Difficulty: Easy (Everything here is done in your WordPress and Chameleon control panels)

This guide will show you how to set a few options in Oracle to get your site up and running asap! We’re going to assume you already have installed your theme (If not, check out the install guide first and then come back here!)

The Menu Bar

The menu bar (The dark and light grey bar right under the logo), is fully controlled via the Appearance > Menus page, including adding your own sub-menus and third level menus. To read more about how to set up a custom menu, just read our guide.

Controlling Your Homepage

In your WordPress dashboard, click the PliablePress link, then click the Oracle tab. These are the options for controlling the content sections of your homepage (The controls for your slider are under PliablePress > Homepage though).

The page is split into 3 sections; Main Posts Column, Inner Sidebar Column, and Images Column.

In the screenshot below, the white column on the left is the main posts column, and the gray one on the right is the inner sidebar. The images column then comes beneath these two.

You can use the options under each heading to take full control over the posts shown there. Each of the 3 sections has a fairly similar set of options (The exceptions will be discussed in a minute).

Let’s take an example of how we could set the posts:

• We want the main column to list our most recent posts.
• We want the sidebar column to list posts from the Movies category.
• We want the images column to show posts tagged with either Travel or Sports.

We would start by giving the main and sidebar columns a “Title” (Which is the large text at the top of the column).

In the “Main Posts Column” section, we would leave the “Name of Category/Tag” box blank. Leaving it blank means that Oracle will use our most recent blog posts. Optionally, we could also use the “Show” dropdown to change how many posts are displayed.

In the “Inner Sidebar Column” section, we would set this field to “Movies” (no quotes) though. Because it is a category, we would set the “Category or Tag” option below to “Category” (The default). And again, we could change how many posts are displayed if we wanted.

Lastly, in the “Images Column” section, we would set the “Name of Category/Tag” box to say “Travel, Sports” (Again without quotes). In any of the sections, you can name as many categories/tags as you want. Just separate each of them with a comma.

NB – If you name multiple tags/categories in the sidebar or image columns, Oracle will set the “More” link to take visitors to the first category or tag you entered.

Special Options

There are 3 special options in this page to give you extra functionality:

Filter Out Sidebar Posts - If you enable this option (Under the Main Posts Column section), then when Oracle is choosing which posts to display in that column, it will first work out what posts will be shown in your sidebar column, and then ensure these don’t appear in the main posts column as well. This is a great way to avoid repetition on your homepage.

Disable Inner Sidebar - You may not want to show the inner sidebar at all. If that’s the case, you can enable this option and the sidebar will be removed, and the main posts column will expand to take up the whole space.

Twitter Feed - This will allow you to embed your latest tweets in the inner sidebar column. On Twitter, go to your profile and then click the “RSS feed of x’s tweets” link at the bottom of your sidebar (Pictured below). Now just copy the address of the page you are on and paste it into this box in the Oracle options.