4.0 QT Gridstacks: definition

QT Gridstacks are an innovative way to build websites, created by Qantumthemes in 2016.

The gridstacks are a way to reppresent informations, mostly archives of custom post types, width differen type of design and interactivity.

This means that you can use any gridstack to represent any type of post, in total freedom.

The gridstacks included in this theme are:

  1.  3D Carousel
  2. Diamonds
  3. Owl Carousel
  4. Skywheel
  5. Slideshow

To add a gridstack to your contents you can either add the shortcode from the text editor or, using the Visual composer, with the custom Gridstack buttons.

Integration method 1: Shortcode

Screen Shot 2016-06-13 at 22.04.25

Integration method 2: Visual Composer

  1. Click ADD and select the QT Gridstack tab

Screen Shot 2016-06-13 at 22.06.51

 

2. Fill the parameters of your gridstack (everyone may have different parameters)

 

Screen Shot 2016-06-13 at 22.05.30

 

General informations about the gridstacks:

  1. To correctly display a gridstacks, every post of that type needs to have a featured image
  2. Some gridstacks, if the featured image is missing, will replace it with a default one, which you can customize in Appearance->Customize.
  3. Some gridstacks may skip the items without a featured image
  4. The Quantity refers to the total number of items extracted by the query
  5. The post type is limited to the ones provided with the theme, to ensure the compatibility with the visualization
  6. You can filter the gridstacks by any taxonomy: be sure to select the one used for that particular post type
  7. The term ID is the numeric ID of the taxonomy item you want to use for the query. To discover the ID of a term, you may need to edit it and check the ID in the URL. For example, it will appear in a string like this:?taxonomy=artistgenre&tag_ID=223
  8. The HTML/PHP of the gridstaks is in sonik/includes/frontend/gridstacks

 

Taxonomies and filtering

To filter the results of a gridstack, you may need to specify a taxonomy and term ID.

Each custom post type has its own taxonomy:

  • Members -> membertype
  • Song charts -> chartcategory
  • Podcast -> podcastfilter
  • Events -> eventtype
  • Album releases -> genre
  • Places -> pcategory
  • Radio shows -> showgenre
  • Radio schedule -> schedule_cat
  • Products -> products_cat

Troubleshooting:

The gridstacks requires Javascript to run. If you have problems like

  • The gridstack doesn’t appear
  • It appears smashed
  • It doesn’t work properly

means generally that something is interferring with its perfect functioning.

What to do?

  1. make a backup of your database in case your site is already populated (just in case)
  2. disable any external plugin not provided with the theme
  3. be sure that you are not adding conflicting values in the gridstack parameters
  4. in case you changed default parameters, try with the default values suggested for each field
  5. check in the chrome debugger if any error is appearing
  6. be sure to have posts for the selected post type

Advanced filtering/ordering

In order to perfectly craft the results, you may need to add specific taxonomies. If you want to change the query in ways that are not covered by the gridstack’s parameters, you may need to customize the main files of the theme.
Please note that these advanced database queries, file code customization, and advanced theme modding, are not covered by the standard theme support service.

The options and look of each gridstack is covered in the next manual sections.

 

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