The SmartTheme is our brand new theme from OptimizePress. It has been designed to work with our OptimizePress plugin, which is for building landing pages, sales pages and membership sites.
Differences between the Theme and Plugin
The SmartTheme is our new WordPress theme. The theme controls the design of your blog posts and normal pages on your WordPress website. This includes the styling of:
- Blog homepage – e.g. http://www.optimizepress.com/blog/
- Individual Blog posts – e.g. https://www.optimizepress.com/wordpress-smarttheme/
- Category pages – e.g. https://www.optimizepress.com/category/optimizepress-news/
- Any other normal blog pages
The OptimizePress Plugin provides access to our LiveEditor pagebuilding functionality, where you’ll find templates for landing pages, sales pages, webinar pages and other types of marketing pages.
Important:
Our existing OptimizePress Theme incorporates the LiveEditor. If you’re using this and planning to switch to the SmartTheme, you will need to install the OptimizePress Plugin to ensure your normal LiveEditor pages look normal and you can maintain access to edit those pages.
When Should I Switch?
WordPress only supports using ONE theme on your website at any one time, so here’s a quick guide for you if you’re thinking about switching. Choose your current situation from the list below:
1) I’m using an external theme (non-OptimizePress)
If you already have a separate theme on your site, and you’re happy with your design, then you may not want to switch. The SmartTheme is designed as a replacement for the existing OptimizePress theme, but switching is not compulsory. You can continue to use the OptimizePress Plugin to build pages with our LiveEditor on your site.
Actions Required: None
2) I’m using the current OptimizePress Theme
The current OptimizePress theme incorporates the blog theme as well as our LiveEditor page-building platform.
Although the theme has been updated over the past 4 years, the framework it was built-upon has not changed, and doesn’t incorporate some of the latest functionality and standards for websites that have become available in recent years.
The SmartTheme has been designed to give our customers the opportunity to create a beautiful, standards compliant blog which is much more easy to customize.
If you are using the current OptimizeTheme, you have 2 options:
>> Continue using the OptimizePress theme
For the time being, we will continue to release updates to the main OptimizeTheme (mainly related to the LiveEditor functionality) so WordPress changes will not break your site. These updates will only be available to users with an active support & updates license. Please note the original OptimizePress theme will no longer be available for download to install on new sites
This will retain your existing design and leave your site unaffected.
Actions Required: None
>> Switch to the SmartTheme
If you are ready for a new design and updated functionality on your website, you can switch to the new SmartTheme. This will change the look of your site to the new SmartTheme, and you’ll need to update the styling of your site in the Theme options to fit with your own company branding
Actions Required:
- First go to Plugins > Add New and install the OptimizePress Plugin (this can be downloaded from the members hub).
- You can activate the Plugin (you’ll receive a notice on your site which you can ignore)
- Next, go to Appearance > Themes and install the SmartTheme. Once you activate this, your site design will change to the new theme.