Theme Options: Advanced

The settings in Appearance > Theme Options > Advanced provide powerful enhancements to the standard features of WordPress. You can add a Series taxonomy for a multi-part series of related posts, add Google Custom Search, add a "leaderboard" ad zone at the top of your layout, add your IDs for social media, analytics, and more.

Let’s take the top three checkboxes one at a time, as they can add a lot of flexibility to your Largo site.

Enable Custom LESS to CSS for Theme Customization

Enabling this will let you change parts of the theme’s colors and fonts in Appearance > CSS Variables. You’ll see options to change colors for several page elements, including the body background and font color, along with typography settings. We recommend changing this only if you are feeling pretty good about your design skills. The base Largo theme is designed to be highly usable, readable, and attractive. If you need further changes in your layout, colors, fonts, etc., we're always happy to talk about custom design work.

Enable Series Taxonomy

If you want to publish a multi-part series of related posts on a given topic or project, you’ll want to enable the “series” taxonomy. This allows you to create a term for the Series, and then apply that term to each post in the Series.

Why Not Use a Category for this Purpose?

Categories should always be the main topics that your site covers (Politics, Education, Environment, etc.) and we typically recommend sticking to a maximum of 6-8 categories to make them easier to manage and keep your site navigation from becoming unwieldy.

We add the optional series taxonomy to allow you to group related stories that are part of a limited Series or special project without having to create too many additional categories.

Each Series you add will have its own archive page, RSS feed and is also used to recommend related posts when you use the Largo related posts widget at the bottom of your article pages.

Additionally, when you create a Series, it enables a couple of widgets for that series allowing you to link to the series in various places and ways:

• The Largo Series Posts widget displays links to up to five stories in a given series. This is typically used in sidebars or widget areas on the homepage to promote any given series.
• The Largo Related Series widget displays the name of the series that a post is a part of with a link to the Series Landing Page. This is typically used at the bottom of article pages to encourage readers to click back to the full Series page that a story is related to.

You can also add links to a Series page to your main navigation or the optional Don't Miss menu in Largo. In WordPress, custom taxonomies are hidden on the edit menu page by default so you'll need to click on screen options at the top right to be able to see the option to add series to any given menu.

For more on menus, see the section of this guide on managing menus in WordPress and Largo.

For more on the Series taxonomy, visit the Largo taxonomy page.

Enable Custom Landing Pages for Series/Project Pages

This option requires the Series taxonomy to be enabled.

If you want to build custom landing pages for your series archive pages (instead of just a simple list of posts in the series with an optional series description in the header) this option allows you to build custom archive pages and associate them with a given series.

Once this option is enabled, you’ll see a new menu item in the dashboard called Landing Pages.

Each Series landing page can have one sidebar, two sidebars, or no sidebars. The options here in the Advanced theme options all you to set the default sidebars for landing pages, but they can be overridden in the settings for each individual landing page.

For more on creating and managing series landing pages, see the related section later in this guide.

Enable Optional Leaderboard Ad Zone

You can run ads at the top of the page, above your masthead, with this option. Selecting this option will enable a Header Ad Zone widget area where you can place widgets to display ads or other content that you want easily noticed. The content will display at the top of your page:

While you can place any kind of content in the Header Ad Zone widget area, the most common use of this space is for displaying ads from the Google Display Network.

Display of Google ads requires the DoubleClick for WordPress plugin, and you’ll need a DoubleClick for Publishers account to make this work.

If you’re set up with Google DFP and want to place ads at the very top of your pages, enable this option and then go to the Appearance > Widgets section of the WordPress admin to add a DFP ad widget to this widget area.

Optionally, for a simpler application, you can use an image widget in this spot with a leaderboard sized display ad (728px x 90px).

Enable “Post Types” Taxonomy

This allows you to organize posts by type of content. For example, you can organize by Photo, Video, Data, etc. You can define your own post types, set up parent/child relationships between post types, and add descriptions and icons for each post type. At this time you can add navigation links based on post types.

See the Post Types section of the Largo Docs for more details.

Search Options

WordPress search isn't great. It doesn't search things like bylines, custom fields and other elements that you might want people to be able to use when searching your site. Google provides a much better search engine based on its own indexing of the website. For most sites, we recommend using a Google Custom Search Engine to replace the default WordPress search. To do that, check the box here under Search Options and enter your Google Custom Search ID.

You can find your Google Custom Search ID, or create a new one for your Largo site, on the Google Custom Search home page.

Site Verification

If you have accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Google, and/or Bit.ly, enter your IDs here for social media site verification and analytics.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Options

If you have lots of Archived pages, in addition to Post Type pages, Series landing pages, Category pages, etc., it’s possible that the same content is getting indexed by Google with multiple URLs - which can lower your site’s overall search ranking. We already block search engines from indexing date archives by default, but if you want to block them from indexing other archive page types (not recommended) you can do that by checking the box here.