After installing and setting up the theme it is time to build up your lyrics database. In this post you will find instructions on how to add and update lyrics posts, and how to use advanced editing techniques this theme provides.

A. Basic Lyrics Editing

If you are familiar with WordPress, you will find out that this theme is using completely standard administration interface. Just make sure that one post is only one song and you can start adding or updating your lyrics database. Post title is a song title, post text is song lyrics; also, pick a category (categories) for your song, add keywords, and that’s it. The only new field in administration panel is Subtitle which you can use for adding some interesting song information.

If you’re brand new to WordPress, take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with admin panel layout. Notice that you can navigate to various administration panels by choosing the menu items in the left side main navigation panel. For simple adding or editing songs in your database you will need just the first menu block – Posts which has sub items Posts, Add New, Categories and Post Tags. You will use Posts menu for updating existing song (post) in your database, Add New to add a new song, Categories and Post Tags to define categories and keywords for your song. You should make up the way you are going to categorize songs in the database, so you can prepare some categories before entering song lyrics. Later you can make changes of your category list either from the menu Categories, or you can do it on the fly when you add/edit song lyrics in Post Edit panel. The same rule should be applied for building Tags list, you can edit them from Post Tags panel, or when you add/edit song lyrics in Post Edit panel. Here is the scheme that will help you understand Post Edit panel and song parts:

Note that you have The Edit button link at the bottom of your song. This button is visible only when you are already logged in the administration panel, and for that session it will be visible for all your songs!

B. Advanced Lyrics Editing

1. Emphasizing Text

If you like to emphasize a part of lyrics text, like song chorus, simply select those lines in text editor and apply block-quote style formatting.

2. Insert chords with lyrics

If you’d like to have chords together with lyrics for some song, you should first prepare your file in some text editor, and make the proper position of chord signs related to the lyrics lines below. For this editing use Arial font because this font is used on your site for lyrics text, and this way you will keep the proper positioning of chords and lyrics text. OK, now open your post edit panel, switch this time to Visual mode in this editor, copy/paste the text with chords that you’ve just prepared. Now, to keep chords positioned, you need to apply Preformatted format to the chord lines. First click the last button in format buttons line to show the additional format buttons in the second line (if they are not visible), then select the chord line in the text and apply Preformatted format. You should repeat this formatting for all chord lines. See the results in this example on demo site.

3. Direct Link

If you want to create direct link from one song text to another song (or any other location), just insert link text, select it and insert link to desired location (use Permalink for that page). Finally, you can apply code style to this text that will add a little link icon in front of the text. This feature is useful for making a short list of songs that you always sing together or a few songs that make a medley, or any time you like to make direct link from one song to another. Check this example on my demo site.

4. Insert Image

You can insert images in your lyrics post using standard wordpress procedure: upload the image you want to your Media Library, then use Add an Image button in post editor to insert the image to a desired location. You can set left, right or central image alignment. Central aligned images should not be wider than 550px, for this is the main content block width. You can use the image as a link object that connect all songs that share same tag, category or some group, like in this example.

5. Insert Large Image

You might find useful to have some scanned images of sheet music, chords or tablature for your song. Such images will probably be wider then your main content block of 550px, so you should make sure you’ve activated Fancybox plugin, insert some text link at the beginning/end of song lyrics, upload your image in Media Library and set it as link location. It will automatically be displayed with Fancybox. To make those links you can also use link buttons I provided you in the Upload folder of the material for this theme. Check the demo of this feature in this example.

6. Backing Tracks

You can also link song lyrics with some karaoke – backing track in mp3 or some other music file format. Upload your backing track file in Media Library, and make text link or use link button from Upload folder of material for this theme. This feature will work properly out of the box only if you are using the local installation of this theme. You also have to set your browser to automatically open music files with your default music player (WINAMP, AIMP…) and not to show any warning or download dialogs. These settings can easily be done in Mozilla Firefox and Opera, so I recommend you these browsers if you’d like to use this feature often. Check the demo in this example.

C. Using Widgets

We started making our lyrics database using only Categories and Tag Cloud. These two widgets should stay your main organization and navigation tools for this database, but let us see what else can be useful in this project. Calendar is presenting you the dates when you entered some songs to your database. You can also use Recent Posts to see the last 5 or 10 songs you added into the database. There are Text widgets to enter some comments, little images, internal or external links, special song lists that are not defined by Categories or Tags. You can create new pages with all these content elements and then show them in Pages sidebar widget. My advice is: don’t make it complicated, if it can work in a simple way. Use only those tools that can improve the functionality of your lyrics database!

Meta widget, which gives you access to WP admin panel and some other administration features, is not needed. I am sure you have already noticed three simple menu buttons in header area: Home, Admin and Google Search, which obviously take you to the home page, admin panel, or google search for lyrics.