After last week’s post with the Valentine’s Day menu of hugely loveable features in Catalyst Theme to feast on, this week I’m taking a look at just one feature again as usual.
It’s a small feature, but a useful one, and one that highlights the attention to detail and flexibility that the Catalyst Theme developers always strive to include throughout the theme.
Content Meta Options
These appear above and below your posts and contain the details of who the author is, the date of posting, the post category and tags etc etc.
Catalyst Theme allows you to switch each item on and off separately and to define the wording around them in the Catalyst Core Options > Content Meta Options.
And of course you can style them as you wish using the options in Dynamik Child Theme as usual.
The Content Meta options appear in two locations on a post. These are the Byline which is just underneath the heading of the post, and at the bottom of the Post after all your content.
Content Meta Options Areas on a Post
The Post Byline Meta Display Options
In the above example, all of the Post Byline Meta Display options have been included, namely:
- Who wrote the post
- The date of posting
- The number of comments
- An “Edit” link to open and edit the particular post within WP Admin for the site
All of these options are selected/deselected in the Catalyst Core > Content > Content Meta Options seen here :
Catalyst – Post Byline Meta Display Options
Who wrote the post is displayed as the user nickname of the post’s author (set in WordPress Users menu)
The date is taken from the time of the Post’s publication (and can be edited in WordPress if desired)
The number of comments made so far on the Post will be displayed after the date.
The “Edit” link is only shown (to you) if you are logged in to WP Admin already. You can switch this off if you prefer so that you only see what a normal visitor would see.
The Catalyst options shown above allow you to define the text that appears before the Author’s name and the publication date to suit your requirements.
Additionally, if you have selected the option to show the number of comments made on posts you may not wish new comments to show as having 0 comments so far. To avoid this, and to encourage the first to be made, Catalyst provides a “Zero Comment Text” option where you can enter your own text to be displayed instead.
There is also an option here to include a separator character of your choice before the Comments data.
The Post Bottom Meta Display Options
In the example Post shown above, all of the Post Bottom Meta Display options have also been included, which are:
- Categories
- Tags
- Author Info
As with the Byline Meta Options, each of these are selected/deselected in the Catalyst Core > Content > Content Meta Options as seen below:
Catalyst – Post Bottom Meta Display Options
This will display the Categories and Tags attributed to the post. Again the texts that precede these items (if selected) can be defined here, including a separator character before the Tags data, as well as the separator between multiple categories and/or tags.
If selected, Author Info will include the Author’s Bio box which displays information from the User’s Profile as set in the WordPress Users menu. Following this information, the Post Bottom Meta Options shown above allow the text for the link to that user’s author archive page to be set as required.
Another “Edit” link to open and edit the particular post within WP Admin is also available in this area.
Styling the Content Meta Options
Finally, whatever the Meta Options you choose to display can be styled using the appropriate settings in the Dynamik Child Theme.
The Post Meta fonts and links can be set within the Dynamik Child Theme > Content settings, allowing you to style the font type, size and colours etc as desired and the Author Info Box can be styled using the settings in the Dynamik > Author settings.
The ability to select and customize the Content Meta Options allows you full control over what is displayed here, and how.
This can typically be very useful where you have ‘evergreen’ content and do not wish to include the publication date for example.
Although this is a relatively minor feature of Catalyst Theme compared to others maybe, it’s another example of how Catalyst enables you to implement exactly what you want!
Have fun.
David.
David Pritchard is the author of the Catalyst Theme Cheat Sheet – the 250+ page guide that helps users make the most of Catalyst Theme. Licenced Catalyst Theme users can get their FREE copy in the downloads section of the Catalyst Theme forum.
David also has a site that with guides to using Catalyst Theme, WordPress, SEO, internet marketing techniques and other topics at http://www.FastStepInternetMarketing.com
Suggestion: Set it up so that I can choose from all the meta options, for either the area above or below the post. While you have divided the meta up into what most would like in the top and like in the bottom, it’s not going to always be the case. It would be great if you just had an input field for both the top area and the bottom area, and we choose to populate it with whatever meta we want, by use of shortcodes (e.g. by [author] on [date]. I believe Headway does it this way.
This will provide complete flexibility for the Catalyst designer.
Hey Mark,
Thanks for the feedback. We’ll certainly consider adding that feature in the future as I can certainly see the benefits. Either way we’ll add it to our “list”.
Eric