Your WordPress Site - Overview
Overview Video on managing your site
Your WordPress site is fully integrated with your account. You can generate and sync your product pages automatically in your WordPress website by clicking a button. Also whenever a product is added, removed, or updated in our software, it is automatically updated on your website.
The way WordPress sync works is that we queue all the jobs we have to do for everyone's sites. Then we process those jobs every so often. So some patience is required. If after an hour and you are sure that your browser is not caching (not getting the latest), then you can ask us to investigate.
Example site: https://www.demorentals.com
We will provide support regarding our integration with WordPress, but once your site has been handed off to it is your responsibility to maintain, update, and further customize it. WordPress is a popular website platform and there are many resources available online to learn basic WordPress usage.
How to login
Editing your homepage
Customizing your site information
Understanding site checkout settings
Working with menus
How to edit your menu styling
Understanding your site's plugins
Editing IO generated pages
Understanding the IO shortcode system
Links to more documentation and tutorials:
WordPress Documentation: https://codex.wordpress.org/
WordPress Beginner's Tutorial: https://www.wpbeginner.com/start-here/
Elementor Documentation: https://docs.elementor.com/
Getting Started - Logging In
1. When your site is ready you will receive an email from us letting you know. Your login for your site is available in your IO account under Settings -> WordPress.
2. Go to your site, add /wp-admin to the end of the URL and then you can login to manage it.
Please note that working with your site requires at least a basic knowledge of WordPress and the web. It is strongly recommended that you take a short tutorial like this one before going further with your site if you are not currently comfortable with these.
First Steps and Overview
When you first login to your site it will already be fully integrated with your IO account, our plugin will be installed and integrated, your products, categories, and images will already be loaded to the site, and any contact info you provided (such as email, phone, and social media) will already be synced as well (NOTE- locations and info included depends on theme). However, it is useful to understand where to find and change these in case you would like to modify or change these values in the future. This guide will cover that and more.
Your site will also come loaded with the full suite of Elementor site building tools. This means that after you take ownership of your site you are free to use these tools to customize and grow your site in an infinite number of ways. This guide will help to get you started with the basics of site management and customization, but it is suggested that you review Elementor's documentation here if you plan on using these tools.
Customizing Your Site
The most common elements you will likely want to change or modify at some point is your logo, business name, business description, contact info, and social media links. Our themes make managing these easy by grouping them all in one place for you to edit. To edit these simply follow the following steps:
- Login to your site using the credentials you created from your Welcome email.
- For logo or business name and description edits, navigate to Appearance -> Customize -> Site Identity.
- For contact info and social media link edits, navigate to Appearance -> Customize -> Header Settings.
- Change or modify the menu fields as needed.
- Click the Publish button.
Managing Your Site's Menus
Understanding how WordPress menus work is extremely important, as this is the one area where WordPress does not allow us to automate your site. As such, when you make significant changes to your inventory these changes might not be automatically reflected within your menus. In these cases you will need to manually edit and update your menu to show these changes. To access and edit your menu following these steps:
- From your site's dashboard click Appearance -> Menus.
- Your site may have more than one menu, make sure you are on the one you wish to edit. This can be checked by scrolling to the bottom of the page and looking for the section titled Display Location. If blank your site has only one menu and you do not need to worry about it's location.
- Delete any menu items that are highlighted in red. These mean something has changed and their links are invalid.
- Find the new category or product you need to add in the pages available to the left, click it, and choose Add to Menu.
- You can also add custom URLs if need be using the Custom Links option.
- Drag and drop your new menu items in the order you wish them to appear. Please note that indenting an item will make it become a sub-menu of the item above it.
- Save your new menu.
Be aware that menus can be become complicated quickly, and that adding too many items to your menu can quickly cause it to become messy and/or unreadable. If you are comfortable you can also use the built in Elementor page building tools to modify the styling of your menu to help its readability if you modify it. Please refer to both WordPress' and Elementor's documentation for further info.
