Chevez is a magazine-style theme with clean spacing, sharp contrast, and a shadowed look. Content is emphasized in over four different customizable layouts. Controlling which posts go where is as simple as choosing a category from a dropdown menu. This flexibility is combined with configurable menus, custom coloring, and theme behavior settings, giving you unparalleled freedom to use Chevez in the way you need.

Images are in central focus in the Chevez design. Each post is assigned an identity image that follows with it throughout the site, ideal for any content-driven blog. These images are managed through Wordpress’ built-in Media Library, and sized & cropped automatically, as needed by the theme. The result is functionality that works instantly, out of the box. No additional per-post configuration required–of course, you can tweak anything you like for precise control.

Chevez comes with our standard pledge of a bug-free experience, cross-browser support on all modern browsers, and continual free updates in the future. Still intrigued? Check out the full list of offered features below, or take the demo for a spin.

For a basic setup, Chevez installs like any other theme. If you’ve never installed a Wordpress theme before, follow our step-by-step guide.

Once standard installation is complete, you can maximize your experience by configuring Chevez’s custom settings. To begin, login to the Wordpress Admin panel and click on the ‘Theme Options’ link in the sidebar menu.

This will bring you to the ‘Customize Chevez Theme’ screen. This page contains options for modifying colors, images, and other appearance-related settings. There are three options on this page:

Logo

Blurbia themes use the built-in Wordpress Media Library for image uploading and management. Clicking the “…” button will launch the standard Media Browser used on the Edit Post screen. To choose an image, upload or select it, and click the ‘insert into post’ button. If you would like to use an image that is hosted elsewhere, or is stored in a specific folder on your server, simply type or paste the full URL to the image in the field, bypassing the Media Browser.

Header Height

This option lets you explicitly define, in pixels, the height of the header. You can use this in conjunction with the logo to precisely customize the appearance of your site’s header.

Highlight/Link Color

This option accepts an HTML hex number preceded by a pound sign (e.g., #ffe733). Many popular image and color programs will generate these hex numbers, including Adobe Photoshop. In addition, clicking the “…” button next to a color field will pop up a color-selection dialog.

After setting these options to your needs, click on the ‘Edit Menus’ item under ‘Theme Options’ in the menu sidebar. You may need to click the arrow icon next to ‘Theme Options’ in order for this to appear.

This will bring you to the ‘Modify Header and Footer Menus’ screen. Chevez has three menus that can be customized from this page: two in the header, and one in the footer.

Header Categories

These settings control the primary menu with scrolling-post-excerpts functionality on the home page. Set the number of menu items you’d prefer, and then save the settings. We generally recommend 3-5, depending on the length of the category names. After saving, the selected number of items should display as dropdown category selections. Simply choose the desired category for each, and save the settings again. The menu will now correspond to your choices, with the post excerpts pulling from the matching categories.

Header Pages

These settings operate in the same way, but for the smaller text-only menu on the right. Enter the number of items, save the settings, and then select a page for each item. This menu consists of simple links to the selected pages, and is generally suitable for About, Contact, and other site-wide information pages.

Footer

This menu pulls from all pages, and allows you to exclude certain pages using this option. Specify a comma-separated list of Page IDs, and they will not show up in this menu.

Now click on the ‘Settings’ item under ‘Theme Options’. This will bring you to the ‘Chevez Theme Settings’ screen. This page contains options that modify the behavior of the theme’s User Interface. There are five sections:

Home Page

These settings control the number of posts that display in different formats on the home page. ‘Posts to Excerpt’ specifies how many will display in the two-column box format below the featured posts. ‘Posts to List’ specifies how many will display in the text-only list format. To hide either format completely, simply set the appropriate number to zero.

Featured

Featured post boxes in Chevez are large-format post excerpts with a prominent thumbnail image (see the demo). These settings let you configure the behavior and number of these boxes. Simply set the number of Featured boxes you’d like to display, save the settings, and the corresponding number of Category Dropdowns will appear. Select a different category for each box, and it will display the most recent post from that category. Be sure to also experiment with the ‘Read More’ style, and see which behavior you prefer.

Ad Spaces

Ad Spaces in Chevez are widgetized areas that can have Ad Widgets placed and configured using the standard Wordpress Widgets editor (located under Appearance). If you do not intend to use these spaces, you can simply disable them by setting them to ‘Hide’ here.

Footer

These settings control the display of copyright information and various links in the footer. You can disable the Wordpress and Blurbia links here, if you prefer.

Other

The first setting is a cosmetic option for a more “clean” look  on Wordpress Pages. If comments are disabled for a given Page, and this option is set to ‘Yes’, the comment box will be hidden entirely on that Page. If this option is set to ‘No’, it will display the standard ‘Comments are closed’ message below the Page content. The second setting only applies if you are not using widgets. The Twitter box in the sidebar will pull from this username if configured. If widgets are used, the username is set in the widget options.

Finished choosing all your options? Your theme is now fully customized and ready to use.

What browsers are supported?

We currently support Firefox, Safari, and IE6+ on all our themes. By “support”, we mean that each page is tested in each browser, and coded to look and behave identically across them. It also means that if you find a bug specific to one of these browsers, we treat it[...] Continue Reading

How do I add thumbnail images to my posts?

Themes that make use of thumbnail images do so by leveraging Wordpress’ built-in Media Library. Anytime you upload an image from the ‘Edit Post’ screen, that image becomes an attachment of that post in the Wordpress database. By default, the theme will simply grab the first attachment it can find[...] Continue Reading

Are updates free?

Yes. One of our goals at Blurbia is to provide continual enhancement to all our existing themes at no extra cost for current and past customers. Whenever a theme you’ve purchased is updated, you can get the latest release by simply logging in and browsing to the theme’s product page.

Why is Wordpress 2.7 required?

The theme makes use of the advanced functionality that Wordpress 2.7 provides, such as threaded comments. At this time, backwards compatibility with prior Wordpress versions has not been included–however, 2.5 and 2.6 compatibility is slated to be released soon as  a free upgrade.

Are threaded comments supported?

Yes. Threaded comments are supported up to 10 levels (the maximum supported in Wordpress). Generally, we recommend 5 levels or fewer with this theme.

Can I customize every color?

Currently, no. Certain colors and images are customizable, depending on the theme, and do offer a great deal of flexibility in creating your own look. However, certain elements are fixed and would require editing of the stylesheets and/or source images in order to change.

(For greater customization, consider the developer’s license,[...] Continue Reading

I changed my color and now the angled “notches” on the comment boxes don’t show up. How do I fix this?

When you customize the primary color, the theme tries to automatically create a new “notch” in the same color. These notches are created using an image file, so the theme needs to be able to generate such a file and save it to the file system. There are two things[...] Continue Reading