Chia is a modern responsive WordPress theme ideal for creating a deli, cafe, or a food-based website. It is promoted as a theme for restaurants, cafes, delis and food recipe blogs. It was created to be used with the WordPress Block Editor.
If this video will convince you to buy the Chia theme, please consider using my affiliate link, it helps me continue making videos like this one.
Video Transcription
Install Chia Theme
As always, let’s start by installing Chia on a fresh WordPress website without any content.
First, you will have to purchase the theme and download it to your hard drive. Then go to your dashboard, open the themes page, click on Add New and then Upload Theme.
Select the .zip file with the theme, install it and then click activate.
This is what an empty website looks like when Chia is activated.
I will install and activate only two of the four recommended plugins: One Click Demo Import and Recipe Card Blocks by WPZOOM. You should install just the plugins that you really need. If you don’t sell anything or you use a different contact form plugin, don’t install WooCommerce and WPForms.
Let’s import the demo content. We are reminded about the recommended plugins, let’s skip them again. The import process can take a few minutes.
You will see these warning messages if you skipped the installation of WooCommerce. Don’t worry about them, that is perfectly normal.
The demo content was imported with everything in it, including menus and widgets.
Chia Theme Options and Settings
Now let’s go through the theme’s options and settings.
Open the Customize page.
In the Site Identity panel, you can upload your logo. You can display the site title and tagline with or without the logo.
In the Theme Options panel you can make many adjustments to the design and layout of your website.
For example the header has 3 different layouts with the option of making it sticky on scroll.
In the Blog Options panel you can change the appearance of blog archives and single posts.
You can hide post meta, which is the published date and the category of a post. I think it would be better to have a separate checkbox for each snippet of data.
The author bio is displayed only if the author has some text in their bio. Otherwise it’s always hidden.
There are options for the copyright text, the Skip to Top button in the footer, the Top Info Bar in the Header and the 404 page. By default it has this image, you can change it to something else.
And finally, for regular pages, you can show or hide page titles. You may want to do that if you build your pages with the Block Editor and want to have a different style of page titles.
In the Colors panel you can change only the background color. In a minute I will explain why.
Block Editor
Now let’s get to the really interesting part: the Block Editor.
I’ll create a new empty page.
If I add just a title and save the page, it will be empty. That’s because my page titles were hidden in the Customizer.
I can build the structure of my page block by block. For example an H1 heading tag and some paragraphs of text.
The color and size of paragraphs and headings can be changed directly in the block settings panel.
Block Patterns
Here’s another cool feature. Click on the Plus sign and switch to the Patterns tab.
In the Chia Blocks category, there are 22 different block patterns.
For example I can add the Cover Section instead of my standard page title.
You can use any combination of standard WordPress blocks and custom block patterns to create unique pages.
If you want to use the Homepage layout as an example, you can import it from the Chia Templates category. Then simply replace your photos, texts and links.
Of course you can change the order of every block or remove the blocks that you don’t need.
Using these custom block patterns, you can quickly build a nice looking menu page and make it your own.
If you have a food blog with recipes, the theme works well with the Recipe Card Blocks plugin by WPZOOM. It provides an easy way to create beautiful and intuitive recipe blocks. It is a free plugin, but it also has a paid upgrade.
Chia works well with the popular WooCommerce plugin. This is what your shop could look like with very little effort.
Conclusion
Chia was released on 21st of April 2021. I’m making this video using the very first version of the theme. I expect it to get many updates in the future, with more layout options, block patterns and full page templates.
Let me know what you think about the Chia theme in the comments section below.
If this video convinced you to buy the Chia theme, please consider using my affiliate link, it helps me continue making videos like this one.
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