Customizing Your Home and Site Pages
Home page edits must be done using Elementor. If you are not comfortable with Elementor, please review it's documentation before proceeding. Rest assured however that making edits is fairly intuitive and easy, and can be learning quickly by just about anyone. The biggest thing to keep in mind is that while your site was built in and is edited with Elementor, due to various technical restrictions, you cannot use Elementor to edit any category or product pages on your site. These require a different process to modify and will be covered below. Here is complete breakdown of what pages can be edited in Elementor vs. through WordPress and IO:
IO Essentials Package Websites
Home page
Custom pages
Header and Footer
Archive pages
IO Premium Package Websites
Everything from above
Specials page
About Us page
F.A.Q. page
Customization and the IO Plugin
Our plugin installed on your site is responsible for integrating your site and IO account. As such, you should exercise caution when making changes to plugin related parts of your site. However, it is important to understand how the integration works and that you can use the plugin tools to customize the category and product pages that IO generates for you.
How It Works
If you have the Sync option set to Auto, then anytime you add or modify a product or category in our software, it will automatically update the pages on WordPress. It only updates the text in the [sc......] part of the page though, so anything you've changed outside of that will remain.
The Sync All arrow on the WP settings page will create or update all the WP pages. If you've really messed up a page, you'll need to delete it in WordPress, then empty the trash. That way when you click the Sync All button it will re-create the page instead of pulling it from the trash and updating it.
Customizing Category and Product Pages
Our software will generate product and category pages in WordPress under Pages. Each page uses the shortcodes setup above as page templates. If you'd like to restore the default shortcode you can rename or delete your shortcodes then de-activate and re-activate the InflatableOffice plug-in.
Your category pages have a built in Featured Product feature. To change this product follow the following steps:
- Login to your account in our software (not your website).
- Choose the Settings tab
- Click Categories under the Rentals group of settings.
- Click the set category order link.
- Use the buttons on this page to first order your categories how you'd like them, then click Save Order.
- Do the same with your products in each category.
- Whatever product you place on top will be your Featured Product.
Modify individual Product/Category Pages
In WordPress, you can change individual product pages anywhere outside of the [sc:io ….] sections of code. Later when our software updates that product page it will only overwrite the [sc:io …] section of code and will leave the rest as-is.
Change all Product/Category Pages
If you want to change the layout of all the pages you can go to InflatableOffice ->Shortcoder (in WordPress). Click the name of the code at the bottom, such as io_rental, to change the template controlling all the product pages.
Be sure you are on the text tab before editing.
Change the Menu Structure
If you want to change the menu structure or order, go to Appearance -> Menus, and Create a Menu. Check only the Header Menu option, and on the left check all the main categories and click “add to Menu.
403 errors
These errors mean something is blocking us from creating or updating the pages. Wordfence plug-in or some other similar firewall plugin could be causing this. Go to Wordfence -> Options -> Whitelist IPs and add the following under Other Options, then hit Save.
208.64.38.12
209.250.2.66
209.250.2.70
404 errors
This means the website wasn't found. It can be caused by recent changes to a website and you may just need to wait a little longer. Another potential solution is to de-activate the IO plugin and then re-activate it. I've also seen that if you change the WordPress -> Settings -> Permalink configuration to something different, save, then switch back it solve issues before. For additional help, please watch this video:
Available Fields from Rentals
To use a field, use the following format %%variable_name%%.
- page="Demo+Rentals+LLC"
- rental_name="Hot Dog Steamer"
- name_encoded="Hot+Dog+Steamer"
- description="Hot Dog Steamer"
- image="https://www.inflatableoffice.com/users/images/885f...
- image_big="https://www.inflatableoffice.com/users/demo/images...
- image2=""
- image_big2=""
- image3=""
- image_big3=""
- image4=""
- image_big4=""
- electric="1.00"
- quantity="1"
- dimensions=""
- footprint=""
- weight="25"
- rating_img="https://rental.software/images/0star.png"...
- rating_txt=" Not Yet Rated"
- staff="0"
- volunteer="0"
- notes="Normally private rental notes that we want to use on site." (You must request this field be turned on for your account)
Site Backups and Restorations
Your site is automatically backed up for 5 days. Just ask us if you need it restored. Also changes made to pages are stored in WordPress or Elementor, so if you just need to undo a page it can be done in the WordPress page editor.
Additional Topics
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