This guide will walk you through the common features in a CultivateWP theme.
Table of Contents
Affiliate Disclosure
Your theme allows you to automatically display an affiliate disclosure at the top of all posts.
In the backend of your site, go to Site Options in the left menu and find the Affiliate Disclosure section. Type in the text you’d like to display and link to your full affiliate disclosure.
Block Areas
Your theme uses Block Areas to bring the block editor to globally editable content areas, like your Sidebar and After Post area.
In the backend of your site, go to Appearance > Block Areas to edit your current block areas.
Click on a block area to edit it. Here’s an example of editing the Sidebar block area:
Your theme also supports additional block areas, like Before First Image and Before Recipe Card, which are useful for inserting blocks or content automatically in all posts. From the Appearance > Block Areas page, click “Add New” , give it a title and content, then in the right sidebar use the “Block Area” dropdown to assign this to one of the available block areas.
Cultivate Category Pages
Cultivate Category Pages allows you to bring the block editor to the top of your category pages. You can curate the user experience to feature your most popular or seasonal content, highlight subcategories, include an email signup, and more.
When viewing a category page, click “Add Category Page” in the admin bar at the top (next to Edit Category) to create a new Cultivate Category Page. Give your page a title, then add any content you’d like to appear at the top of your category, then publish the page.
When viewing a category that already has a Cultivate Category Page, you can click “Edit Category Page” in the admin bar to hop back into the block editor to customize this content.
Full Width Color Sections
You can use the Group block to add a background color to a section of your page, and set it to be full width. Here’s a video showing how:
Social Links
Your theme includes a “Social Links” block for linking to Instagram, YouTube, and other social services. This block can be inserted directly in the post content, or it might come pre-filled in some blocks (ex: the About block). It might also be pre-built into your site header and/or site footer.
The social links can be managed inside Yoast SEO > Settings > Site Representation > Other Profiles. We have support for most social services, but if you add a URL and it does not appear in the social links block, send us an email and we’ll update the block to support that specific service.
Top Hat
The Top Hat is an editable content area that appears above a site header, and is typically used as a call to action encouraging the reader to sign up for email updates, purchase a cookbook, sign up as a member, or any other action.
In the backend of your site, go to Site Options in the left menu and find the Top Hat section. Type in the text you’d like to display and link it to your desired location.
There’s also an optional image field to display a small image next to the text (often a cookbook cover).
You can also enable social links to be included, in which case on desktop the top hat text will display on the left side and the social links on the right.
As Seen In block
The As Seen In block lets you highlight logos of publications in which you’ve been featured. It’s typically added to the Before Footer block area so that it appears above the footer on all pages of the site.
Browse our As Seen In Logo collection and download the logos of any publications you’d like to feature. Add the As Seen in block to your site, then customize the title and logos in the right sidebar.
You can also create your own. We recommend making a 300×144 PNG or JPG with a black-and-white version of the logo centered inside it. This will ensure it matches all the other logos. The theme will style the logos – the theme in the screenshot below is lowering the opacity of the logos when displayed, but you’ll see in the sidebar the original logos are all black.
Post Listing Block
The Post Listing block enables you to dynamically display specific posts across your site. It’s one of the tools you’ll use the most to build your homepage and your Cultivate Category Pages.
After adding the block, customize the title. This is a fully editable block area so you can add introductory text or anything else you’d like in this title section.
In the settings for this block, you can choose from a number of different layout options. Because we take a “mobile first” design approach, some of these layouts appear differently on mobile screens. It’s a good idea to preview what your site will look like on a mobile device.
For instance, the “4up Full” and “4up Grid” layouts both show 4 columns on desktop. The “4up Full” layout will show one column of full width posts on mobile, while the “4up Grid” will show two columns on mobile.
By default, the Post Listing block shows your most recent posts. But you can also choose to display your most popular posts. If you’re adding this block to a single post or a block area that appears on single posts (ex: After Post, Sidebar), you can choose to show related posts from the current post’s category, either sorted by most recent or most popular.
You can also select “Manual” to manually select exactly which posts will appear and in what order.
You can also limit the posts to one or more specific categories. If you select multiple categories, it will only return posts in both of those categories.
Finally, you can customize the Read More text and URL. If you’re filtering posts by a specific category, you could set the Read More URL to go to the category page. If you’re filtering by multiple categories (ex: “Thanksgiving” and “Appetizers”), you might want to link to a roundup post that shows more of these posts.
Quick Links block
The Quick Links block lets you highlight categories or other content on your landing pages as circle or square image links.
When set to Flex they will all fit on one row, and get smaller as you add more. When set to Grid they will display in a fixed grid and can take up multiple rows, which is useful for listing categories on your Recipe Index page.
When used to display categories, you’ll select the category and it will automatically use the category’s name, URL, and image. When editing a category you can customize the category image and the “Short Title” (an optional shorter title for this category, used in the Quick Links block).
When set to “Manual”, you can manually specify a title, image, and URL. This can be used to link to a roundup post, a page, or anything else.
Seasonal Content Block
This block lets you set a start and end date for when the content inside of it will be visible, most often used for seasonal content in the sidebar or the homepage. Watch the video demonstration here.
Save Recipe Block
The “Save Recipe” block lets readers easily save the recipe by emailing them a link to it. It can also subscribe them to your email newsletter.
If you’d like to manually control where it appears, you can insert the “Save Recipe” block directly into a post while you’re writing or editing it.
If you’d like this block to appear in every post, you can add it to a Block Area like “Before Recipe Card” or “After First Image”.
Use your email marketing service for the Save Recipe email
By default, we use WPForms to send the “Here’s your saved recipe” email. We customize the form design using your brand colors, and you can customize the text of the email. With this solution you’ll need SMTP to ensure email deliverability.
Our form is saving the current Post Title and Post Permalink as a hidden field, so if your email marketing service supports custom fields (ex: ConvertKit, MailChimp), you could create custom fields for the title & permalink and build the “Save Recipe” form directly inside your email marketing service. We can then remove the WPForms email and SMTP will not need to be set up.
This gives you the most flexibility in designing the email your users receive, but requires you to set it up inside your email marketing service. Here’s a guide on setting up the Save Recipe block with ConvertKit.
The information below only applies if you are using the WPForms email. You can ignore the following information if your Save Recipe email comes your email marketing service.
Ensure deliverability with SMTP
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is a way to send emails from your WordPress website without them being seen as spoof emails. This can improve the deliverability rate of your emails and ensure they don’t end up in spam folders.
If you’re hosted with BigScoots or Agathon, send them a support request asking them to set up SMTP on your site.
Most other hosts do not include SMTP email as part of their service offering, so we recommend:
- Sign up for an SMTP service. Here are a few options:
- Purchase WP Mail SMTP Pro for $49 which includes White Glove Setup
- Send a support request to WP Mail SMTP requesting a White Glove Setup, and provide them with your SendLayer login and the login for your domain registrar (ex: Godaddy or Namecheap). They’ll set up SMTP on your domain.
Customize the email users receive
We’ll set up the email for you, but if you’d like to customize the text in the email, go to WPForms, select the “Save Recipe” form, then go to Settings > Notifications. You can update the “Email Subject Line” and “Email Message”, but keep the smart tags in place. {page_title} is used in the Subject Line to show the recipe’s title, and {field_id="2"} is used in the Email Message to display the recipe URL.
