Support Documentation

Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about Sites at Penn State and WordPress, from basic WordPress features to theme and plugin set-up instructions.

Themes Overview

Your blog theme controls the visual layout and appearance of your blog.

Sites at Penn State and CampusPress provides over 300 themes for you to choose including:

  • Themes that can’t be altered and are “use as is”.
  • Themes that are “extremely customizable” allowing to change font types, font color and background color.

Penn State provides 40+ premium themes, including Penn State themes.

Choosing a Theme

To activate or change a theme, visit Appearance → Themes in the dashboard. You can change your theme at any time. Note: Some themes provide additional features and Post Types that may not display when switching from one theme to another. If this happens, you can change your theme back and all of your content should still be there.

From Appearance → Themes you can see your Current Theme.

Browse Themes

To view all of the available themes, visit your Dashboard and click Appearance → Themes. If you do not see the Appearance menu option, this means that you are not an Administrator on the site.

You can sort themes by clicking the different Categories. These Categories can help you decide on a theme based on the type of site you want to make. You can use the Search themes box to find themes by type or feature, such as photography, portfolio, studiopress, or if you are looking for a particular theme by name.

Note: The currently selected theme will not appear in the results when browsing or searching for other themes.

Previewing Themes

We do not recommend using the Live Preview feature when you want to preview a theme. It does not give an accurate preview. Instead, hover over a theme and click Theme Details for a link to the Full Theme Demo in order to see the fully featured preview of a theme.

Theme Details

Clicking on a theme will show the theme details with a brief description of the theme, but more importantly you can click Demo and access the Setup Instructions for each theme.