Out of the box, Timeline Express comes bundled with a custom template used to display all single announcements. This template may not fit in exactly how your theme looks. We’ve done our best to make a universal template, that will work with as many themes as possible. On occasion you may find that the template doesn’t match up with your existing single blog post – for example, the default announcement template doesn’t contain a sidebar, which you may want.
Luckily, we’ve made it very easy to match the look and feel of your existing theme templates. Follow along with the tutorial below to get an announcement template setup on your site, that will match the existing look and feel of your themes. In the end, the new announcement template should match the single blog post template of your theme.
Getting Started
In this tutorial, I am going to be using the default WordPress theme TwentySixteen, but this will work with any theme that you currently installed.
To begin, you’ll want to create a directory inside of your theme (or child theme) called timeline-express. If you’ve customized another template within the plugin, and this directory exists – you can skip this step.
Example
Once you’ve created the “timeline-express” directory in your theme root, you’ll want to locate the .php file single.php contained in your theme root. This is the template that’s used to display all single blog posts on your site. (Note: Your theme may be using a different file, for example single-blog.php or single-post.php. You can also customize any of your existing templates, it doesn’t need to be single.php).
Once found, go ahead duplicate this file and place the new copy into the timeline-express directory we created above. Once placed in the directory, rename the file to single-timeline-express.php.
Note: The above step is crucial to ensuring the new template is referenced from your theme root. The file must be named single-timeline-express.php or it will not load from your theme root.
Example
Once you’ve copied the file to that location, you’ll want to open it up. We’ll need to replace one line in the file, to load the appropriate Timeline Express announcement content.
Go ahead and open up the new single-timeline-express.php in your favorite text editor, and locate one of the following lines:
get_template_part( 'content', 'single' );
or
the_content();
Note that it can be either one of the two above (or something else altogether). Each theme handles loading the content differently, but these seem to be the two most popular. If you are unable to locate one of the two above, post in the support forums and we can help you out.
Once found, replace that line with the following Timeline Express helper function:
timeline_express_content();
Go ahead and save the file, and you’re all set. Re-load the announcement template, and you should now see a new layout for your announcements.