ThemeFlood.

Introduction

Flare is heavily derived from the Volcano theme. Volcano continues to prove immensely popular with people seeking to build professional-grade business and service websites. Along the way, we have collected lots of feature requests from users. Particularly feature requests relating to things only found in RapidWeaver 8, like RGBa colour support and number inputs.

Rather than disrupt existing users of Volcano, we opted instead to duplicate Volcano. Then begin building-in many of the feature requests received, into the new Flare theme. The finished result is a modern, reliable and extremely capable RapidWeaver theme design. Flare encapsulates all the best things in modern web design, and combines this with the latest API features on offer in RapidWeaver 8. Flare is an exciting theme with huge potential.

Note: Flare replaces the previous Longitude theme. If you are an existing user of Longitude, you can login to your Paddle account to download Flare at no additional cost.

Excellent accessibility

Flare supports keyboard tab navigation on all links and the main menu at the top, including the drop-downs. This means the theme easily complies with all stringent accessibility guidelines and ensures everyone to your website gets the best possible experience. Links are outlined with a dotted border, when they receive tab focus. We purposefully forego features like scroll-fixed positioning on the header bar, for this same reason.

Navigation

On desktop you are presented with a conventional horizontal / dropdown navigation menu. On screen widths below the specified breakpoint, this converts to a toggle navigation menu. Multiple levels of navigation links are supported by Flare, so you have the capability to build quite large websites with this theme.

The icons displayed alongside page links are totally optional. These are created using free Font Awesome icons. The Knowledgebase shares some more details about how to setup your own icons alongside page names. It can add a rather nice finishing touch to the navigation menu.

Backgrounds

You can apply subtle textures and background effects on elements like the header bar, banner, content area and footer. These work to give finished webpages a less 'flat' appearance. Often it's these types of small details that can make a big difference to the presentation of websites.

Sidebar

By default, this is turned off in the theme style settings. It is possible to turn it on and change its width to anything you like. The sidebar can be floated either left or right on desktops and positioned top or bottom of the main content container on mobile devices.

Configuring ExtraContent 5

Any Font Awesome icon placed in ExtraContent 5 will be 'supersized'. That is to mean it will have its font size dramatically increased. The font size is set to 150px on mobile and 250px on desktop. This can be changed in the theme style settings, within the Sizing and Dimensions group. The idea of this feature is to display an icon at a large size, to give it relevance to what the page may be about.

If you want to make an icon look like an app icon, you can supply additional CSS code like this:

#myExtraContent5 i {
	background: rgba(255,148,11,1.00);	
	height: 200px;
	width: 200px;
	display: block;
	border-radius: 20%;
	margin: auto;
	position: relative;
	box-shadow: inset 0 0 20px 3px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2);
	pointer-events: none;
	cursor: pointer;
}

@media screen and (min-width: 768px) {
	#myExtraContent5 i {	
		height: 400px;
		width: 400px;
		margin-right: 0;
	}
}

#myExtraContent5 i:before {
	position: absolute;
	top: 50%;
	left: 50%;
	-webkit-transform: translate(-50%, -50%);
   	-moz-transform: translate(-50%, -50%); 
   	-ms-transform: translate(-50%, -50%); 
   	-o-transform: translate(-50%, -50%); 
   	transform: translate(-50%, -50%); 
   	opacity: 0.75;
   	color: white;
}

This CSS code will centre align the icon inside a rounded box, apply shadow effects, reduce the opacity of the icon and change its colour to white. Potentially you could modify of further extend this code even further.

You are not restricted to only being able to use Font Awesome Icons inside ExtraContent 5. This container also makes a great space to place an embedded video, a slider, more written content or images. Because we use CSS Flexbox in the banner, things will automatically resize and flex to fit the content you supply. On screens less-than the breakpoint width (like smartphones) these banner content boxes are stacked vertically.

Lots of themes have rather boring footer areas. In Flare, the footer comprises of multiple mixed-width columns configured with ExtraContent. These allow you to place lots of valuable links and other content at the bottom of your webpages. It's also a good place to put things like social media sharing and bookmarking icons. If you have not used ExtraContent before, you can find more details about this theme technique in the Knowledgebase. Flare has a large quantity of useful ExtraContent containers located elsewhere in the page too.