AumCreate — the official guide

AumCreate is a WordPress theme. It renders a complete site on its own: a site header with your logo and menu, a blog index, archives, search results, single posts, pages, an author profile, and comments. It also recognises the Aumframe visual editor and steps aside wherever a design of yours takes over a URL.

1. How the theme renders a page

WordPress chooses a template file for every URL. AumCreate supplies one for each case the template hierarchy asks about, and those templates draw the page from the post content, the theme settings, and the colour palette.

Three things sit on top of that:

• AumCreate draws the site header and the footer. When Aumframe is active and a Site shell has been published, Aumframe's shell replaces both, and the theme emits nothing of its own in their place.
• When Aumframe is active and one of its designs matches the current URL, that design replaces the theme's template output for the URL entirely. The theme detects this through aumframe_is_taking_over() and skips the stylesheets and scripts its own templates would otherwise need.
• WooCommerce, AumNexCart, and AumReserva are each detected at runtime. When one is absent, the theme renders without it, and no part of the theme assumes any of them is installed.

The theme declares support for post-thumbnails, title-tag, automatic-feed-links, html5, responsive-embeds, align-wide, and, when WooCommerce is active, the product gallery features. It registers one menu location, Primary Menu.

2. Install

Install the theme and activate it. No further configuration is required to get a working site.

Two settings are worth setting before anything else, because the site header reads both:

1. Appearance → Menus — assign a menu to the Primary Menu location.
2. AumCreate → Theme Settings → General — upload a horizontal logo.

Without a logo the site header shows the site title instead. Without a menu assigned, the header shows the logo alone.

3. The theme settings screen

The theme adds one top-level menu item, AumCreate, with a single sub-item, Theme Settings. Everything the theme can be configured to do is on that one screen, divided into tabs:

Each tab saves independently. A field's description sits under the field.

4. Site identity and the site header

The site header is drawn from two settings and one WordPress menu location.

4.1 Logos

General Settings holds four logo slots: a horizontal logo and a square logo, each with a separate dark-mode variant. The site header uses the horizontal pair; the square pair is used where a wide logo does not fit.

Both variants are written into the page, and the one that matches the current palette is shown. Setting only the light variant is valid: that logo then appears in both palettes, which is the right choice for a mark that reads on either ground.

4.2 The Primary Menu

The header renders the menu assigned to the Primary Menu location, one level deep. Sub-menu items are not drawn in the site header.

When no menu is assigned to that location, the header renders the logo alone rather than falling back to a list of pages.

4.3 The footer

The theme's footer carries the site name and the current year. It is deliberately brief: a site that wants a designed footer gets one from an Aumframe Site shell, which replaces this.

5. Colours and the day/night palette

5.1 The two palettes

Color Settings holds one palette for light mode and one for dark mode. Each palette sets seven values: the brand colour, a secondary colour, the page background, the card background, the border colour, the muted text colour, and the scrollbar colour.

5.2 Computed text colours

Text colours are not among those seven. The theme computes the ink for each background from that background's own relative luminance, comparing the contrast against white and against near-black and taking whichever is higher. Changing a background therefore moves its text with it, and a brand colour dark enough to need white text gets white text without a second setting to keep in step.

5.3 Theme mode

Theme Mode in General Settings takes one of three values:

• Light Mode — the site always renders the light palette.
• Dark Mode — the site always renders the dark palette.
• Follow System — the palette follows the visitor's operating-system preference.

5.4 The front-end toggle

Front-end theme toggle adds a control that lets a visitor switch palettes for themselves. The setting is independent of Theme Mode: a site can default to dark and still offer the toggle, and a site can default to light and offer no toggle at all.

5.5 Custom colour tokens

Custom Global Colors accepts named colours, each with a light value and a dark value. Each one becomes a CSS custom property named after its slug, available to any custom CSS and to designs built in Aumframe.

6. Typography

Typography sits on the Layout Settings tab and sets three faces: a heading font, a body font, and a monospace font. Each can be a system stack or a Google font.

A fourth control, Fallback Stack, chooses what follows the selected family in the CSS font stack, so text still renders in a related shape while a web font loads or when it fails to.

