Note: we highly recommend setting up the Modern Homepage using the Feast Plugin instead. The theme homepages have a number of issues as outlined here.
Cook'd Pro Classic uses a widgetized home page template to accomplish the flexible layout that shows recent and/or featured posts in full-width or grid format. The widget used to create these sections of posts is built in to the theme, so there's no need for an additional plugin.
The 3 areas on homepage are:
- "Homepage: Top" for 3 featured images
- "Homepage: Accessory" for a call-to-action (eg. newsletter) and more featured posts (optionally: banner)
- "Homepage: Bottom" for more featured posts with a sidebar
The 3 areas are setup to display recent and featured posts in different ways using the "Cook'd Pro: Featured Posts" widget. You will drag and drop a Cook'd Pro Featured Posts widget to one of these widget areas and then configure them as you wish. These screenshots show how I have chosen to set things up for the demo site:
Homepage: 3 Featured Top
Note: the "Cookd Vertical" thumbnail size is extremely large and requires that you've uploaded images larger than 1477px. This is no longer a best practice as we now recommend uploading featured images at 1200x1200px.
Note #2: You should be displaying either 2 or 4 images on desktop, not 3. This is because all themes now display featured images as half-width on mobile, and this requires either 2 or 4 posts for proper display.
We highly recommend converting to the Modern Homepage instead of using this theme's homepage.
Also: Add an h1 to your homepage
Homepage: Accessory Top
This is formerly the "Home Middle" section.
You'll also see the Genesis eNews Extended widget in the "Homepage: Accessory" widget area. The Genesis eNews Extended widget is used to set up your newsletter opt-in. This plugin is designed to be used with a newsletter service such as Mailchimp, Aweber, Mailpoet, or any of the other popular newsletter services.
You can Google "Genesis eNews Extended + whatever service you choose" and there are bound to be some tutorials and videos to guide you in getting that set up. Here's the plugin info page where you can read about installation and get support: https://wordpress.org/plugins/genesis-enews-extended/
You can also use the "Custom HTML" widget to include full-width banners and ads.
Homepage: Bottom
Using Shortcodes in the Post Info
is for the limited categories.
You may also wish to add in other shortcodes in the post info field. A full list of valid shortcodes can be found here. Note: Because the theme was styled to include all of the shortcodes custom code may be necessary to get them looking good.
Why isn't there any pagination?
Because the home page is so flexible, pagination would not work well. We would need to limit the flexibility of the home page in order to add that feature and we chose to stick with flexibility.
Instead, your readers should still be able to navigate your site with a well established menu and internal linking.
If you must have pagination, one option to get around this is to add a text link at the bottom of your home page that goes to your blog. Something like this should work well:
<div align="right"> <a href="https://yoursite.com/blog">See More →</a> </div>