New to Publii–a few questions
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February 18, 2023 at 8:40 am #9359
[anonymous]
Hi,
I am coming from a WordPress background, although I have not used it recently. I am really confused with Publii. I have a friend who recommended Publii, and he waxes poetically about how mind-blowingly, astoundingly, earth-shatteringly simple it is….Yet, I am stuck.
I have been trying out the Simple Theme (2.5.0.0.) and I have a few questions:
1. I cannot get more than one menu item. I have created three–two with submenus and content–but it will only let me assign one as a main menu item. For the others, the only option is Unassigned. I have read the documentation and looked at all the options under Site Settings and Theme. I am stuck at this step. I want at least five or six menu items, most with sub-menus. Will Simple do this? Is there some reason I cannot get more than one menu item and how can I modify this so that I can have five or six?
2. What are the optimum pixel dimensions for the image on the main page (not even sure what to call this)? What is the aspect ratio?
3. What is the optimum page width?
4. Aside from the Publii website, are there any good tutorials, YouTube videos or other resources to help a beginner?
Thanks for any help!
February 21, 2023 at 11:21 am #9372[anonymous]
@1010
Responding to your points:
1. Remember, the Simple theme is designed ‘out of the box’ to have one main menu: the top one. The idea of course is to ‘keep things simple’. If scroll down any of the pages, and then start to scroll back up, the top main menu then displays — so is always easily accessible. If we check out the Simple theme demo at: https://demo.getpublii.eu/themes/simple/ that seems to work best with four top-level menu items plus the Home button and optionally the site Search button. If you wanted to add more, you could experiment and test. And of course, your top-level menu items can have submenus, as shown in the demo above under the ‘Pages’ top-level menu item.
If you wanted to add another menu or additional menus — say one in or near the footer, to get it match in, you might need to modify the theme, and then you would probably want to make sure your theme changes didn’t get overwritten when a new theme version becomes available. You could check the various Help articles at https://getpublii.com/docs/ and if necessary at: https://getpublii.com/dev/ But if you wanted to minimise any tech changes needed, the quick-fix option is to choose a theme that already has additional menus functionality built in from https://marketplace.getpublii.com/themes/. Though remember, adding additional menus might affect your SEO scores is not implemented correctly.
2. On the home page and each main page, the source image size in the demo is 1792 pixels x 348 pixels — then, Publii optimises and auto-generates any other smaller images that may be required. For Aspect Ratio, using that image size, if we use the calculator at: https://aspectratiocalculator.com the Aspect Ratio is 448 : 87.
3. The Simple theme default setting uses 100% as the page width, and in the Theme > Theme Settings > Custom Settings > Layout > Page width = 42rem. Those values seem to work well, though you can experiment if you want.
4. In addition to the GetPublii.com resources, you could try searching in Search engines for ‘Publii tutorials’. Also, some great help can be found at: https://cv.domagic.site . Plus, there are probably more too. Maybe some other users in the forum can suggest more.
February 26, 2023 at 11:27 pm #9428[anonymous]
Welcome 1010! Besides the domagic site that itip suggested, I also recommend:
SimonPadbury’s Publii-Bootstrap-Starter Tutorials: https://github.com/SimonPadbury/Publii-Bootstrap-Starter/tree/master/TUTORIALS. There’s even a page on menus: https://github.com/SimonPadbury/Publii-Bootstrap-Starter/blob/master/TUTORIALS/04-setting-up-a-bootstrap-navbar.md
Reading through Publii’s Dev Docs from start to finish: https://getpublii.com/dev/. They will really help you get a hang of the technical parts of Publii. The user docs, on the other hand, are better for understanding everything inside the GUI (ie: how to create a post, add authors, etc.).
This video series also helped me, although it might be a bit outdated: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4Fb33QfSHwmYxxr08vBgUtc-1jZpSkW5