Installed via Reclaim Hosting’s cpanel installer, this is a version of the TRU Collector fully built out with many things that you would have to do to create a site like this from scratch. The most up to date documentation is available from the theme’s home.

This pre-built version helps you dive right into creating a pool of images or other things you might build a collection around. When you have installed a copy of this into your own site, you have a few more things to do to get the pool going.

Once you have done these, you can delete the earlier “Collectables” in the pool (the dog and the animated hamster), although you are welcome to keep them. You might want to edit this post, and under the Publish settings in the top right, change the status to Draft. That way, it will not appear on the site, but you can preview it from the Dashboard if you need to check these instructions.

Also be sure to refer to the theme’s set-up instructions for help understanding the Theme Options.

WordPress Settings

Make sure you are logged into your site (add /admin) to your URL. You can tell you are logged in if you see the black admin menu bar on top of every page your site. The following are some things you should do first to customize the site.

  1. Customize the site and tagline Go to Settings -> General
  2. Make Your Own Categories Go to Collectables -> Collectable Categories. Delete the silly ones that come with this, and create your own meaningful categories.
  3. Update the About Page Go to Pages and look for the About page. Make it describe your own site, not this one.

TRU Collector Options

Look for the link in the top admin bar to the options that further control how the site works. The Documentation tab explains (hopefully) the settings, but to summarize:

  1. Access Code Enter a passphrase to provide a weak entrance requirement to post images. If a code is entered, anyone adding images to your pool will be sent to the Welcome Desk screen where they must enter the code to access the form for adding items.
    • If you do not use an access code, we suggest using the Status for New Items option to Set to draft so you can moderate content.
    • If you do use an access code, we suggest using the Status for New Items option to Publish immediately so your site users can see their results right away.

The rest of the options should be easy to see how they work. You can disable them from the Collection Add form, make them optional, or make them required depending on how much information you want to have people add to your site.

Now try adding an image to your pool. Is that cool or what?

Customizing the Add to Collection Form

You can now customize the field labels and the descriptions of the form where people submit new items to a TRU Collector site. On your site navigate to the collect form, and activate the WordPress Customizer from the admin bar.

There is a special section at the bottom to open:

Then from this pane, open “Collect Form” (eventually the theme options will live here too)

And then you will see a series of fields to edit for all form field elements. For each, you can edit the title/label of the field and the prompt that appears below. As you type in the customizer fields on the left, you will see a live preview on the right (ignore the silly pizza references in the screenshot, the author was just hungry):

Browse/View By Reuse License

The TRU Collector provides links that display archives of content that have the same reuse license (if the feature is activated via the TRU Collector options). Just make sure there is a WordPress Page with the url / slug /licensed

This page is created automatically on new sites, or simply by activating the theme again (activate the parent Fukasawa, then activate TRU Collector again). It only displays ones that have been used, and includes a count of the number of items in the collection using that license.

This page (see example) provides links to view all content with the licenses available on the collect form. The url including licensed/cc-by yields all items with a Creative Commons CC By Attribution license example.

Use the page to find links to the ones you wish to use and add to your site’s menus or widgets. If the links do not work, you may have to go to Settings — Permalinks and just click save to regenerate the settings.

Adding Hyperlinks to Captions

Any HTML put into the editor for the caption is stripped out. But a new feature allows hyperlinks to be created using a “shortcode” format:

Links show be entered as a  shortcode where the link url is specified as well as the text to be used as hypertext:

the coolest site on the internet

This will create a hyperlink like the coolest site on the internet

To present the link just as a URL, simply use

http://www.themostamazingwebsiteontheinternet.com/

which will produce the hyperlink like http://www.themostamazingwebsiteontheinternet.com/ — all links will open in a new window.

If you want to give your site users more editing tools, enable the Rich Text Editor option in the TRU Collector Options.

Enable Public Ratings

Activating the WP-Ratings Plugin that comes with this theme installed enables public star (or other scale) ratings on items from the front page, archives, and single items.

Fix Rotated Mobile Phone Photos

If contributors to your collection will be uploading photos directly from a smart phone, the iOS Image Fixer plugin comes with this install enabled, so it can fix problems associated with portrait mode photos that end up uploaded as sideways images.

Get rid of the default widgets on the site; make it your own

Widgets

Shared by: @cogdog
Image Credit: Pixabay https://pixabay.com/en/pool-water-swimming-pool-refresh-831996/
Reuse License: Public Domain
Attribution Text: