Pulsar — Documentation

What Pulsar is

A multipurpose WordPress theme, built around publishing.

Pulsar gives you a homepage you assemble from blocks, five hero layouts, five article card styles, thirteen widgets, a settings panel with live previews, and a set of shortcodes for your articles. It needs no page builder and no third party framework.

It started as a news and magazine theme, and it is not limited to that. Presets set the whole thing up in one click — a news magazine, a motoring site, and more to come — and each one is only a starting point: palette, typography, hero, blocks and wording all stay editable afterwards. A site that is none of those starts from the closest preset and changes what it needs, which is usually less than you would expect.

Two things worth knowing before you start

• Out of the box, nothing is requested from anyone else. Fonts are bundled with the theme and there are no CDN scripts. The one feature that can read from an outside server is Apple's public app lookup, and a fresh install still makes no outside request: the app banner is on, so that the block is there to look at, but the switch that reads from Apple — Look the app up automatically — ships switched off, and the [app] shortcode asks Apple nothing until somebody opens an article that uses it.
• Everything you set lives in your database. Updating the theme never overwrites your settings, your posts or your menus.

1 · Installation

Ten minutes, three files. Do them in this order.

Inside the package you downloaded from ThemeForest you will find:

1. Install the theme. In WordPress go to Appearance → Themes → Add New → Upload Theme, choose pulsar.zip and click Install Now. Do not unzip it first: WordPress expects the zip.
2. Install the child theme, then activate that one. Upload pulsar-child.zip the same way, and click Activate on the child, not on Pulsar itself. Both need to be installed; only the child is active.
3. Install the plugin. Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, choose pulsar-core.zip, install and activate. Without it the shortcodes do not exist.
4. Open the panel. A Pulsar Theme entry now sits in the WordPress menu on the left. That is where everything in this documentation happens.

What activation changes

Activating Pulsar sets a few things up for you, so the site is not empty on the first load:

• It creates the menus Pulsar - Top bar, Pulsar - Header menu, Pulsar - Footer links and Pulsar - Copyright links and assigns them, unless you already have a menu in that position, in which case yours is left alone.
• It sets Settings → Media to the sizes the theme draws at (thumbnail 150 cropped, medium 432×243, medium_large off, large 1200).

2 · Child theme

Use it if you plan to touch any code. Skip it if you never will.

A child theme is a small theme that inherits everything from Pulsar and lets you override single pieces. The reason it matters is simple: when Pulsar updates, every file inside it is replaced. Anything you wrote in the parent theme is gone. Anything in the child survives.

What goes in the child

• Your own CSS, in pulsar-child/style.css.
• Your own PHP snippets and filters, in pulsar-child/functions.php.
• A copy of a template you want to change: copy the file from pulsar/ into pulsar-child/, keeping the same path, and edit the copy. WordPress will use yours. This works for the page templates in templates/, for every piece under partials/ — a card, a widget, a row of the homepage — and for a template placed in the child's root instead of templates/: the child is always looked at first.

3 · The Pulsar Core plugin

The shortcodes live in a plugin on purpose, so they stay yours.

Shortcodes are content: they sit inside your articles. If they lived in the theme, changing theme one day would leave [product …] printed as raw text in every article that used one. Because they are a plugin, they keep working whatever theme you run.

The words your visitors read

The shortcodes print a few labels of their own — Read also, See the offer, Download, the comment count. You can rewrite any of them in Settings → Pulsar Core: to translate them into a language the plugin does not ship with, or simply to say something else (Related, Buy it now). Leave a field empty and the standard text is used, already translated into the bundled languages.

The product button has two of these labels, and the box picks between them on its own: See the offer when the shortcode carries both a price and a full price, and Buy when there is a single price with nothing to compare it against. Both are editable, and a cta="…" written on the shortcode overrides whichever would apply.

Those settings live in the plugin, not in the Pulsar panel, which is the whole point: they follow the shortcodes if you ever change theme. Fields marked with %s must keep it — it is where the number or the shop name goes, and a text that lost it is refused rather than saved half broken.

The rest of the plugin's text — the shortcode names and descriptions you see while writing — is translated the usual way, with the files in pulsar-core/languages/. The free Loco Translate plugin does it from the browser without touching a file.

The plugin is bundled with the theme and installs like any other plugin. If you ever delete it, the Shortcodes screen of the panel has an Install the plugin button that fetches it again.

4 · Your first hour

If you only do these eight things, the site is presentable.

1. Pick a preset. Pulsar Theme → Presets and appearance. It writes a full set of options — palette, font, hero, homepage blocks — in one click, and everything stays editable afterwards.
2. Import the demo content, but only on a brand new site. Same screen. On a site that already has posts, skip it.
3. Put your logo in. Header & logo, then the button that opens the Customizer section. Four slots: normal, retina, dark, dark retina.
4. Set the site icon (the little square in the browser tab), from the same screen.
5. Check your colours. Colors & type. Type a hex code or pick one; the preview on the right updates as you go.
6. Build the homepage. Homepage: drag the blocks into the order you want, switch off what you do not need, and configure each one.
7. Build your menus. Appearance → Menus, or the shortcut on the Header & logo screen.
8. Decide about cookies. Privacy & cookies. The banner is off by default because it is a legal decision, and it is yours.

5 · Presets and appearance

A whole configuration in one click, for a kind of publication.

A preset writes a full set of options at once: palette, font, hero layout, homepage block order and the wording of each section. Everything stays editable afterwards — a preset is a starting point, not a mode you are locked into.

Details that belong to one preset

A preset can carry a detail of its own that is not worth a setting. Cars & bikes recolours the logo the theme ships with, from blue to red, so the mark matches the band it sits on.

It only ever touches the bundled logo. The moment you set a logo of your own in Header & logo, it is shown exactly as you uploaded it — your logo is already the colour you chose, and it might be a photograph.

What a preset is responsible for

A preset is not just a palette: it is what the site looks like. Colours and type, yes, but also the homepage blocks and their order, the hero, the cards and the settings of the single post. Everything outside that — your logo, your ad codes, your SEO fields, your social addresses, and the free HTML block you write at the end of your articles — belongs to the site and is never moved by a preset.

Every preset keeps its own settings

Change something on Homepage or Articles while a preset is on, and that change belongs to that preset. Switch to another one and the site takes on its settings instead, not yours; switch back and your choices are there again, exactly where you made them.

So the two are not in competition: you can set up one preset the way you want it, try the other, and return without losing an afternoon's work. Applying the preset that is already on means something different on purpose — it is how you ask for that preset as it comes, and it clears what you had changed under it.

Options a preset does not mention go back to the theme default when you switch, rather than staying as the previous preset's decision: that is what makes a preset look like itself.

Removing the demo content

Everything the import brings in is marked as its own, so taking it away is one button — Remove the demo content, on the same screen — and not an afternoon of deleting posts by hand and then hunting for the images they left in the media library.

It removes the posts and pages, the images and the files behind them, the categories, the menu and the widgets the import added. Only what carries the import's mark is deleted, so the posts you have written since are never at risk. The button appears only when there is demo content to remove: on a site whose posts came from somewhere else there is nothing for the theme to claim, and nothing to offer.

Undo, below, is a different thing. It puts back your settings, not your content: use the button above for the demo posts and images.

A preset never touches your content. It writes options only — no post is created, edited or deleted — so you can try one on a site that has been running for years.

Appearance: light and dark

The theme is drawn in two appearances. The dark one is not a second stylesheet: it is a second set of values for the same variables, and it takes the colours of your palette — the brand raised in lightness so it reads on a dark page, its hue and its saturation left alone. Change your brand colour and the dark appearance changes with it.

The same goes for the band behind the hero: the colour you pick there is brought down to a weight the dark appearance can carry, keeping its hue, so a pale blue band becomes a deep blue one rather than staying a bright stripe across a dark page. A gradient keeps its direction, and a colour already dark is left as it is.

None of it is out of your hands. Colors & type carries a sun and a moon at the top: dress the light appearance, flip the switch, and the same colours are there again for the dark one — background, card surface, borders, text, brand, accent and the comment badge, each with the colour the theme worked out already in the box, ready to be read or replaced. A dark colour follows the light one beside it until you change it; once you do, it is yours and stays where you put it. The preview beside the fields shows whichever appearance you are working on. The two hero colours work the same way.

• Appearance of the site — Light and Dark are what every visitor gets, whatever their own device is set to. Follow the system, the default, hands that decision to the device instead, which is what most sites do.
• Let visitors switch it from the header — on by default. It adds a button beside the search: a moon on the light appearance, a sun on the dark one. The site still starts from the appearance you chose; what a visitor picks with the button is then remembered in their browser. Switch it off and the appearance you chose is the only one there is — the button is gone and nothing can change it.

The top bar and the footer are dark in both appearances — that is the design — so they do not change. The header does: it is a white bar on the light appearance and a dark one here.

The appearance is decided before a single rule is read, in the head of the page, so the site never flashes white on its way to being dark. A visitor with JavaScript switched off still gets the dark appearance when their device asks for it.

6 · Demo content — the one click importer

For a WordPress that has no posts yet. One button, imported once, if at all.

On a brand new install there is nothing to configure the theme against: an empty homepage tells you nothing about what a grid or a hero will look like. The demo content fills the site with sample posts, categories, a page, menus and widgets so you can set the theme up on a homepage that behaves like a real one.

• You get the articles of the demo site, not filler: the galleries, the cover blocks, the tables, the review boxes, the shortcodes and the comments that make the "most commented" widget show something. Fourteen articles, fourteen categories, the menus and the widgets — and a full width page that shows every Gutenberg block the theme styles, one after the other.
• It is one set of content, not one per preset. Presets are previewed by their own thumbnails; you do not need to import fourteen posts to see what a palette does.
• The posts and pages travel inside the theme; the photographs are downloaded when you press the button — about 10 MB, once. Keeping fifty-five photographs in the zip would make every theme update a 10 MB download for something most sites import once, if at all.
• Everything imported is tagged. Remove demo content deletes exactly what was created — posts, pages, pictures, categories, comments — and never touches a post you wrote.

How the panel works

One screen, one subject. Nothing is applied until you save.

The panel lives under Pulsar Theme in the WordPress menu. The first page is an overview: one card per screen, each with a line saying what it holds and a badge with its current state — how many ad zones are on, whether the cookie banner is running, which preset was applied.

Three habits worth having

• The bar at the bottom. As soon as you change anything, a bar appears with Save settings. Until you press it, nothing is live. Leaving the page loses the changes.
• The live preview. Several screens have a preview on the right with a green dot and the word unsaved: it shows what you are doing before you commit to it. It renders with the real stylesheets of the site, so it is not an illustration.
• Sliders have a reset. Hover a slider row and a small arrow appears next to the number: it puts that value back to the theme's own.

Colors & type

The palette, the site font and every type size.

Colours

The theme is drawn in two appearances, light and dark, and the card sets one at a time. The switch at the top says which one you are dressing; everything below it belongs to that appearance.

Each row is one colour. You can set it in two ways, and they are the same value:

• Type the hex code in the field — this is what gets saved.
• Click the swatch on the left to open your system colour picker.

The button at the end of a row takes it back to where it started. On the light appearance that is the colour the theme ships with; on the dark one it is Auto, which hands the colour back to the calculation from the light colour beside it. A dark colour keeps following its light counterpart until you change it, and stays where you put it afterwards.

The soft tints the theme uses behind badges and behind selected text are derived from your brand colour, not fixed: change the brand and every tinted surface follows.

The colour of the hero band is not set here. It belongs to the band, and is set where the band is: Homepage → Hero, next to the layout it paints.

Corners

How round everything is — cards, images, buttons, the hero band, the pill around a category — in one setting for the whole site. Rounded is the theme as it is drawn, Slight keeps a hint of it, and Squared takes every corner down to nothing, which is the look of most motoring and sports mastheads.

Every radius in the theme is written as its own size times one number, so this changes all of them at once and none of them individually: nothing is redrawn, and going back to Rounded gives you the design exactly as it was. Shapes that are round by nature — the author avatars, the round buttons — use a percentage and stay round whatever you choose.

The Cars & bikes preset comes squared, the featured image included.

Site font

Twelve bundled families plus System, which uses the reader's device font and loads nothing at all. The bundled fonts are self-hosted: no request ever leaves your site. Custom lets you name any family you are loading yourself.

The list covers four registers rather than one: the neutral sans-serifs — Inter, Geist, DM Sans, Nunito, Open Sans, Lato — the geometric ones with more character — Poppins, Montserrat — the serifs, for a site that wants to read as a magazine rather than as an app — Playfair Display for headlines, Lora and Source Serif for text meant to be read at length — and one condensed, Oswald, which is the shape a sports or motoring masthead usually takes.

The same list of families is asked twice, and a tab decides which of the two you are looking at. Inner text is the family of the whole site: the text of the articles, the menus, the buttons, the author lines, the widgets and the captions. Headings only is the headlines of the articles, the section titles and the card titles — a serif over a sans is the oldest pairing a magazine has, and it changes the character of a site more than any colour does. Left on Theme default the headings follow the family of the site and the whole thing keeps one family, which is how the theme ships. Only the families actually in use are fetched: a system body with a serif on the headings loads one file set, not two.

The files are loaded so that the page is never repainted in a different family halfway through: the two the page needs are preloaded in the head, and the faces are declared font-display: optional. A family that arrives in time is drawn from the first paint; one that does not is left for the next page view, by which point it is in the cache. Either way there is no flash of one font replaced by another and nothing on the page moves — which is what the layout-shift figure of a performance report measures.

Type sizes

Sliders for body text, article text, headings and the card components. The two that matter most:

• Article — the size of the text inside a post. The theme steps down on phones; set this slider and your value holds on every screen.
• Article title — the headline on the single post page.

Every size has a phone twin, behind the desktop / mobile switch. A phone slider left at zero means as on desktop: the size is inherited and nothing is written. The one exception is Bento · small posts, where the theme has a phone size of its own — 15px — because on a phone those cards are stacked and the title has the width of the screen. Its slider says as the theme (15px) at zero, and moving it replaces that value.

The same is true of the two sizes at the top of an article, on Single posts: the headline is 22px on a phone and the subtitle 15px, on every style. A headline set for a wide column does not survive a screen four inches across, so the theme sets them apart rather than scaling the desktop value down.

Header & logo

Logo, site icon, the two menus, the top bar and the breaking bar.

The layout

The first choice on the screen, because it decides what the rest of it means. Six arrangements of the same pieces, each drawn on its own button:

On a phone the row of the logo closes up to the logo and the menu button, and the band that carries the menu is not drawn: it would be an empty strip, since that menu is already in the panel the button opens. The masthead banner is not drawn either, rather than shrunk to something illegible. The pictures of the cover and of the skin are drawn, shorter: in those two the picture is the arrangement, not a decoration for wide screens.

Two things follow from choosing a layout. First, the rest of the screen changes with it: a setting that the arrangement cannot carry is not offered — there is no top bar to configure under a cover photograph, because there is no top bar. Second, the settings belong to the layout: the top bar, the breaking bar, the menu style and the style of the category strip are kept separately for each one, so trying a different arrangement and going back finds everything as you left it. The logo and the site icon are the exception, shared by all of them, because they are the site's and not the layout's.

The two that lose the top bar lose it for a reason. A second dark strip above a header that is already one solid band reads as two headers; and a row of small links across the top of a cover photograph cuts in half the one thing that layout exists for. In the same two, the search keeps its icon and drops its placeholder: a wide field with a shortcut in it needs room those arrangements do not have.

Two switches on this screen belong to every layout. The breaking bar has one of its own, so it can be turned off without deleting the headlines written in it — and switched on with nothing written yet, it is drawn with its badge and no headlines, ready for the first. It starts off in the Centred arrangement, where a coloured strip immediately under a logo standing alone takes the eye off it, and on in the others. The category strip, the row a phone shows in place of the menu, can be drawn as tinted buttons or as the words alone.

The logo

There are four slots, and only the first is required:

You set them in the Customizer, under Site Identity — the panel has a card that shows the current logo and a button that takes you straight there. They are set there because that is where you see the logo on the real site while you choose it.

If no logo is set, Pulsar falls back in this order: the logo you set → the WordPress custom logo → the placeholder bundled with the theme → the site name as text. There is also a switch, Write the site name instead of a logo, if text is what you want.

Site icon

The small square shown in the browser tab. It is a WordPress setting, so the panel shows it and sends you to the Customizer rather than keeping a second copy of it.

