the image above, I have added a Theming WP skin (ThemingWP was the WordPress theming website of wilwebs). Which is quite easy to achieve.
The skins are located in the skins folder of your theme. The steps I took to create this Themify WP skin, are:
- copy the blue folder inside the skins folder, and name it themingwp
- replace the hex code of the Themify blue #0e88be in the style.css in the themingwp folder with #4eb9f3 – which is Theming WP blue
- for the finishing touch, I have also replaced the the blue in the image, which is not really necessary since you can give the skin any name you want
A major disadvantage of this approach, of course, is that you probably will lose your custom skin with the next update of the theme.
Preserving your custom skin
Preserving your custom skin settings is very easy though.
- Switch over to the WordPress Customizer
- go to Themify Options >> Custom CSS
- copy and paste the code from style.css of your custom skin in the Custom CSS area
- hit the [Save & Publish]-button
Your custom skin is now stored in the database where it cannot be overwritten during theme updates.
Themify Transfer
The Transfer tab facilitates the import and export of your theme settings.
Hitting the [Export]-button generates a zip file that looks something like Landing_themify_export_2015_04_14.zip. This zip contains data_export.txt. A plain text file with all theme settings.
You can store this file as a back-up, just in case you need to restore your theme settings from that very moment.
Since it is easy to backup the theme settings, it might be a good idea to export the theme settings every time you change the theme. Or at least after every major adjustment
And of course, you can also use this feature to work on your website locally, export the settings when you are satisfied, and upload them to your production site on the web.
With this feature there is no need to migrate the entire database, and all media files when you have only been working on the theme.
Themify Demo Import
To get familiar with your new theme, Themify offers you to import example posts, pages, theme settings, menus and configured as widgets. Just as in the demo on the Themify website with [Import Demo].
When you no longer have a need for the demo content, you can simply remove it again, by clicking the [Erase Demo]-button.
Themify Update
As mentioned earlier, all Themify themes incorporate the Themify Framework. Themes and the framework are update regularly, but not always simultaneously.
The upper right corner of the Settings states the version number of the theme regarding, while the number in the lower left corner reflects the version number of the framework.
You are notified when there is an update available like in the image above. Updating takes no more than clicking the [Update Now]-button.
When there is no update available, you will see two buttons:
- Check for Updates
- Re-install Theme
The first option will be obvious. Re-install Theme replaces the current installed version with the latest available version of the theme – even when both have the same version number.
For automatic updates, you need to enter your user name and password of your Themify account. Otherwise you have to update manually over (S)FTP.
Themify Options
As mentioned before, the settings formerly known as the Styling Options have been integrated with the WordPress Customizer and continue there as the Themify Options.
You can choose from two modes – Basic and Advanced. You see an image of the Basic set of options here at the right.
The Advanced Options not only include three more categories of styling options (Layout Containers, Headings, and Forms), but also include more settings for each of the group of options.
To avoid that you get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of options, I guess it is best to start with the lesser mode – the Basic Options. Especially since even the Basic mode offers you a lot of possibilities to tweak your theme, simply by point-and-click.
Things like selecting a color or uploading a background image for the body and header, or selecting your preferred fonts and colors for titles, body text, headings and navigation – all this is possible with the Basic Themify Options.
The styling options of Themify themes are really quite impressive and highly customizable without the need to code.
In fact, with these styling options you are able to customise the style.css without the need to code
Themify Settings
The Settings are the core component of the theme options. The Settings of the Landing theme include:
- General Settings
- Default Layouts
- Portfolio Layouts
- Theme Settings
- Image Script
- Social Links
- Themify Builder
- Twitter Settings
- Hook Content
General Settings
Your first option at the General Settings is uploading your favicon.
Next you have the ability to enter a Custom Feed URL in case it is something different than the default https://domainname/feed – like for example https://feeds.feedburner.com/feedname.
The text areas regarding the Header and Footer Code allow you to enter any custom CSS or JavaScript, which will be added between the <head> tags, respectively just before the closing </body> tag. Images of these text boxes are just plain white space and therefore not included here.
