Note: if you run into issues or have questions that aren't answered here (or in the linked tutorials) then use the support ticket page in the Feast Plugin.
A number of settings in the Feast Plugin are simply optimizations that remove either useless or bloated features from WordPress, helping your site run quicker. You'll find these under the "recommended" section.
We've named theme-replacements "Modern X" to indicate that this the Modern setup. These do require some work to get configured properly for your site.
Once complete, you shouldn't have to worry about these during any future theme update - they're not affected by theme updates, or theme changes, and we'll be able to release small bug fixes automatically as needed via plugin updates.
The Feast Plugin gets implemented in two stages, in easy-to-manage steps:
- fixing the site involves enabling settings to remove outdated, worthless options WordPress has in place
- rebuilding the site involves replacing the site layout in individual stages, without having to reinstall the theme
Jump to:
Fix the site
We recommend everyone enable these settings:
- Remove comment author link
- Remove website field from comments form
- Remove comment date link
- Add Yoast breadcrumbs
- Enable previous+next on posts
- Remove entry-meta from posts
- Edit the body font size (18px)
- Enable: Process Shortcodes on "Custom HTML" widgets
- Enable: Remove WordPress "Smart Quotes"
- Enable Block Editor Styling
Image optimization
Enable the Modern Thumbnails by following the tutorial, remove the theme thumbnails, and run the regenerate thumbnails plugin on the images. This will be used for the Modern Homepage below.
You'll then need to update your "featured posts" widgets and archive grid settings, and set the thumbnail to one of the options from the Feast Plugin.
The most common thumbnail will be the feast-portrait-3x4-360x480.
Review the image optimization page for up-to-date best practices.
Mobile optimization
Category optimization
You can now assign images to categories for use in the Simple Category Index shortcode, which gets used on the homepage. We recommend starting with at least 4 so that you can embed it into the Modern Homepage next:
Homepage optimization
Set up the Modern Homepage, or start with the more basic Simple Modern Homepage tutorial.
This takes the homepage to a whole new level and requires some work on your part, deciding which post and categories to feature on the homepage, as well as writing unique content for each section.
Post optimization
The Advanced Jump To links is manually inserted into posts that you've updated to follow the Modern Guidelines for Headings.
This is not part of the setup process - it's something you'll do over time as you're naturally updating content.
BETA
Ignore anything in the BETA section. These are live features that are still in development (buggy!) and may change before final release.
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Modern setups
The initial goal of the Feast Plugin was to enhance the themes, but as WordPress has continued to evolve, it looks like we'll be replacing all of the theme functionality. With any luck, we'll have this complete by the end of the year and be able to release "version 5" of the themes that will consist exclusive of CSS.
Check out the 2020 roadmap post for more details.
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