Nominate Help

Requirements

• The Elemental theme (which is included, for free, when you purchase Nominate)
• Wordpress 3+
• PHP 4+ and a MySQL database
• A host server with GD library (very common)
• Note: You do not need to purchase Elemental separately. It comes included with your purchase of "Nominate"

Overview

Nominate is a child theme for Elemental, a larger framework, which means both must be installed in your /themes/ directory, though only Nominate needs to be activated. For more on child themes, please view the screencast. Users new to either theme should also read the Elemental documentation first.

Configuration

1. First read the Elemental configuration docs
2. Setup WordPress on your web space (info on WordPress and Theme installation here)
3. Download your theme from the accounts control panel.
4. Install/ Upload the Elemental theme files to your web space. Elemental is required for Nominate to work, however you do not need to activate it. There are sometimes problems with using the WordPress theme uploader so you may need to upload the theme files manually using an ftp client
5. Install/ Upload Nominate on your website.
6. Visit Nominate > Options and edit anything else, from typography to navigation
7. For information on creating custom Site Styles check out the tutorial here

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Do I have to buy Elemental when I buy Nominate?
   Nope, Elemental comes bundled with Nominate for free, so one purchase gets you everything you need to get your voting site up and running.
2. How do the spam controls work?
   For a post to be published it has to go through a series of spam processes:
   1. Is the user logged in?
   2. Check all required fields are completed
   3. Check the captcha entry is valid
   4. Check if the post contains any of the words in the blacklist (set inside the control panel)
   5. Check if the post points to any of the urls in the blacklist (set inside the theme control panel)
   6. Push it through the Akismet plugin (if setup)
   7. Finally, if this is the first or second post from this user it will be placed in Drafts for moderation. To post the article simply edit it and press publish
3. A post has been placed in Draft and not published. Why?
   If a user has not had many articles posted then their articles get placed into Draft mode for moderation. If enough are submitted then they will be automatically published. To publish a draft simply edit the post as you would a normal WordPress post, and hit Publish.
4. What is the difference between the Developers and Basic License?
   The main difference between the two licenses is the level of support we will offer for the theme. With a Basic license we will support a single website whilst with Developers license we will support you on multiple websites.
5. Why doesn’t the vote button appear on my posts?
   Generally the reason the posts do not have a vote button is because they have been added to the blog category as specified in the theme administration pages.
6. What is the ‘blog’ category for?
   The blog category is used to keep normal posts abut your website (news and updates etc) separate from the articles that are submitted by users.
7. Can Nominate be purchased without Elemental?
   Elemental is required for Nominate to work, however Elemental is included in the price of Nominate so there is no need to make multiple purchases.
8. Why is the ‘Incoming Posts’ Widget empty?
   A number of the widgets in Nominate (and Elemental) do not display blog posts if the posts have already been displayed on the page. This is so that the maximum number of posts possible can be linked to on each page.
9. What should I use for the ‘View all url’ in the ‘Incoming Posts’ widget?
   The ‘View all url’ will point to whatever web page you insert in the box, however you should enter a link to a page that you create using the ‘Latest Posts’ custom page template.
10. What posts display on the homepage?
    If there are no featured posts then the homepage will display all blog posts sequentially, as they would on a normal blog. Once there are featured posts the homepage will display those.
11. What makes a post featured?
    Featured posts are posts that have the tag ‘featured’ added to them. This can either be done manually, or once a post has X votes, as defined in the Nominate theme options – the default for this is 5 posts.
12. How do I moderate submitted articles?
    Based upon the spam rules submitted articles will either be posted straight away or they will be sent for moderation. The moderated posts will be added as drafts to your WordPress post listing so to moderate just open up the posts, check the content, and hit the publish button.
13. Does Nominate come with the WPVote.com design?
    Unfortunately not. WPVote.com was designed to have a stand alone theme design that looks unique and as such the design is not included in the theme package, however there is a custom design called ‘sky blue’ that uses similar colours, but without the custom images.
14. Can registration be disabled so that anyone can vote and submit content?
    This is not something that is possible since it would open your site up to spam and hacking, however you could use the WP-Facebook-Connect plugin to ease signups and registrations considerably.
15. Can I see Nominate in action?
    You certainly can, all of the Pro Theme Design themes can be previewed on the theme previews website.
16. Why doesn’t the ‘login’ & ‘submit article’ popup load?
    The reason for this is that the domain name in the WordPress settings does not match the domain name that the website is running from. Most often this is because the www has been missed (or added) from the name. Make sure the names match everywhere and the screens will load fine. The reason for the problem is that ajax is used to load the screens, and this does not work cross domain. If the settings vary then they won’t load as expected.
17. Why does the registration screen tab on the login popup say ‘registration is currently disabled’?
    Registration functionality is set within WordPress itself. For people to be able to register on your blog you must enable user registration in theme options. To enable registration you must tick the ‘Anyone can register’ option on the General settings page.
18. Why doesn’t the ‘Submit Article’ button display?
    There are a couple of reasons why this could happen.
    1. The submit article button is a widget. If there are no widgets set then the button will show, if you add a widget to the sidebar then you will need to make sure to add the Submit Article widget as well.
    2. Article submission has been disabled in the theme options. Re-enable it and you’ll be able to submit articles once more.
19. The vote buttons are not appearing. Why?
    The most likely reason for this is that the blog category has been set to your article category in the theme options. If this happens make sure there is a separate category to use for blog posts and then assign that in the theme options. The blog category is there to allow you to post your own articles without any vote buttons. It will automatically be hidden from any user submitted areas.
20. Why can’t people sign up so that they can vote and login?
    This setting is controlled by WordPress itself. Go to ‘settings’ -> ‘general’ and then tick the box that says ‘anyone can register’, and hit save.
21. What user level should I set users to?
    Regular users should only be set to ‘subscriber’ level. Use a level higher than this and they will be able to edit content settings (such as the number of votes) which would be a bad thing since they’d be able to cheat the system.
22. Can I take code from this theme and insert it into my own theme?
    If you buy a license to the theme then you would be welcome to use elements of this theme on your own site, however please keep in mind that the theme was not built with this functionality in mind and so this will likely not be as straight forward as you might imagine. Remember, Nominate is a theme, not a plugin!
23. How can I change the from and email address settings in emails to my users?
    By default emails sent from a WordPress blog will be sent from a person called ‘WordPress’. This is not always ideal. The easiest way to change it is to use a WordPress plugin. This one, called Send From, seems to work well, but I am sure there are others if you want to look for them.
24. I have changed the number of votes required to make a post featured but nothing has changed. Why?
    A post is only made featured when it is voted on, so if you change the value, then new posts will only become featured when they are voted on and their vote value is greater than or equal to the value set in the admin.

