Boulanger Child Theme for Divi
$75 USD
If you have always wanted to have your own recipe blog, Boulanger and Divi will make it easy for you to get started.
The Recipe Page – the Heart of Your Food Blog
Jump to Recipe Button
For people like me who just want to check out the recipe right away, the Jump to Recipe button is the answer! Just like the button says, click and you will be taken right to the recipe.
Pinterest Optimized Images
Pinterest is a huge source of traffic for many food bloggers. Boulanger is designed with that in mind, and allows you to upload the tall images that generate the most pins. The image size we have used is 736 x 1104px. Your images can be any height but this happens to be a standard crop size for portrait orientation images.
TIP 1: install a Pinterest image sharing plugin on your site to make it easy for people to pin your photos. One I like is Jquery Pin It Button for Images.
TIP 2: Use an image editing program to add a title and your website name and URL to your images.
Social Sharing
Boulanger has been pre-styled to work with the Monarch social sharing plugin, which will help you build traffic to your site by allowing people to easily share your post. Monarch is a premium plugin available from Elegant Themes. If you have a Developers or Lifetime subscription to Elegant Themes then you have access to the Monarch plugin. If not there are many other social sharing plugins available. One I like is Simple Share Button.
The Recipe
Boulanger is integrated with the WP Ultimate Recipe plugin. This gives you an easy form to enter your recipe in your WordPress post, and ensures that it is consistently and attractively displayed on your site.
The recipe format is responsive, which means it will look good on all types of devices. It also includes back end coding so that the recipes are compatible with Google Recipe Search.
You can read more about WP Ultimate Recipe here.
Social Follow Menu
The social follow menu makes sure that all your social media networks are in easy reach of your visitors. Pre-formatted for the most popular networks used by food bloggers: Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.
About Me Widget
People reading a food blog want to be able to connect with the author. A photo and a little bit about you links to your “About me” page where they can read more about you.
The social sharing menu can also be repeated in your sidebar to make sure people can connect with you through those channels.
Newsletter Signup
Many food bloggers like to grow their readership by offering an email newsletter. Sending out a notice when you have added new content to your site can bring people back. Boulanger offers a pre-styled Divi Optin module. Connect this to your Mailchimp or AWeber newsletter account and start collecting subscribers!
Sidebar Optimized for Advertising
If your are working with Google Adsense or other advertising network the Boulanger sidebar has been optimized to work with the most popular medium rectangle and skyscraper advertising units.
Boulanger Recipe Widget
Boulanger comes equipped with a special recipe widget that displays a grid of recipe photos in your sidebar and footer. The grid is category based – you can choose to display your most recent recipes (default – all categories), feature recipes from a particular category, or even create a special “featured recipes” category to feature just the recipes you want.
Tag Support
Boulanger offers support for Tags. If you add tags to your recipes, they will be displayed below your recipe in the post, and you could also add a tag cloud to your sidebar.
Two Home Page Options
Your blog – your way. Boulanger comes with two home page options that you can choose from for your Home page.
Some bloggers like to avoid placing ads on their home page. If you are one of them the first option is for you. It offers an attractive grid layout with your 5 most recent recipes “above the fold”, followed by a horizontal email optin form.
Following this you can feature additional recipes – this feature blog module is category based so you can feature the ones prior to the most recent recipes in the grid above, or choose a particular category to feature. And of course, your About Me widget to let people know who you are and what your blog is about.
If you want to go the more traditional route, then check out the second home page option. This option features the traditional blog sidebar, where you can place ads and any other information you want to feature. It takes full advantage of the Divi Post Slider module to feature several of your most recent posts with large images at the top, followed by the more traditional Blog module in grid format with your previous recipe posts. Or if you want to go full on traditional you can easily remove the slider and switch the Blog module to fullwidth format. That’s the beauty of Divi!
The Recipe Index Page
A very important element of a recipe blog (or any website really!) is having a way for people to discover the content that you have on the site. For a food blog, the most effective way to attract people to your posts is through images – people like to look at a photo of what the finished dish will look like.
