Bezel - Creative Multi-Purpose WordPress Theme

Contents

1. Install Theme and Required Plugins

2. Importing Demo Content

3. Setting Up Visual Composer

4. Creating Pages with Visual Composer

5. Set Up a Mega Menu

6. Adding Portfolio Items

7. Using Theme Options

8. Setting Up Home and Blog Pages

9. Updating the theme

10. Bezel FAQs

1. Install Theme and Required Plugins

You can install the theme in two ways. These are as follows:

WordPress:

  1. Navigate to Appearance > Themes
  2. Click Add New
  3. Click Upload Theme
  4. Click Choose File, look for the "bezel-wp.zip" file in the theme folder downloaded from Themeforest and click Install now.

FTP:

After installing and activating the theme you will notice a message in the top of your dashboard with required and recommended plugins.

Install and activate these plugins.

Here's a video that shows the complete process:


Note:

If you are a developer and you want customize the theme, install the child-theme (bezel-wp-child.zip) included in the download package. If you edit the code of the main theme, you will lose all your changes 


2. Importing Demo Content

To import the demo content and have the theme look exactly like the ThemeForest preview, you just need to open the page "Bezel Options", select the tab "Import Demo Data" and click on the button "Import". A warning message will appear, read it and confirm only if you have installed required plugins. This process can take up to 10 minutes, don't do anything until you get a successful message! (Don't close or refresh the page).

Here's a video that shows the complete process:

This process will not only import demo content and widgets. It will set the Home Page, the Blog page and the menus. When it finishes, your website is ready, no initial setup required.

3. Setting Up Visual Composer

By default, Visual Composer is enabled only for pages. You need to enable it for custom post types, such as Portfolio items.

Navigate to the Visual Composer settings page, select the tab Role Manager and switch the Post Types field from Pages Only to Custom. Now check the pages and portfolio fields.

Check out this video:


4. Creating Pages with Visual Composer

Creating pages with Visual Composer is very simple. You can use prebuilt templates included with Bezel, or you can create them from scratch. In the following video you can learn how to do it.


If you are not familiar with Visual Composer, check out the official video tutorials here.

5. Set Up a Mega Menu

To set up a Mega Menu, you just need to create a standard WordPress menu, by following this procedure:

Check out this video that shows the complete process:


6. Adding Portfolio Items

7. Using Theme Options

Go to "Bezel Options" on the left side of your admin panel.

Here you have several options. You can:

See some examples here:


8. Setting Up Home and Blog Pages

To add a blog page, navigate to "Pages => Add New", create a new page called "Blog" (for example) and select the template "Blog Page", from the right sidebar.

From "Blog Options", under the WordPress editor, you can choose the layout and the sidebar position.

The "Grid" layout allows you to select the number of columns.

Now, you just need to set the page as "Posts Page". Navigate to Settings > Reading and change the Front page displays to "A static page". Choose then an Home page as Front Page, and the new created "Blog" as Posts page.


9. Updating the theme

It's important to use always the latest version of the theme. To update it, there are two ways:

The easiest way:

You just need to navigate to "Plugins => Add New", search for "Easy Theme and Plugin Upgrades" and install it.

This is the update process:

  1. Download the latest zip file for the theme from ThemeForest.
  2. Go to Appearance > Themes.
  3. Click the "Add New" button at the top of the page.
  4. Click the "Upload Theme" button at the top of the page.
  5. Click the file browse button to select your theme zip file. The button's text varies by browser. It typically says "Browse...", "Choose File", or "Choose...".
  6. Select the zip file with the new theme version to install.
  7. Select "Yes" from the "Upgrade existing theme?" option.
  8. Click the "Install Now" button.

That's it. The plugin will automatically create a backup of the previous version of the theme, incase anything goes wrong.

The advanced way:

  1. Login into your Themeforest account and go to downloads (Dashboad > downloads)
  2. Download the theme.
  3. Retrieve your FTP login information from your hosting admin panel and login into your hosting via FTP
  4. Unzip the item main file.
  5. Locate the theme zip file (bezel-wp.zip) and unzip it.
  6. Log in to your server with an FTP client (like Filezilla).
  7. Drag and drop theme main folder (bezel-wp) into your FTP program with the destination : "wp-content/themes/", in the root folder of your web server.
  8. FTP program will give a warning that there is an existing with the same directory name, choose replace all.
  9. The process can take up to 30 minutes to replace all files.

Note:

If you are a developer and you've customized the theme without installing the child-theme (bezel-wp-child.zip), you will lose all your changes when you will update the theme. Always use the child theme if you want to customize it.



10. Bezel FAQs

Installation issue: The theme is missing the style.css stylesheet.

Unless you are trying to install an HTML template instead of a WordPress theme, this error message does not mean that the theme you have purchased is broken, it simply means it has been uploaded incorrectly. You don't have to upload the purchased package, but you need upload the installable WordPress theme, the "bezel-wp.zip" file.

The file is located in the unzipped package. If you can't find it, do the following:

Google Maps does not work properly.

You need to obtain a Google Maps API key from this link (you will see the button "Get a Key"). After that, go to "Bezel Options" and paste the key in the "Google Maps Api Key" field, in the "General" tab.

My website is slow.

Consider to use a cache plugin, like WP Super Cache. It will improve the performances of your website. If it does not solve the problem, most probably the issue is related to your web hosting. If you are using a cheap hosting, you will encounter many problems with WordPress.

I advise you to use a premium hosting provider, like these: