Timber Lite is a photography WordPress theme aimed at all you visual creatives out there that need a tool to showcase your work. In this guide, I will try to walk you through the main features that Timber Lite brings on top of what already WordPress has to offer (basic WordPress learning is not the scope of the current article).
Install and Activate the Theme
One of the perks of WordPress in general and Timber Lite, in particular, is that you can start playing around with it in no time.
- Log into your WordPress Dashboard and navigate to Appearance → Themes.
- Click Add New button at the top of the page.
- Search for “Timber Lite” from the top right search field.
- Find the theme and click Install Now.
- Once the theme has been installed, click the Activate link.
Getting Started
Timber Lite is a theme that strives to follow all the WordPress standards both in coding but most of all in the way it utilizes the functionality that WordPress offers out of the box. We believe this is the way forward for themes, making it easier for you to switch themes and take your old content along for the ride.
The Portfolio
The portfolio section is one such example (actually the main one as we are talking about a portfolio theme). We have focused each project on the WordPress editor (yes you’ve heard it right).
How can one have those beautiful project galleries with horizontal scroll, text, videos, thumbnails, and so on, all in the old editor? Well, you can if we do the heavy lifting for you. Let me elaborate.
Creating Projects
When you create a new project from your WordPress admin panel by going to Projects → Add New you get a pretty standard set of tools (the same ones you would get when creating a new post). You get the editor, project types (these are similar to categories), project tags, a featured image and a few custom settings of our own in the Project Settings box under the editor box.
So where do I get to add my photos?
Right in the editor in the form of image galleries (we automatically insert an empty gallery when you create a new project just to get you started that much faster), regular images (I would recommend keeping the images on separate lines) or video embeds.
Timber Lite will only look at the image URL (or id if it’s a gallery shortcode) and the caption if present. So any other settings you may use (like image alignment) will be ignored.
Set up the Portfolio Front Page
The front page of your website say something about you, so make sure you use it wisely. There’s no second chance for a first impression, right? Let us walk you through the steps of achieving a great result on this one.
- Go to Page → click on Add new
- Set the Custom Portfolio Template as the Page Template from the right side of the page (under Page Attributes there’s a dropdown)
- Select the portfolio items you want to display on your front page from the Featured Projects section
- Click on Publish to save the page
- Go on Settings → Reading → check Static Page (select below) option from the top of the page → select the above created page as “Front page” → click on Save Changes from the bottom, and it’s done.
For a detailed review of Timber Lite, make sure to check out this article.
Now you are ready to build a stunning website and showcase your work with Timber Lite. Make the most out of our WordPress theme, and don’t hesitate to aim for more. There’s always a way to improve everything.
Need More? Upgrade to Timber PRO
If you are looking for more flexibility and customizations options, galleries with text and video support, animated page transitions, online store capabilities, and much more check out the comparison table.