Custom Font CSS accepts @font-face or @import rules for fonts hosted anywhere else. The theme emits the font @import before any other rule in its generated stylesheet, because a browser discards an @import that follows a rule and reports nothing when it does.

7. Layout, the floating controls, and the post sidebar

7.1 Content width and image shape

Content Width sets the maximum width of the content column. Image Orientation chooses between a 4:3 and a 3:4 aspect ratio for the cover images in listings, which is applied as a CSS aspect-ratio rather than by cropping the file.

7.2 The floating column

Three controls share one fixed column in the corner of the viewport: the back-to-top button, the day/night toggle, and the social sidebar. Back to Top Button and Social Sidebar each switch their own member on and off.

The column is attached to wp_footer, which both the theme's footer and Aumframe's canvas call, so its members appear on every page including the ones a design has taken over.

7.3 Social links

Social Links accepts any number of entries. Each entry carries an icon image, a background colour, a hover colour, and one of three behaviours: a link, a text popup shown on hover, or an image popup shown on hover. A QR code is the usual reason to choose the image popup.

7.4 Post sidebar modules

Post Sidebar Modules chooses which modules appear beside a single post, and in what order:

• Table of Contents — built from the headings in the post.
• Post Navigation (Prev / Next) — links to the adjacent posts.
• Related Posts — posts sharing a category or tag.
• Tags — the post's tags.

Each module has its own switch, and the list order is the render order.

8. Article templates

Every post carries an Article Template box in the editor sidebar with three options.

8.1 Text

The default. The post renders as a hero with the featured image behind the title, followed by the post content and the sidebar modules.

8.2 Gallery

The box gains an image picker. Images chosen there are rendered as a gallery above the post content, and the first of them becomes the post's cover wherever the post appears in a listing and no featured image is set.

8.3 Video

The box gains a video picker, and the post renders with the video in place of the hero image.

A video has no thumbnail of its own, so the box offers to make one: the browser loads the selected video, seeks to a frame, draws that frame to a canvas, and uploads the result as the post's featured image. The work happens in the browser, so no server-side video tooling is involved.

8.4 Covers in listings

Wherever a post appears in a listing, its cover is resolved in this order: the featured image, then the first gallery image, then the video poster, then the Default Post Thumbnail from General Settings. A post with none of those and no default set renders its card without an image rather than with a broken one.

9. Listings

Three templates render lists of posts, and all three use the same card: a cover image, the title, the date, the comment count, the view and interaction counts where those are available, and a trimmed excerpt.

9.1 The blog index

The posts page renders the cards in a grid that fits as many columns as the content width allows, down to one column on a phone.

9.2 Archives

A category, tag, date, or post-type archive adds three things the blog index does not have:

• A filter bar carrying a sort order (Newest, Recently updated, Most commented, Title A–Z, and Random), a direction, and a search field scoped to the archive.
• A sidebar carrying categories, recent posts, and a tag cloud, each in its own collapsible panel.
• Paging that does not reload the page: changing a filter or a page fetches the next set and replaces the cards in place.

9.3 Search results

Search results render the same cards beside the same sidebar. Search Types in General Settings chooses which content types are searched in addition to posts and pages.

10. The author profile page

Every author URL renders a profile page rather than a plain list of that author's posts. The page carries the author's avatar, biography, join date, location, and website, and a set of tabs:

• Recent Posts — the author's published posts.
• Liked Posts and Favorited Posts — what the author has marked, when the interaction features are available.
• Following and Followers — the author's connections to other users.
• Orders and Downloads — added when WooCommerce is active, and visible only to the account that owns the profile.

A logged-in author viewing their own profile can edit the biography, location, website, and birthday in place, and can change their avatar from the same screen.

11. Comments

Comments are threaded and load over AJAX: the first page arrives with the post, and the pager replaces the list in place instead of reloading the page. A reply form opens under the comment being replied to.

The comment list and the reply form read the post identifier from the data-post-id attribute on <body>, which the theme writes for every singular view.

12. Membership and social features

12.1 Registration and the login page

Anyone can register mirrors the WordPress setting of the same name and stays in step with it, so turning it on here turns it on in Settings → General as well.

The theme replaces the WordPress login screen with one that carries your logo and a carousel of images. Login Page Carousel holds those images, and Default Avatar sets the avatar for accounts that have uploaded none.

12.2 The global social switch

Global Social Features Switch controls views, likes, and favourites across the site: the counters on cards, the buttons on single posts, and the Liked and Favorited tabs on the author profile.

These counts are stored and served by Aumframe. With the switch on and Aumframe absent, the theme renders no counters at all rather than rows of zeros, because a zero that means "nothing is counting" is not a count.

13. Performance switches

The Performance tab holds eight switches, each over one piece of WordPress behaviour that costs bytes or requests. All eight are off by default, and each states what it removes:

• Disable Emoji Scripts — removes the emoji JavaScript and CSS, roughly 10 kB. Modern browsers render emoji without them.
• Disable Embed Scripts — removes the oEmbed host script that lets other sites embed yours.
• Limit Post Revisions — keeps at most five revisions per post.
• Reduce Heartbeat Frequency — slows the admin Heartbeat API from every 15 seconds to every 60.
• Lazy-Load Iframes — adds loading="lazy" to iframes.
• Disable XML-RPC — blocks the XML-RPC endpoint. Leave it on only if nothing you use connects over XML-RPC.
• Defer Non-Critical JS — adds defer to scripts that do not need to block parsing.
• Remove Version Query Strings — strips ?ver= from local CSS and JS URLs so caches that refuse to store URLs with query strings will store them.

14. WooCommerce

The WooCommerce tab appears only while WooCommerce is active, and holds seven settings: a content width for shop pages, the number of products per row at desktop, tablet, and phone widths, the number of products per page, the loading mode (Pagination or Load More Button), and the number of related products shown on a product page.

The theme also declares support for WooCommerce's product gallery zoom, lightbox, and slider, and attaches WooCommerce's own dark-control styles when the site renders in dark mode, so the block checkout's inputs follow the palette.

15. Plugins that extend the theme

The theme works with none of these installed. Each one adds capability rather than enabling the theme, and the theme never mentions any of them. There is no notice, no checklist, and no installer anywhere in the admin: a site running the theme alone is a finished site, so there is nothing for the theme to report as missing.

A template kit is the one thing that does have plugin requirements, because its content is built with them. Those requirements belong to the kit, and the kit manager that installs it is what reads them and says what a site is still missing.

• Aumframe — visual design: page layouts, a site header and footer drawn as a Site shell, and templates bound to content. It also owns the view, like, and favourite counts, and the template kit format a kit manager reads.
• AumViso — search engine metadata, structured data, and the FAQ, guide, and glossary content types.
• WooCommerce — a shop. The theme's WooCommerce tab and the Orders and Downloads tabs on the author profile appear with it.
• AumNexCart — a product catalogue with enquiries in place of a checkout.
• AumReserva — bookings.

Each is detected at runtime. The theme does not declare a dependency on any of them, and removing one returns the site to what the theme renders by itself.

There is one message the theme does show, and it is not a recommendation. When Aumframe is installed but older than the designs on the site need, the settings screen says which version is installed and which is required, because designs that already exist stop rendering until it is updated.

16. Settings reference

Every field on the theme settings screen, by tab, with the option key it writes. All of them live in one WordPress option, aumcreate_settings.

16.1 General Settings

16.2 Color Settings

16.3 Layout Settings

16.4 User Settings

16.5 Performance

16.6 WooCommerce

17. Troubleshooting

The site has no header. Assign a menu to the Primary Menu location under Appearance → Menus, and upload a horizontal logo under General Settings. With neither, the header renders the site title alone.

A page looks nothing like the theme's templates. An Aumframe design matches that URL and has replaced the template output. The design's rule decides which URLs it takes over.

Cards show no view, like, or favourite counts. Those counts come from Aumframe. With the plugin absent the theme renders no counters rather than zeros.

Dates and counters read in English on a translated site. The theme ships one translation, Simplified Chinese. WordPress does not fall back from one locale to another, so a site set to any other locale renders the theme's own strings in English.

A font chosen in Typography never appears. A Google font request can be slow or blocked depending on where the visitor is. The Fallback Stack decides what renders meanwhile, and Custom Font CSS accepts rules pointing at a font hosted anywhere else.