Craftiness Theme Not Working (Pt. 2) – TABS

[glittergal]

I can't believe I've been working for nearly 6 hours to get this blog set up. I should be done with this now and generating content for it. From start to finish it's truly been the most mind-numbing, confusing experience I've had as of late.

And so much for following the directions on the  "how to" page here (http://www.restored316designs.com/themes/craftiness-theme-faqs/) or the 47 page pdf because none of it is working (http://glittermeetsglue.com). I can't get any tabs to show up. Is there some kind of trick that I should know but is unstated in the directions?

[Susan]

Did you enable your menus under Primary Navigation and/or Secondary Navigation?

Here's a tutorial on setting up menus:

 

[glittergal]

Thanks for your reply, Susan. Those navigations were already enabled. Apparently the issue was under:

DASHBOARD >> APPEARANCE >> MENU >> THEME LOCATIONS >> PRIMARY

I didn't select "primary" under that section. I'm not finding any of this intuitive and I think that's why it's all very frustrating. At this point, I still don't even know what's the difference between "primary" and "secondary" navigation nor am I seeing a clear, visual description of it so I'm just not connecting with any of this.

So now I can see some tabs up there and I'm trying to fiddle around with them and experiencing moderate success. I'm struggling to understand how to set up some navigation under a section I called, "Clipart." I want to have some links to other parts of my site that say things like:

Badges

Frames / Borders

Scrapbook Paper

Seasonal >

Easter

Christmas

St. Patty's Day

Valentine's Day

 

And when that link in the navigation is clicked, it takes you to a page that has a collection of posts related to whatever item they selected and it looks like what this person did with the same template (http://ssimplyme.com/category/life-posts/tots/). But I can't figure out how to do that.

[Susan]

If you look at the site you linked to, the menu items are actually categories. You would need to create categories for the items you would like, and then go to Genesis > Menus > Custom Links, and type in the URL for the category (for example, the URL for your "featured" category is http://glittermeetsglue.com/?cat=50), add to menu, and then indent them under the Clipart Menu item.

[glittergal]

Thanks Susan.

I managed to make a bunch of categories but I don't have anything that says GENESIS > MENU > CUSTOM LINKS, but I do have APPEARANCE >> MENUS >> CUSTOM LINKS and it seems to be looking like what you're describing. Where I get stuck is in the URL. How do I know what the URL of each of my categories are? Is it that I'm not going to know that URL until I've made a blog post and copy/paste it in? I'm unsure why I'm not connecting with this.

Thanks for your help thus far. It's much appreciated.

[Susan]

You are right - it is Appearance > Menus > Custom Links.

To find the URL of your category, once again in your dashboard, go to Posts > Categories > which will bring up a list of all your catgories. There is a heading there called "slug", The “slug” is the URL-friendly version of the name. It is usually all lowercase and contains only letters, numbers, and hyphens.

So, the full URL would be something like http://YOUR BLOG URL/category/CATEGORYSLUG.

I hope that helps!

[glittergal]

One step forward, two steps back...

So I seem to have some navigation set up (yay) under the "Clip Art" heading." Before I'd done this, I'd thrown up a test post to see if making the post would put it in the Featured Slider, and it did.

But as soon as I set up navigation, it bumped it out. I have the post in question checked off for "featured" and it has a "featured image," too.

Getting closer!

[glittergal]

Bumping to ask if anyone has any idea what would cause the problem in my previous post. I'm not sure what's causing this problem and I'm so close to having the meats and potatoes of this site set up!

[Susan]

Sorry I didn't get back when you first posted - was working on a school assignment 🙂

I don't see that the change in what is being displayed in the slider is related in any way to the changes you made in the navigation menu, but the timing is weird.

Can you get the slider to display any images? You've indicated that you've got it to display images with the category of "featured" - does it work if you have some other criteria selected? How many images do you have selected to display?

[glittergal]

No worries! Just thought maybe someone else might know, too.

The timing was very aligned. I made the change, refreshed the page, and everything left the slider box.

I'm here trying to play with it now and I just noticed that the slider widget was set to another category ("stationery"), so I just changed it to "Featured" and now nothing still shows in the slider box but the text from the one post I have marked as "featured" is appearing above the social media icons! It never ends. LOL

[glittergal]

WAIT: I THINK I GOT IT!....

[Susan]

I had an answer typed about the featured post in your header right, but as I'm switching back and forth between this post and your site, it looks like you got that resolved. 🙂

 

I can see images in your slider now!

[glittergal]

HA HA! That's why I quickly typed, "WAIT!" Because I didn't want you to get too deep into a reply and waste your time. 🙂 All I see now to resolve is the lightness of the text in the slider. That's a CSS thing and I can hack that code as I've done that before.

The issue was having the Genesis Featured Posts widget in the wrong location. The slider wasn't where it was supposed to be.

Now hopefully going forward, there won't be any more of these issues. Don't know how I dug myself into such a pit considering this isn't the first blog I've done, but, there you have it.

Thanks so much for your help on this. It was truly invaluable!

[Susan]

I'm so glad you got it resolved! I'm going to go ahead and close this thread as resolved - start another thread if you have more issues!

 

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