TWU E-Portfolios

Menu

Skip to content
  • Get Started
    • What is a Portfolio?
    • A Portfolio to Dream Of
    • Artifacts 101
    • Reflection
  • Resources
    • What and Why of Digital Literacy
    • Publish Artifacts Like a Portfolio Champ
    • Academic Context
    • Accessible Design
    • Personal Branding
    • Career Ready Primer

Customizing the Minds Theme

You can modify the title of your portfolio and change other design aspects of it via the WordPress Customizer. This interface allows you to see a preview of your portfolio as you change settings. The TWU Minds theme offers a number of features you can customize not available in the other themes.

Access it via the Customize link at the top of your black WordPress admin bar while viewing your site or from inside your dashboard via Appearance -> Customize.

Each panel on the left side provides tools to change the appearance of your site. Let’s start with the first one, Site Identity.

The TWU Minds Theme allows you to put a graphic or logo at the top of every page. Under Logo click Select. You can upload any image file here, then you will use the tools to optional crop it to the shape you desire.

In Site Identity section, a logo of a moon was selected and we see it on the right side

Adding a logo to a portfolio via the customizer

Use the Logo Size slider to control how big or small the image is.

editing the text form in the left under Site Title changes the appearance in the preview on the right

Change the site title and the tagline in the Customizer.

As you change the text in the left side editing fields, you will see the changes previewed on the right. We might start by creating a more personal title and the tagline that appears below.

changing the site title in the interface to 'Portfolio Over The Moon'

Changing the title of the portfolio site

No changes are made to your site until you click the Publish button at the top, so we can do a few more things.

Wow, this his site is looking very different than the default template!

Next, explore other things you can change here. If all these changes look good to you, click the Publish button to make them active.

Under the Featured Prompt panel, you can customize a “teaser” to invite a visitor to specific part of your portfolio; it could be a group of artifacts from a category, it could be a specific blog post, or in this case, we are going to link to an artifact we think really shows our work best.

all fields of the customizer, Title, Description, Button Text and link, background image that can be modified

Customizing the appearance of the featured prompt

As you can see you can make this area say exactly what you want. If you do not want to include this feature, uncheck the Display on the Front Page box.

In the Customizer you can also add Contact information- your address, phone, and email (you should decide if this is information you want on a public site). This theme also lets you choose whether to have it appear at the top of allpages (header) or bottom (footer).

showing where the contact information fields are added to a page

Adding contact information

To remove any items, just delete the content in the fields.

Another feature of this theme is that you can change the over all style of your site (fonts, colors, header alignment) via the choices of Style Packs in the Customizer:

preview of changing the theme's style packs

Change the style of your portfolio in one click via Style Packs

The Customizer for this theme also provides a set of tools to modify the appearance of the Minds theme’s front page display of most recent portfolio artifacts. These tools are in the TWU Portfolios panel of the Customizer.

Customizer interface with lines showin the fields nd how they change the front page's title, subtitle, and number of artifacts to show on the front page of the portfolio

In this panel, you can change the text of the title and subtitle (“tagline”) that appear above the display of your most recent artifacts. Use the drop down menu to select how many artifacts it should show on the front page.

Learn More About the WordPress Customizer

  • Beginner’s Guide: How To Use The WordPress Customizer (WP Lift)

Tips for Using the Minds Theme

  • Special Dashboard Features
  • The Front Page
  • Customizing the Minds Theme
  • Creating Artifacts
  • Shortcodes
  • Navigation Menus
  • Footer Widgets
  • Changing to Another Theme
Widgets

This guide is designed for students of Trinity Western University to assist them in the crafting of their Electronic Portfolios hosted on TWU Create.

Find It

Contents

  • Get Started
    • What is a Portfolio?
    • A Portfolio to Dream Of
    • Artifacts 101
    • Reflection
  • Resources
    • What and Why of Digital Literacy
    • Publish Artifacts Like a Portfolio Champ
    • Academic Context
    • Accessible Design
    • Personal Branding
    • Career Ready Primer
Proudly powered by WordPress | Theme: Illustratr by WordPress.com.