Much more interesting are the Search Settings. Here you can exclude Post Categories and available custom post types, so that these do not show up in the search results on the website.
With the Feed Settings, you can exclude Post Categories from the RSS Feed. You can also exclude the Featured Image from your RSS Feed, simply by checking the appropriate box.
When styling text and titles with the Themify Options (Basic or Advanced), the Themify Framework offers you a set of Websafe Fonts and Google Fonts.
With the Google Fonts settings above you can choose to load all Google Fonts instead of the recommended subset.
And when you do need fonts designed for Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek or Hebrew scripts, you can exclude these here.
Default and Portfolio Layouts
With Default Layouts you have the ability to compose the page templates for the index pages, single post pages, and the default page layout.
And for themes that install with a portfolio post type you get comparable options regarding the layout of the portfolio template.
For the content area, you can choose from one, two, three or even four columns. In addition, you can set the preferred sidebar position, or choose to have no sidebar at all.
Other options let you display the full post content, excerpts or just the image.
You can enter a custom Read More text, reverse the sort order, hide post meta, include or exclude the Featured Image, and set the dimensions for the Featured Image.
What you do here is basically customising the template files and the functions.php of your theme – without the need to code
Theme Settings
The Theme Settings let you select, or disable the desired WordPress Gallery Lightbox. Additionally, you can choose between a numbered pagination and a pagination with previous/next post links.
With the Header Options you can disable the sticky header, exclude the RSS Link and Search Form, Social Widgets and even the navigation.
Other options let you set up one to four Footer Widgets, or disable the fat footer entirely.
Last but not least, to customise the footer credits, you only have to enter your preferred text or HTML.
Image Script
Themify generates Featured Images dynamically – on the fly – in all desired dimensions as entered with the Default and Portfolio Layouts.
In case your images have been cropped manually, you can disable this feature at the Image Script settings.
Social Links and Twitter Settings
Some social widgets plugins let you only choose from the most popular networks. Not with Themify’s Social Links widget. Here you can add any link you want, and in the order you like.
You can either use the Font Awesome font to display the icon of the social network, opt for the default Themify image icons, or upload your own. For each Social Link, you enter a title, the URL, and optionally an icon.
You can add as many social profiles as you like, and display these in the Social Widget area. However, with the Social Links widget you can display the links in any widget area you prefer.
In order to use Themify’s Twitter Widget, you will have to enter the Consumer Key and Consumer Secret from your account with Twitter.
Themify Builder
The Themify Builder is a drag & drop page builder. All Themify themes come packed with this Builder. Other themes can take advantage of the Builder features by obtaining the Builder Plugin.
The Builder options let you disable the visual content editor completely, or just the Animation Effects and/or the Parallax Effects of the Builder.
You can also disable any of the Builder Modules: Accordion, Box, Callout, Divider, Feature, Gallery, Image, Map, Menu, Portfolio, Post, Slider, Tab, Text, Video, Widget, Widgetized.
A more in-depth review of the Themify Builder is available here on wilwebs too.
Hook Content
WordPress allows you to add or change code or content through hooks. You can for example create a custom widget area to display a welcome message, a banner ad or Google AdSense code.
First select a location – like header_after here above. Indeed, the ad in this example will be displayed directly after the page header.
With the Conditions you identify where the code or content (here the add) will appear – all pages, just the homepage, etc. Themify has made it easy for you, this is merely a matter of checking boxes – no need to code.
Wrapping Up
Well, that is about it. Although we have touched a lot of ground, we definitely did not cover every single feature. In case you are hungry for more, you could have a look at the documentation.
February 2012, I became a Themify Member, and they continue impressing me with their creations, implementing innovations as soon as they come available.
And that was even before the introduction of the Themify Builder, which adds a ton of value to each and every theme.
As far as I am concerned, Themify is very successful in building themes that give you the opportunity to unleash the true power of WordPress.
And the best of all is that you can take advantage of all that power without the need to code. Just point-and-click. That is it. Simply Powerful.
To date, Theming WP has published reviews of 32 themes from Themify, all of them are responsive.
When you have any questions regarding the Themify Framework, please do not hesitate and leave a comment. It will be my pleasure to get back to you.
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