If you have successfully installed Lyrics Organizer theme – as described in post Theme Installation, now you need just a few setup steps to make it fully functional.

1. Activation

First go to the admin panel and choose Appearance > Themes from the side menu. You will see that you have three new themes, i.e. three variations of Lyrics Organizer: Dark, Light and Mini. Activate the Dark theme. When you finish all the settings, you can always get back here and change theme variation.

2. Site Title

Go to the Settings > General in admin panel menu. Here you can change the site title and subtitle (tagline). Save changes and go to site view to see what it looks like:

3. Sidebar Widgets

Initially, you have some widgets which are not needed for this theme. Get back to the admin panel and click on Appearance > Widgets in the side menu. In this theme you have two sidebar columns, left and right. From Available Widgets panel drag Categories widget and put it in the Left Sidebar, and drag Tag Cloud widget to the Right Sidebar. These two widgets will be your main organization and navigation tools, therefore you should make a plan how to organize your lyrics in categories, and which keywords will be used in tag cloud. Check my demo presentation site and see that my songs are organized by style, and that I am using artist’s names and tempo values as tags. When using this theme on live performances, this way of organization will help you in planning song sets, and give you nice song lists with smooth flow from one song to the next.

4. Installing Plugins

This theme requires two plugins – CQS and wp-subtitle to work properly. The third plugin – Fancybox is optional – you can install it if you plan to use big images in your lyrics project. All the plugins are already copied – installed in your theme (chapter B.2 of this tutorial), and now you have to activate them and set options.

1. CQS (custom-query-string-reloaded) – posts in standard WordPress themes are always ordered by date/time of post creating. In this project we want all our song lists to be ordered by Song Title, and this plugin will help us achieve that goal. In admin panel go to the Plugins, locate Custom Query String Reloaded and activate it. Now, in WP admin panel find Settings > CQS (at the bottom of side menu). In this dialog you will define conditions for listing your posts (songs), and for this purpose you will need just the top – query line of dropdown lists dialog. First select is_archive (or just leave it if it’s already selected) from the Condition column, then in column Show write how menu posts (songs) do you want to be displayed on one page: 50, 100 or use -1 to show all posts (songs). Finally, in column named Order By select title and ASC, which means that your songs will be ordered by Song Title ascending (from A to Z). Use the same settings for defining next two conditions: is_category and is_search. Now you have three defined conditions for correct displaying of all song lists in your project:
   
2. WP Subtitle – go to the Plugins section in admin panel and activate this plugin. When you add or edit posts (i.e. songs) a new field appears in the admin panel and you can use it to add brief information about the author, artist, song key, or tempo. There are no settings for this plugin.
3. FancyBox is a kind of “lightbox” tool for displaying images, html content, and multi-media. You can use it in this project for displaying big images of chords, music sheet, tablatures, and other pictures. You activate it from Plugins section in admin panel. It will automatically open all images that are used in link tags. Settings for this plugin are located in the Settings > Fancybox for WP menu (at the bottom of side menu), and you can experiment here with various display, animations, and other options.

5. Creating Homepage

This theme is very simple and clean, so we will make the homepage in the same style – just a nice frontpage image with a title. Inside the folder uplads of the downloaded material for this theme, you will find the image singers_01.jpg that will be just fine for this purpose. First upload this image to your WP project media library. In admin panel go to Media > Add New and click Select Files. Find image singers_01.jpg click open, and save it in media library. Now navigate to Pages > Add New to create a home page. Create new page (Pages > Add New), give it a title – Lyrics Book (it is just for the reference and won’t be shown on your page). In text edit field choose HTML view (instead of Visual view). Click on Add an Image icon on top of this editor, then in this dialog choose Media Library from the top tab menu, choose your image and click Show. In the picture dialog delete Link URL (you don’t need any link from this image), set alignment – Center and size – Full Size, and click Insert into Post button. Publish your new page. To set it as homepage navigate to Settings > Reading in the admin panel side menu, choose A Static page and for frontpage select Lyrics Book page that you have just created. Save changes and go to your site view to see how your front-page looks.

You can add a simple line on top and bottom of an image by adding the following code in your home page editor. Check that your editor is in HTML mode, the first line goes before the image tag, and the second after the image tag.
<div style="margin: -28px 5px 34px; width: 540px;"></div>
<div style="margin: 20px 5px 30px; width: 540px;"></div>
Of course, you can set any other image you like for the home page. Just take care that the available width of main content block is 550px. Later, when you create your lyrics database, you can add more elements to your homepage, for example some text, your favorite song lists, or internal – external links.