Boulanger gives you a customized grid based layout, showing the most recent recipes in each category, with a link to the category page where they can see all the recipes in that category.
Again, you have the choice of 2 recipe index layouts, one with and one without a traditional sidebar. Both options feature a search box at the top, for those people who don’t like to browse, but just want to get right down to it!
The Category and Search Pages
Boulanger offers customized category archive and search templates to display category and search results in a grid layout that is consistent with the rest of the site.
Both templates feature customized pagination, with links to each page of the results at the bottom of the results.
TIP: You can set the number of posts (recipes) to display per page in the Divi Theme Options.
The search results page also displays the term that the person searched for at the top, along with the number of matching recipes that were found.
Optional Advertising Spaces
As discussed above, the Boulanger sidebar (and even footer) can accommodate common 300px wide ad formats. In addition to this, Boulanger offers 2 additional widget areas that can accommodate horizontal leaderboard or even billboard ads, which tend to perform very well. One adspace is in the header of your site, just below your menu, and one is at the bottom of the page in the footer.
To activate these ad spaces, simply add a widget containing your ad code to the widget area in your WordPress dashboard. (You will find detailed instructions in the documentation that comes with your theme purchase.)
TIP: if you only want to show ads on selected pages or posts, or if you want to show different ad units (or just different widgets) o different pages, you can install the Widget Logic plugin on your site. This will allow you to show or hide widgets on specific pages, posts or categories.
Features of the Boulanger Theme
- Customized Divi Blog Module displays recipes with featured image and title in a grid format.
- Custom single recipe template includes support for Pinterest-optimized image size, “jump to recipe” link for people who want to skip the article and get right to the recipe, and support for tags which will be displayed at the bottom of the recipe if used.
- Custom archive pages to display recipes by category or tag in a grid format, with customized pagination with page numbers rather than next and previous links.
- Custom search results page includes the search term and number of results found with customized pagination.
- 2 home page layout options
- 2 recipe index page layout options
- Integrated social sharing menu with Font Awesome icons, pre-formatted for key social networks for food bloggers: Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ – just add links to your accounts.
- Styled Divi Optin Module – full width and sidebar – to build your email list – just connect to your MailChimp or AWeber account.
- Optional header and footer full width widget areas that support leaderboard ad size if you will be signing up with an advertising network.
- Pinch to zoom enabled so people can be sure to see all the recipe ingredients.
- Includes the Divi Widget Builder function by SJ James – allowing you to use Divi modules in sidebar widget areas
- Custom sidebar and footer recipe photo grid layouts allows you to show a selection of recipes from all or selected categories in your sidebar or footer.
- Neutral colour scheme to let your beautiful food photography shine (but you can also easily add your own colours through the Divi theme settings).
- Comprehensive installation instructions (written and video)
Requirements
In order to use the Boulanger child theme, you will need the Divi parent theme for WordPress, which is not included with this product. You can purchase an annual subscription from Elegant Themes, which includes the Divi theme.
You will also need a hosted WordPress website. The current version of Boulanger (V1.2) is compatible with Divi 3.0.89 and higher. It is highly recommended that the theme be installed on a new install of WordPress.
Please be aware that you will need an amount of experience with WordPress and the Divi Theme to take full advantage of our child themes. If you intend to make customizations beyond changing content and colours, a reasonable knowledge of CSS is also required. Please make your decision to purchase based upon your skill level.
License Information
Once purchased, you are free to use this Child Theme for both personal and commercial use on as many sites as you like for as long as you like. You cannot resell or redistribute the theme or any of its parts to anyone else. Support is provided for 6 months from the date of purchase. Divi Diva will not be responsible for any conflicts due to updates by Divi, WordPress or any third party plugins or extensions.
Please note that while this theme is pre-configured to work with the WP Ultimate Recipes plugin, we cannot provide support for the plugin beyond the installation instructions provided. Please contact WP Ultimate Recipes directly for support if required.
The images in the demo are not included in the child theme package. The child theme includes placeholder images with the correct sizing.
Read More About Boulanger
The Boulanger child theme was featured in an article on Elegant Marketplace. The article discusses using Divi to create a food blog.