Top bar and breaking bar

• Top bar — the thin strip above the header. Its two ends are set separately, on the Top bar card itself, and in different ways. The left end is composed: pick the pieces you want from the shelf — today's date, the social buttons, a WordPress menu, a line of free text — and they stand in the order you picked them — the last one picked is the one furthest to the right, which is also how they are reordered: take a piece out and put it back and it goes to the end. Two or more at one end are separated by a dot. Pick none and that end is empty. Two of them bring their own setting when you pick them: the free text a field, which keeps basic HTML — a link, bold, italic, a line break, and nothing else once the settings are saved — and the menu a list of the menus on the site, chosen by name rather than assigned to a location. One piece at each end is what the bar is built for: it is a single line of small type, and an end carrying several of them reads as a list rather than as the edge of the page. The right end is composed the same way, from the same shelf less the date: the social buttons, a menu, a line of free text. Same rules throughout — the order is the order you picked them in, two of them are separated by a dot, and each end has a menu of its own to choose. The right end, with no menu chosen, falls back to the one assigned to the top bar location. With both ends empty the strip is not drawn at all. The buttons show the profiles filled in under Social & Promo, one mark each in the colour of the bar rather than in the colours of the networks. The menu of that bar is referred to on the same card, so which menu it draws and whether it draws one are settled in one place.
• Breaking bar — the strip with a coloured badge and a scrolling line. One line per row, in the form Text|URL. The badge wording is yours to set. Leave the field empty and the bar disappears; leave it untouched and a welcome line is shown. The line stops on its own when the pointer is over it or the keyboard focus enters it, and a pause button at the end of the bar holds it still until it is pressed again — a scrolling line carries links, and they have to be catchable. Nothing scrolls at all for a visitor whose system asks for less movement.

Search

Two ways to find an article, and they agree with each other.

Instant search

The magnifier in the header opens a box that answers while you type — or press ⌘K (Ctrl+K on Windows) from anywhere on the site. Each result carries a small square thumbnail, so a piece can be recognised before its title is read.

From the keyboard: Esc closes and puts the focus back on the magnifier, ↑ and ↓ move through the results while the text cursor stays in the field (Home and End jump to the first and the last), Tab moves between the results without leaving the box, Enter opens the highlighted one. Typing a word and pressing Enter straight away goes to the full results page instead.

The results page

The same query, with the cards you see everywhere else, the sidebar, and pagination — the page for going through everything rather than picking the first thing that fits.

What both of them look at

Pulsar searches article titles, not the whole text, and asks for every word you typed to be there. Results come out newest first, not by relevance.

A news site is read for what happened, not for how often a word appears. Searching the body text would put a five-year-old piece that mentions the word in passing above today's article about it. The instant box and the results page use the same rule, so the first suggestion is the same article you find after pressing Enter.

Homepage

The homepage is a stack of blocks. You decide which ones, in what order, and how each behaves.

The screen has three tabs: Build your homepage, Customise the hero and Customise the article cards.

Building it

1. Add a block with the Add button, or switch off one you do not want.
2. Drag it by the handle to change the order, or use the up and down arrows next to the handle — the same buttons the WordPress dashboard puts on its boxes, and the way to reorder without a mouse. A block moves within its own band, and the arrow greys out when there is nowhere left to go. The homepage renders in exactly this order.
3. Open Configure on a block to set its title, how many articles it shows, which categories or tags it draws from, which card style it uses and whether it has a Load more button.

Some blocks can be added more than once — two grids pointing at different categories, for example. Each copy keeps its own settings.

The stories bar

The row of round covers at the very top, the shape a phone reader knows from Instagram: it scrolls sideways with a finger and each cover opens its article. It has four settings of its own, in Homepage:

Hidden on a device, it costs nothing at all: the block returns before it queries anything, so no markup and no database work — which is what makes it safe to leave on a site served through a page cache that splits by device.

The blocks

The blocks in the main column sit next to the homepage sidebar; the ones in the top and bottom bands run the full width of the page. That is why the order you can give them is not entirely free: a full width block cannot appear in the middle of a column.

There are two column bands, each with a sidebar of its own — Sidebar Homepage and Homepage · second sidebar — so the same widget is never shown twice on one page. Which sidebar a band shows is the first row of that band in Homepage: a fixed row, above the blocks, with a picker listing every sidebar on the site, each with the number of widgets in it. Out of the box the first band shows the first sidebar and the second band the second; swapping them is one click, and None turns that band into a full width one.

A column band always reserves the room for its sidebar, whether or not there are widgets in it: the column keeps the same width as the other band, and an empty strip is the sign that the sidebar is waiting to be filled from Appearance → Widgets.

Order

Every block that draws its own articles carries an Order control in Configure: Newest, Oldest or Random. It applies to grid, list, carousel, bento and timeline, on its own or together with a category or tag filter.

Random reshuffles on every page load, so a block set that way is never cached: use it on one block, not on all of them. The bento adds an Order, block 2 and Order, block 3, each with an extra Inherit value that follows the order set on the first column.

A second title for phones

Beside the desktop title and subtitle, Configure holds a second pair for the phone. Leave them empty — the placeholder says same as desktop — and the desktop text is used on every screen. Fill one in and a long heading can become a short one where the column is narrow.

Both versions are printed and the screen chooses between them in CSS, never by guessing the device, so the pair works behind a page cache that serves the same HTML to everybody.

Filter chips on the grid

The grid can show a row of chips that filter it without reloading the page. Each row is a category chosen from a searchable list, plus the label you want on the chip — leave the label empty and it uses the category name, so renaming the category renames the chip. On a site that already has posts, the three categories with the most articles are proposed until you save the field for the first time.

Load more

Grid, list, bento and timeline can each end with a Load more button that fetches the next batch without a page reload. You set how many articles per click. On the bento, one button widens all the columns together and no column ever repeats an article another has already shown.

Hero layouts

Five ways to open the homepage. Pick one in Homepage → Customise the hero.

The social buttons of layouts B and C

Both these layouts carry a side column, and in it a row of buttons for your social channels. A switch decides whether the row is drawn at all, and a list of tick boxes decides which networks it shows: Facebook, X, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Threads are ticked to begin with, Telegram and WhatsApp are there to be added, and any of the six can be taken away. They appear in the order of the list, which the two arrows on each card reorder — the same buttons work with the mouse and from the keyboard.

The two layouts keep their own choice, so the row can look one way in B and another in C. The address of each profile and its follower figure are set once, in Social & Promo: a network with no address still shows its button, pointing at the network's own home page and without a number — the theme never invents a follower count.

Settings common to all five

• Background — flat or gradient, set here or in Colors & type.
• How many articles the hero draws.
• Which articles — include or exclude categories and tags, by ID or by slug. A filter that matches nothing falls back to the most recent posts, so a fresh install never opens with an empty hero.

Layouts D and E

Both have two call-to-action buttons and a media slot. Two rules worth knowing: a button is drawn as soon as it has a label, so you can see it while you configure it, but it only becomes a real link when it also has an address. And if you leave the media empty, the theme draws its own placeholder rather than an empty box or a broken image.

Article cards

Nine card styles. Each block chooses one; you decide what each style shows.

Open Homepage → Customise the article cards. For every style there is a live preview built from your real posts, and a set of switches. The card Where each card is used tells you which blocks use which style.

What you can switch per style

• Where the category sits on the picture — bottom left or top left — on the styles that draw it there
• Category, and whether it has a background behind it
• Author name, author avatar (desktop and mobile separately)
• Date, and its format — condensed (19 Apr 2026) or extended (19 April 2026)
• Comment count, and whether the word "comments" is written out
• Excerpt

Single post

Everything on the page of one article, in the order it appears.

The screen is a numbered list of blocks, top to bottom, so it reads like the page itself: breadcrumbs, category, title and subtitle, sharing, meta line, featured image, content, tags, author box, previous/next, related articles, comments.

Article layout

The first card of the screen chooses how the page of an article is arranged. An arrangement decides where the pieces sit and what they stand on; it never decides what the page carries. That is what the switches under it are for, and they hold whichever arrangement you choose.

The arrangement chosen here is the site's. One article can be given an arrangement of its own in the Pulsar — article options box under the editor: its Layout field starts on As set in the theme panel, and left there the article follows the site — including when the site's choice changes later. Choosing an arrangement there changes that article and no other.

The same card carries the sidebar switch. With it off the sidebar is not rendered at all, in either arrangement, and the article takes the full width of the site, narrowing with the window as every other page does.

The settings you will actually use

Sharing

An article can be offered to the reader in three places, each with a switch of its own. They are plain links: nothing is loaded from anyone else, no script, no counter, no cookie.

The bar and the column are set separately, each under its own switch and shown only while that switch is on. Both choose a fill — the colour of the destination behind a white mark, or that mark in colour on the page — and both choose which destinations they carry, from Facebook, X, WhatsApp, Telegram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, email and a copy button, ticked and reordered like the social profiles. A short row above the piece and the whole list down its side is a perfectly reasonable pair of answers.

The column also chooses a shape, round or square, because there each button is a mark on its own. The bar does not: it is a row of buttons and takes the corners set for the whole site under Style, like every other button of the theme.

Pinterest is left out of an article with no featured image, which is the picture it would pin.

The button over the featured image is a different thing and has its own switch: it opens the sharing panel of the device itself, and where the browser has none it copies the address instead.

Your own block at the end

A space at the foot of every article that holds whatever you write into it: a referral offer, a newsletter form, a disclosure, a banner of your own — whatever the theme does not already provide. You will find it in Articles → Your own block at the end.

It is off unless you ask for it, and an empty one is not rendered at all: a switch left on with nothing in it would otherwise leave a gap under every article. Your markup goes into the page as you wrote it, so it can carry classes of your own and be styled from the child theme; it sits after the article and before the buttons at the end.

What you write there belongs to the site, not to the preset in use: switching preset never takes it away.

Images that open in a viewer

Click an image inside an article and it opens full size, over the page, with a dark backdrop and a close button — Escape works too. This covers the images you drop into the editor, which since WordPress 5 carry no link of their own, as well as any image you have linked to its own file.

The viewer always shows the largest size WordPress has made of that image, not the one scaled down for the column, so the detail is really there when the reader looks closer.

Left alone, on purpose: an image inside a link that points somewhere else (that link is meant to be followed), the pictures that belong to the theme's own blocks — product shots, card thumbnails, video posters, cover backgrounds — and anything drawn smaller than 140 px, which is an icon rather than a photograph. To exclude one image of your own, give it the class pls-no-lightbox.

The viewer works without a mouse: an image that can be opened is a tab stop, Enter or Space opens it, Tab stays inside the viewer while it is open and Esc closes it, returning the focus to the image.

The pill under the featured image

Between the image and the text Pulsar can show a single call to action: Add <your site> as a preferred source on Google. A reader who does that sees your articles more often in Top Stories and in Google's AI answers. It is on by default and lives in Articles → Bar under the image.

Clicking it adds the source without leaving the article — the reader stays where they were reading, and Google shows its own short confirmation. That is done with the module Google publishes for the purpose, not with Google's ready-made button: the pill is the theme's, in the theme's colours, and there is no third-party script in your pages.

When Google is contacted. Never while an article is being read. The module is fetched the first time a reader moves onto the pill — hover, touch or keyboard focus — which is a deliberate move towards it. With a mouse the pointer has to rest on it for a moment first (180ms): the pill sits where the pointer travels on its way down to the text, and a passing sweep should not cost a reader a download. Pages without the pill never load it at all.

If it cannot load — an old browser, a strict Content Security Policy, no connection — nothing breaks. The pill is a real link to Google's own page for the same purpose, and the click simply follows it, in a new tab, as any link would.

Two things worth knowing, both of them Google's doing. Only domains and subdomains can be preferred sources, not subdirectories: a site living at example.com/news/ is not eligible. And Google offers no way to know whether a reader has already added you, so the pill cannot show an “already added” state.

To keep the pill but never load the module, return false from the pulsar_google_preferred_inline filter; the pill then behaves as a plain link. To remove it altogether, switch it off in Articles.

The featured video

An article can open with a video instead of a still picture. You set it on the post, in the Pulsar — article options box beside the editor: paste the address of an .mp4 or .webm file, or a YouTube link, or press Choose from library to pick a video you have already uploaded.

Two switches sit next to the field. Loop makes it start again when it ends. Autoplay in cards lets the same video play inside the cards that list the article, on the homepage and in the archives; with it off the cards keep the still picture and the video plays only inside the article.

The featured image is still what gets drawn first, everywhere: the page paints with the picture and the video is swapped in once it is ready, so a slow connection sees the article rather than an empty frame. For the same reason the player script is only loaded on pages where a video actually is, and an article with no featured image cannot show a featured video — the picture is what stands in for it.

A YouTube video waits to be asked. Playing one means fetching YouTube's player from www.youtube.com, and that request carries whatever Google cookies the reader's browser already holds — so the theme does not make it on its own. The cover keeps the featured image and shows a play button; the video starts when the reader presses it, or straight away if your consent banner is on and the reader has granted Experience, the purpose that covers content from other platforms. A video hosted on your own site is not affected: it contacts nobody and plays as before.

If the question is settled elsewhere on your site — your own consent plugin, or an audience this does not apply to — one line in the child theme removes the wait:

add_filter('pulsar_youtube_click_to_play', '__return_false');

Posts from X, as cards

With this on, an address of a post on X alone on its own line is drawn as a card of your site — author, text, pictures, the quoted post. An address written inside a sentence stays the link you wrote. It is off until you turn it on, in Shortcodes & Reviews.

No script from X is loaded, no iframe, nothing that follows your readers. The post is read once, in the background, when you save the article — never while somebody is waiting for the page — and its text and pictures are copied to your site. The card therefore keeps working the day the original is deleted or made private, and your reader never asks X for anything.

A box in the editor, beside the article, lists the X posts it quotes and says when each was saved. Its Refresh button reads one again and replaces the stored copy: for a post that has been edited since, or one that failed to arrive the first time. It is the only moment that screen talks to the outside.

The review box

Every post can carry a review: a score out of ten, a set of criteria with their own scores, a verdict with a line of text, and lists of pros and cons. You fill it in on the post, in the Review box. Each criterion is drawn as a bar, and the number beside it reads either out of ten or as a percentage — that is the one choice. The overall score is what shows on the cards.

A site that never reviews anything can put the whole thing away: Shortcodes & Reviews → The review box → Let articles carry a review. Switched off, the fields leave the article editor, the box is not drawn and no score appears on the cards. Nothing is deleted: what was already written comes back the day it is switched on again.

The box comes from the Pulsar Core plugin, like the shortcodes and for the same reason: a score and a verdict are something you wrote, and what you write has to stay on your articles whatever theme comes next. The theme draws the box; the plugin owns the data. Switch the plugin off and the reviews are still there — they are simply not drawn — and nothing on the site breaks.

Ad block notice

A message to readers who are blocking the ads. Off unless you turn it on.

At the foot of the Ads screen. With it on, the theme looks for an ad blocker and — only when it finds one — shows a message you write: a title, a paragraph, and up to two buttons of your own, each with its label and address.

Pages

Static pages, category and tag lists, and search results.

Three kinds of page that are neither the front page nor an article, set apart because they are read apart: somebody arriving on a category is looking for more of the same, somebody who has searched is looking for one thing. Each keeps its own answers.

Defaults for every page, and an override on each one.

This screen sets what pages do in general: whether they show the sidebar, whether the featured image is printed, and the style of the title. Then, on any single page, the Pulsar box lets you decide otherwise for that page alone — a landing page with no sidebar, for instance, while every other page keeps it.

Sidebars & widgets

Six widget areas and thirteen widgets of the theme's own.

You fill them from Appearance → Widgets like any WordPress sidebar. Every widget of the theme is prefixed Pulsar: in the list.

The Social widget

The channels come from the same list the rest of the theme uses, so a profile is written down once. Tick the ones you want, reorder them with the arrows on each row, and the widget draws them in that order. The address of each profile and its follower figure are not set here: they live in Social & Promo, and every place that shows a channel reads them from there. A channel with no address points at the network's home page and shows no figure — an invented number is worse than none.

The follower counts have a switch of their own in the widget, independent of the row beside the hero: the same channels can carry their numbers in one place and not in the other.

So does the button style: Minimal or Flat, this widget alone, while the row beside the hero keeps the style chosen in Social & Promo. A widget you have never opened follows that choice; answering here once makes the style its own.

Under them you can add buttons of your own, as many as you like — a newsletter, a forum, a donation page, a channel the theme does not know about. Each one carries:

• An icon, or none. Every social mark plus a chat bubble and the PayPal mark, picked from the icons themselves rather than from a list of names.
• An image of your own instead of the icon, chosen from the media library. Keep it small: a button icon is 20px, so a light PNG is all it needs to be.
• A name and an address, on half a row or across it.
• A brand stripe down the left edge, if you want that button to stand out.

A button of your own is centred, icon and name together, because it has no follower figure to line up with. Corners follow the theme like everything else: rounded, slight or square, as the style you chose.

Footer

Four shapes for the band that closes every page.

The layout is chosen from a row of drawings at the top of the screen, and the cards under it follow: each one is shown while the layout it belongs to is in use, so the screen only ever asks for what the footer you have chosen actually draws.

What the columns hold

• The site block — logo, a description of the site and the small links under it. The logo follows the header's when you set none of its own: the dark version first, since the footer sits on a dark band. A site whose header carries no logo of its own shows none here either. The description has a switch of its own, on by default; left empty it prints a placeholder paragraph. The block is drawn in the columns and brand layouts, and the compact one keeps its logo.
• The network column — a short text about your network of sites, if you have one. Like the block above, the description has a switch of its own and falls back to the placeholder paragraph while the field is empty; it also takes basic HTML — bold, italic, links and line breaks. Under it, the image of the network and the list of its sites.
• The footer menu — a menu of quick links, set under Appearance → Menus. The compact layout draws the same menu in a row.
• Copyright bar — the line at the very bottom, plus a menu for legal pages.

Footer widgets

The footer has a widget area of its own, Footer under Appearance → Widgets, and every widget the theme brings can go in it. How many columns it is laid out across is set on this screen, and how many are offered follows the room the layout has: up to four in the widgets layout and under the written columns, and two beside the wide column of the brand — there the question is not asked, because that is the only number that fits. Beside the written columns it answers to a switch, because there it is an addition; in the brand and widgets layouts it is the layout itself, so there is nothing to switch off. An empty area draws nothing at all rather than a band of blank space.

You also choose the box around each widget, and the three answers are three different things. See-through, which is what the theme ships with, is a veil of the band's own light with a hairline around it: enough to set the widgets apart without putting a second panel inside the footer, and the text follows the colour of the band. Light and dark draw them as cards instead, the way they are drawn in a sidebar, with a light band free to carry dark cards and the other way round. The choice is set on the area as a whole, so it holds for the widgets of the theme and for anybody else's — the tab strips, the poll options and everything else inside them follow it too.

Picture strip

A row of pictures across the full width, above the footer: the opening image of a few articles, each one a link to its own, with an optional label over the middle of the band. The pictures come from your own articles — the most recent, or the most recent of the categories you name — so nothing outside the site has to be set up for the strip to appear, and it keeps working with no account, token or plugin behind it. Articles with no picture of their own are skipped.

Social buttons

One switch decides whether the footer carries the profiles you filled in under Social & Promo. Where they are drawn is the layout's business: in the site block of the brand layout, in the row of the compact one, and on the right of the copyright line in the others. A network with no address of yours is not drawn — the footer shows the profiles you actually have.

Appearance

The band is dark by default and can be light instead, and either can carry a picture behind it. The veil that keeps the text readable over the picture is drawn by the theme, in the colour of the band, so a picture can never be set in a way that makes the footer unreadable.

The credit line (Theme built with ♥ by…) has its own switch. Switch it off and the line is not printed; leave the text field empty and the default wording is used.

Social & Promo

Your profiles, the app banner and the newsletter box.

Social profiles

One address per network. A network with no address of yours still shows, but it points at the network's own home page and shows no follower count — the theme never invents numbers.

Button style

How your social buttons are drawn, everywhere the theme draws them — the row beside the hero in layouts B and C, and the Social widget. Two examples under the choice show what each one looks like.

• Minimal — the theme's own button: a light surface, the mark in the colour of the network, the follower figure beside it. This is what a fresh install starts with.
• Flat — the button filled with the colour of the network, its mark in white on a darker square at the leading edge and the follower figure at the far end. Every network is filled with a gradient: its own colour deepening towards the end the figure sits on, and for Instagram the four stops its mark is drawn with. The three whose mark is black carry a colour instead — a button filled with black would be a hole in the page — with X keeping the dark grey of the three.

Buttons per row decides whether they stand two side by side, which is what a fresh install does, or one across the width of the column they are in.

App banner

A promo block for an iOS app: icon, name, slogan, App Store button, rating and review count, with two phones drawn in CSS. It is on by default so the block is there to look at, with grey placeholders in place of the icon and the screenshots until you provide your own. Nothing leaves your server on its own: the switch that reads from Apple ships off.

1. Paste the App Store address of your app. Without it everything is drawn except the button, which would lead nowhere.
2. Switch on Look the app up automatically to have the icon, the rating and the number of ratings read from Apple's public iTunes lookup — as soon as the address is written, and once a week afterwards, never while a visitor is loading the page.
3. Or leave it off and fill those three in yourself: with the lookup off the banner shows exactly what you write.
4. Add the two screenshots, portrait, around 588×1280. A phone with no picture keeps its shape and shows a light grey screen.
5. Switch the block off in Use the app banner if your site has no app.

Newsletter

The theme draws the box; a plugin collects the addresses. That division is deliberate: collecting an email means storing personal data, sending confirmations and honouring unsubscribes, and that has to survive a change of theme.

1. Install a newsletter plugin. The screen recognises MC4WP, Newsletter, MailPoet, Brevo and FluentCRM and tells you which are installed, but any plugin works.
2. Paste its shortcode into Form shortcode.
3. Write the wording — eyebrow, title, text, small print.

Until a shortcode is in place the block is not shown to visitors at all: a sign-up box that collects nothing is worse than no box. As an administrator you still see a line explaining why.

Ads

Six zones in the panel — three of them inline in the article — plus a widget for the sidebar. Each one arrives switched off.

