Elegant Themes Chameleon

The right side of every slider image is already taken

You pick your best photo, put it in the home page slider, and the text lands right on top of the face, the product or the detail you wanted to show. The image was good. The problem is that it was chosen without looking at where the text falls.

In Chameleon, each slide's excerpt sits in an overlay on the right side of the slider, so every image should keep its main subject toward the left. Composing for that space changes how you prepare photos, and it is worth deciding before you load the first one.

Chameleon is an Elegant Themes theme with rounded corners, a home page slider and a media bar.

The Chameleon home page, piece by piece

• Featured slider: with "Use Pages" it shows the pages you choose. Without that option, it shows posts from the featured category. Each slide's image is the featured image.
• Slider types: the Slider Type setting switches between Nivo, Cycle and Roundabout.
• Media bar: its category is defined in the Homepage tab. Each post carries a Thumbnail custom field and, for video, another one called et_videolink with the URL.
• Three blocks below the slider: they come from the pages assigned in Service Page 1, 2 and 3. The "more" tag decides how much of each one is read.

Trying colors on the site before committing to them

The Show Control Panel option adds a settings box on the left side of the site for trying color combinations on real pages. When one convinces you, you copy those values into ePanel, the theme's options panel, and turn the box off.

• Background: color with a picker, preset texture or your own image.
• Typography: Header Font and Body Font change separately.
• Advertising: banners managed from the theme options and an ET: Advertisement widget for 125x125 ads in the sidebar.
• Layout: page templates in the Templates dropdown, with their ET Page Templates Settings box, and shortcodes inserted through buttons in the text editor.
• Languages: Mo and Po files in the /lang folder.

Where it asks for more manual work

Its features do not include a drag-and-drop visual builder. The home page is organized with settings, categories and custom fields, so each media bar post needs some attention when you publish it.

Video in that bar is embedded from services such as YouTube or Vimeo, not from a file uploaded to your media library.

Thumbnails deserve a check too: when you change themes you may need to regenerate them so they take Chameleon's sizes. On a site with many images, include that step in the migration plan.

Installing Chameleon with its sample data

You can begin with the sample data and replace it afterwards:

1. Upload the theme ZIP from the WordPress dashboard and activate it.
2. Import sampledata/sample.xml in Tools, Import, with the Import epanel settings box checked.
3. Choose the slider source and its type in General Settings, Featured Slider.
4. Prepare the images with the subject on the left and assign them as featured images.
5. Assign the three service pages and the media category in the Homepage tab.
6. Enable Show Control Panel, define the palette, move it to ePanel and turn the panel off.

Divi and Divi Builder for layouts with a visual builder

Divi, from Elegant Themes, combines theme and visual builder, with global templates for header, footer and pages. If you want to keep Chameleon and lay out individual pages with that same system, Divi Builder is the plugin version that works with any theme.

How to handle the usual tasks in Chameleon

Can I use pages in the slider instead of posts?

Yes. Enable "Use Pages" in the slider settings and choose the pages you want to show.

How do I keep the text from covering the image?

Place the main subject on the left. Elegant Themes published eight Photoshop templates for this slider, including one that blurs the area behind the excerpt.

Does the media bar support video?

Yes, with the et_videolink field and a URL from a service such as YouTube or Vimeo.

Should the color box stay active?

No. It is for testing. When you finish, you move the values to ePanel and disable it.

Can it be translated?

Yes. It includes Mo and Po files in the /lang folder for translating its English text.