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Customize your Twenty Fourteen theme with Fourteen Extended

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How to Customize your Twenty Fourteen theme with Fourteen Extended

Do you like the Twenty Fourteen theme but would like your site centered on the screen instead of left aligned?

Would you like to control the content width or even make your posts full width?

And how about doing those modifications and quite a few more without touching a line of code, directly from the theme Customizer?

On my post Changing the colors of the Twenty Fourteen I showed you how to easily customize the colors of the Twenty Fourteen theme with the aid of a plugin. Today I´ll show you how to use another plugin to further customize this theme.

The name of this plugin is Fourteen Extended and is also free and available from the WordPress Plugin Directory.

According to its author, the purpose of this plugin is “to help you customize your Twenty Fourteen run website with ease, while still giving you much of the control“.

New options in your Theme Customizer

As soon as you install and activate this plugin, you will notice that several new options had been added to the Theme Customizer, organized in six new menu sections:

fourteen-extended-options

The first section “TwentyFourteen Starts Here” is really an introduction to the plugin with just one option: You can disable the CSS output of the plugin without deactivating it, while still remaining in the Customizer section adjusting other settings or debugging issues.

General Options

Some of the most interesting options are the ones that are grouped under the following section: “TwentyFourteen General Options”.

fourteen-extended-centered

Here you will find controls for the following options:

  • Center align your site layout.
  • Remove the featured content section.
  • Set the overall max width, with a complete width control from boxed down to 940 px to full screen up to 3200 px.
  • Float Primary Menu to the left, instead of the default right.
  • Remove the left sidebar. This option allows you to hide the left sidebar sitewide.
  • Set the overall content maximum width.
  • Set the overall content image maximum height.
  • Make the post featured images span to 100% width.
  • Remove the background image and color.

Content Options

The next section, “TwentyFourteen Content Options”, also includes a bunch of very interesting options that will help you customize the way your content is to be displayed, such as:

  • Hide the sidebar on the blog feed.
  • Show full width for single posts.
  • Show full width for archives, categories and tags pages.
  • Show full width for Search results pages.
  • Remove the white space above the content.
  • Set the top offset for posts with no featured image.
  • Remove the content separator.
  • Change the opacity of the content separator line.
  • Set the padding to control the space between the featured image and the content.
  • Set the content maximum width.
  • Select a category for the block feed.
  • Switch blog feed to show excerpts, including Archives, Categories, Tags, Author and Search Pages.
  • Set the home excerpt length.
  • Show/Hide Featured Posts in blog feed.
  • Remove the top border of widget titles.

FitVids Options

FitVids is a lightweight, easy-to-use jQuery plugin for fluid width video embeds.

Fourteen Extended allows you to include this script without the need for an additional plugin, thus making your embedded videos truly responsive.

The plugin also gives you a couple of options for the integration of FitVids:

  • Set selector (default is .post)
  • Set custom selector (optional) for other areas like .sidebar or a custom section.

 

fourteen-extended-fitvids

Mobile Options

The available options in this section allow you to:

  • Show full content on the home page on mobile devices, instead of a list view.
  • Set the featured content mobile layout view. For instance, you can set the desktop view to grid and the mobile view to slider.

Other Options

The last section of options added by this plugin, “TwentyFourteen Optional Scripts”, allow you to load a couple of  JavaScript scripts (Selectivizr.js and Respond.js) in case you need them, i.e for IE8 support.

Conclusion

Fourteen Extended is a free plugin that will fit the needs of those who want to customize the Twenty Fourteen theme only to some extent (for example centering the site layout and controlling the content width), without having to deal with code and without the need to develop a child theme. This plugin will be extremely helpful making things very easy for those users, provided of course that the customization options needed are matched by some of the various options offered by the plugin.

Source: http://www.wpthemedetector.com/customize-twenty-fourteen-theme-with-fourteen-extended/