Tutorials

• Creating custom Site Styles for child themes
• Customising Nominate Article Fields : adding your own options to the post submission popup.

Custom Widgets

Nominate has a number of custom widgets that can be used to improve the display and functionality of your website. These are listed below.

• Incoming Posts – This widget displays the latest posts to be submitted to the site, ordered by date, irrespective of the amount of votes they get. It’s worth using this widget to make sure that new submissions get promoted to people.
• Submit Article Button – does exactly what the title says. Adds a button to your sidebar that allows people to submit new articles. If the user is not logged in then it will prompt them to login/ signup. The text on the button can be customised.

Custom Page Templates

In addition to widgets Nominate has some custom page templates tailor made for the theme. These can be set up by doing the following (full documentation here):

1. Adding a new page to the blog
2. In the Page Attributes box selecting the desired template
3. Publishing your shiny new page

In addition to the custom Elemental templates, the available templates are:

• Blog – because most of the posts on a site like this are going to be submitted articles there needed to be a template for listing blog posts/ news updates. This template was created to display those things.
• Incoming Posts – like the Incoming Posts Widget above, the Incoming Posts page template lists the newest submitted articles so that you can check out any posts you might have missed.
• Popular Posts – Unlike the homepage the popular posts widget lists posts ranked by total votes ever. This widget requires WordPress 3.0 and above.
• Top This Week – The top posts submitted in the last week, ranked by number of votes.
• Top This Month – The top posts submitted in the last month, ranked by number of votes.
• Top This Year – Same as the last two, but yearly

Error Codes

Error codes have been added to the theme to help with debugging problems that might occur. The error codes are displayed below. These codes are mostly used during content submission. Generally the errors will be caught by the javascript validation however if javascript is disabled for some reason you may see one of these appear instead.

• 4001 – Invalid Captcha submitted. This may mean that Captcha does not work on your server so try disabling it in the theme options.
• 4002 – post content is empty.
• 4003 – submitted article is too short.
• 4004 – user tried to submit a post to the blog category.
• 4005 – user tried to submit a post to an invalid category.
• 4006 – post was submitted without required url.