User FAQ
From pixyWiki
How do I customize my 'About' page?
To take control of the template pages which make-up your site you need to customize your Theme. To do this follow the steps customizing your theme. Once you have your template pages available to edit you can simply edit the content of the About page and the changes will show-up immediately.
How do I change the default style from 'Light' to 'Dark' (or vice-versa)?
This can be easily done by editing a couple of lines in the template pages which make-up your site. If you haven't done so already you will first need to 'customize' your theme (follow the steps customizing your theme). Once you have your template pages available to edit you will need to edit the following in your _header template:
From:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="$url.resource("light.css")" />
<link rel="alternate stylesheet" type="text/css" href="$url.resource("dark.css")" title="dark"/>
To:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="$url.resource("dark.css")"/>
<link rel="alternate stylesheet" type="text/css" href="$url.resource("light.css")" title="light"/>
If you are using a Theme which has the comments pop-up in separate window, then you will also have to edit the _popupcomments template and make the same changes there too.
Finally, if you are uploading more than one photo per entry, then the Archives page displays those photos in a carousel which rotates them. When changing the default style you will need to update the Archives page template so that the carousel script displays the correct paging arrows (« or »), this is done by swapping the styles round.
For example, if the default theme style is light then you would have some code like this in your Archives page:
if (getActiveStyleSheet() == 'dark') {
$(button).style.color = enabled ? "#FFFFFF" : "#181818";
} else {
$(button).style.color = enabled ? "#000000" : "#CCCCCC";
}
You would need to change this to:
if (getActiveStyleSheet() == 'light') {
$(button).style.color = enabled ? "#000000" : "#CCCCCC";
} else {
$(button).style.color = enabled ? "#FFFFFF" : "#181818";
}
Note the changing of "dark" to "light" and the swapping of the "#XXXXXX" (hex colour values).
Changing your photoblog's home page
By default the homepage of your photoblog would be the Blog page template which displays your latest entry. However, this can be easily changed to display another template. First you need to take control of the template pages which make-up your site; you need to customize your Theme. To do this follow the steps customizing your theme. You can now set the order/priority for each of the template pages by setting the Navbar Order value. By setting the Navbar Order of a template to 1, this makes that template page the default entry page (home page) to your site. You can do this for an existing page template or you can create your own custom page template.
How do I change the colours and fonts for my theme
Currently this is not very easy and requires some knowledge of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). You will first need to customize your theme (see customizing your theme for how to do this). Once you are using your own custom theme then the style sheets that control the colours, fonts and layout of your theme will be in your File Uploads area of the admin (Blog > File Uploads). There will be two style sheet documents, light.css and dark.css, one for controlling the Dark layout and one for the Light. Any changes you make to one you should make to the other to keep the files in-sync.
Adding external links to the page menu
If you would like to add an external link from the page menu (navigation bar) of your site then there are a number of ways you can achieve this, but we find the easiest is to create a new template (making sure you include it in the page menu), and then simply add the following HTML code:
<html> <head> <meta HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" content="0; url=http://www.domain.com/external/page.html"> </head> <body></body> </html>
How do I run my photoblog under my own domain name?
The easiest way for you to do this is to register your domain name (we recommend http://www.godaddy.com) and then change the nameservers to:
- ns1.pixyblog.com
- ns2.pixyblog.com
Inform us of the change and we'll do the rest. It normally takes around 24 hours for the changes to take effect.
Alternatively you may want to manage the DNS yourself, this is fine. Simply create a CNAME/Alias record of the domain you would like to run your photoblog under and point it to host1.pixyblog.com and again inform us of the change.
How do I change my customized theme whilst retaining my changes?
So you have a website which you've customized and now you want to change to a different theme, or perhaps a newer version of the theme you are using has been released and you want to update your customized theme. Depending on the level of customizations you've made this can be a simple process or it may take a bit more planning.
When you take a theme and customize it (by hitting the customize button in the theme manager) this makes a copy of the page templates and style sheets which make-up that theme to your local area so that you can edit them. In the theme manager your theme will now be set to "custom" and you can add/edit/remove any pages you like. If you then decide to change to another theme and customize that, this will overwrite any existing page templates and style sheets with the ones from that theme. So before you overwrite any changes you've made you should make a copy of page templates you've either edited or added. You can do this by opening the page template and simply copy-and-paste the contents to a text editor. If you've made changes to the style sheets, you should save a local copy of these too. You can then choose your new theme, customize it and then re-apply the changes you made.
For example; a lot of people personalize their About page template and also add link buttons in their _footer page template. So to change themes you would:
- Make copies of both your _footer and About page templates on your computer.
- Choose your new theme and customize it.
- Re-apply your _footer and About edits to your new page templates.
If you've added your own custom pages then these won't get overwritten when changing themes. However the HTML is different on each theme so you will probably have to make some changes to the page template to get the formatting right for the new theme. For example, the surrounding HTML for a page template on one theme might look like:
#includeTemplate($model.weblog "header")
<div id="page">
<p><!-- Your content here --></p>
</div>
#includeTemplate($model.weblog "footer")
Whereas on another theme the page template may be:
#includeTemplate($model.weblog "header")
<div id="Content">
<div id="centercontent_wrap">
<div id="centercontent">
<p><!-- Your content here --></p>
</div>
</div>
<div id="rightcontent_wrap">
<div id="rightcontent">
#includeTemplate($model.weblog "sidebar")
</div>
</div>
</div>
#includeTemplate($model.weblog "footer")
In this case you can take the main body of your content and change the surrounding HTML so that it conforms to the layout of that theme.