ThemeFlood.

Introduction

A RapidWeaver theme with a distinctive poster / magazine flavour. Blow Up would not look out-of-place being used for a fashion website, photography portfolio, filmography website or a stunning, high-quality e-commerce website. As the name suggests, this theme is all about leaving a lasting impression on your readers.

Blow Up has quite a long history and is a theme originally created by Henk Vrieselaar. Original versions were fixed-width. A couple of additional 'speciality' versions became available over time; which had variations to the navigation layout or background content. There were various versions named things like 'HV-Blow-Up-2, 'Blow Up-Flickr', Blow-Up-YouTube and suchlike. In recent times, we have merged all the best features from these different themes into one single, simple theme named Blow Up. This new version of Blow Up is easy to use, fully mobile responsive, features a simple navigation layout and includes the option of a background slideshow.

As you can see from the live demo site, Blow Up really makes an impact! It's a lovely theme to work with. These completed webpages work reliably in all modern web browsers and across various devices. Blow Up will undoubtedly save you a huge amount of time and money; in trying to custom-build something similar with a blank theme and third-party addons. A vast choice of powerful style and colour setting exist in Blow Up, so you can make it look like your own! Newer versions are built on modern web technologies, like CSS FlexBox. Plus the theme includes a few extra features, like the complete Bootstrap framework and Font Awesome Icons.

Setup a background slider with Stacks

The background slider is very easy to configure with the Stacks plugin. You simply need to download and install the free Henk's Slider stack from this page. This stack requires the Stacks plugin, version 3 or above. Stacks is not included with Blow Up.

Install the stack into Stacks, by dragging and dropping the stack icon onto your RapidWeaver dock icon. Launch RapidWeaver and in your project file add a new Stacks page type (if you don't already have a Stacks page in your website). Open the Stacks library and search for Henk's Slider. Drag and drop a copy of the stack into your page. Click the blue '+' button to add images to your slider.

These should be images you've added to your project as Resources or already uploaded to a directory on your web server. Simply provide the links to these images. Ideally images should be less-than 500KB each, to promote faster page loading and smoother playback. Slideshow settings can be adjusted in the theme or the slideshow stack itself.

If using the slideshow, you may find the sample 'butterfly on bamboo leaf' image still shows on the right side or bottom side of the page. You can easily blank this out with some custom CSS code:

body {
	background: #000000 !important;
}

Not using Stacks? No problem!

The homepage of demo project for Blow Up is using a snippet for the slider. This is good to use for page types like the RapidWeaver blog, styled text, Markdown, HTML code or contact form. Click through to Page Inspector > HTML > Header to view the code snippet.

Displaying a Single Background Image

This is the option most users of Blow Up use. Static images scale better and may prove less distracting to end uses. If you are using RapidWeaver 7 or above, just drag and drop a suitable image into the Banner Image box, in the page inspector. Within the theme background settings, you can opt to change the positing of the image. For older versions of RapidWeaver, and image can be set with custom CSS code like this:

body {
	background-image: url(path/to/my/image.jpg);
}

ExtraContent

ExtraContent allows you to add more content, compared to what RapidWeaver typically allows. There are a couple of ExtraContent containers built into the Blow Up theme.

Responsive Design

The traditional fixed width design doesn't work any more. Web design needs to be adaptive. The layout needs to be automatically adjusted to fit all display resolution and devices. Rest assured, Blow Up is a fully responsive theme that looks and works great across a wide range of devices and modern web browsers. Using a theme like Blow Up, you no longer need to build multiple websites for different screen sizes.

Navigation

On mobile, Blow Up has a multi-level toggle accordion menu that is very touch-friendly and easy for your site users to access. On wider screens, a simplified drop-down menu layout is used. The caret or chevron icons displayed after pages with subpages can be created by adding Font Awesome markup after the page name:

<i class="arrow fas fa-caret-down"></i>

The addition of the extra 'arrow' class prevents display of the icon within breadcrumbs or the sitemap.

Font Awesome

As mentioned already, Blow Up includes the complete Font Awesome Icon library (the current version is shown in the theme details on this page). With Font Awesome you have several hundred icons at your disposal, in any colour and any size you like. No extra addons or plugins need to be purchased, to use basic Font Awesome icons in Blow Up.