The theme carries no ad markup of its own: a zone renders exactly what you paste, and if the field is empty nothing is printed — no container, no "Advertisement" label, no reserved height.

With AdSense

Put your publisher ID (ca-pub-…) in Integrations and the theme injects the loader once, in the right place. You can then paste just the <ins> block into a zone. Slots are only requested when they have a width and are near the viewport, and a slot the network does not fill collapses instead of leaving an empty labelled box.

SEO

Enough on its own; silent if you use a plugin.

Pulsar emits meta description, Open Graph and Twitter cards, robots directives, canonical links and JSON-LD structured data for articles, breadcrumbs and your organisation. If Yoast, Rank Math, SEOPress or All in One SEO is active, the theme steps aside and lets the plugin do it — there is nothing to configure to make that happen.

What to fill in

• Organisation name and logo — used in the structured data of every page.
• Country and what the site is about — both optional, and both left empty on purpose: a country you did not choose would be wrong on every site but one.
• Official social profiles — the sameAs list that ties your accounts to your site.
• Editorial policy pages — for Google News, if you have them.

The canonical link is emitted where WordPress does not do it itself, and page two of an archive is canonical to itself, never to page one: they hold different articles, and pointing them at the same address asks Google to ignore everything after the first page.

Performance

Two switches of the theme's own, and three things it cannot do for you.

Critical CSS

A page's stylesheets block rendering: the browser will not paint until they arrive. Critical CSS is the small slice needed for what is visible first, printed straight into the page, with the rest loaded without blocking. It is the single change with the largest effect on First Contentful Paint and Largest Contentful Paint, which is most of the PageSpeed score.

1. Switch on Inline critical CSS. It is off by default.
2. Press Generate. The measurement runs in your own browser, in hidden frames, for a handful of page templates. Nothing is sent anywhere.
3. Leave Keep it up to date automatically on. The file is a snapshot of the theme as it is today, so when you change settings or stylesheets it goes out of date — and the theme quietly re-measures, at most once every fifteen minutes, while you are in the admin.

Hero image preload

Tells the browser to start fetching the main image of the page immediately. It is aimed squarely at LCP.

What the theme cannot do alone

1. Resize old images — a site with an existing archive needs Regenerate Thumbnails run once. The screen counts your images and tells you whether it is actually worth it.
2. Cache pages — a page cache stores the generated HTML and serves it without running WordPress. W3 Total Cache is what Pulsar was built and tested against; any other cache plugin does the same job. Switch on page cache and browser cache first.
3. Search a large archive — WordPress searches with a LIKE that no index can serve, so every search reads the whole posts table and results come out by date, not relevance. Above a thousand posts, Relevanssi Light replaces that query with a MySQL FULLTEXT index. This is the one thing a cache never helps with, because every search is a different query.

What the theme talks to

Every server this theme can reach, when, and whether you asked for it.

A fresh install talks to nothing. Every request below is made by a feature that is either off until you turn it on, or one you started by pressing a button. None of them happens while a visitor is reading a page, except the ones you configure yourself — your ad network, your analytics.

Privacy & cookies — GDPR consent

A GDPR consent banner built into the theme. Off by default, because it is a legal decision.

When you switch it on, visitors get a banner and a preferences panel with four purposes — functionality, experience, measurement, marketing — plus the strictly necessary ones, which cannot be switched off. Consent Mode v2 starts with everything denied and is updated with the reader's choice, which is stored in a cookie for 180 days. Nothing is sent anywhere: it is a consent manager, not a service.

Integrations

Google Analytics 4 and AdSense, and nothing else.

• Consent Mode v2 — switch on if you serve European traffic; it is what makes a consent banner actually work.
• Anonymise IP — sends anonymize_ip with the tag. A GA4 property already truncates the address on collection and ignores it; it is the setting that matters if you point the field at a legacy Universal Analytics property instead.

Everything on this screen sends data to somebody else. Nothing is active until you fill a field in: with the measurement ID empty the theme prints no Analytics tag at all. Fill it in and the tag goes out in <head>, after the consent banner has had its say.

Shortcodes

Eleven blocks for your articles and pages, provided by the Pulsar Core plugin.

The Shortcodes (plugin) screen of the panel — named that way because the shortcodes come from the Pulsar Core plugin, not from the theme — lists them all, each with its own switch, a copyable example and a live preview in desktop and mobile width. There is also a master switch: with it off, no shortcode is drawn and its stylesheet is never sent.

[app]

A card for an iOS app: icon, name, developer and a button. With just an ID it reads name, developer, price and icon from Apple's public lookup and caches them for a week.

[app id="331441694"]

The ID is the number in the App Store address. You can override anything by writing it: name, developer, price, icon_url, rating, ratings, link.

[product]

A product box: picture, title, price, previous price, a badge and a button. No API, no keys, nothing updates on its own — it shows what you write, which is also what affiliate programmes ask of a stated price.

[product img="https://example.com/photo.jpg" title="In-ear headphones with active noise cancelling"
         price="199,00 €" full_price="249,00 €" badge="Lowest ever" link="https://example.com/offer"]
  A short description of the product, between the tags.
[/product]

The discount is worked out for you from the two prices — you do not write the percentage. Both 1.299,99 and 1,299.99 are understood. The link is marked sponsored.

[read] and [read-also]

The same block in two modes. [read] takes post IDs and builds the card from the post itself; [read-also] is the manual version, for an article somewhere else.

[read]2261096[/read]
[read]2261096, 2261094[/read]

[read-also title="An article on an external site" subtitle="An optional description of the link"
           img="https://example.com/photo.jpg" link="https://example.com/article"]

Which shape you get depends on the tag, not on how many IDs you write:

So use [read] when each article deserves its own space, and [read-also] when they are a row of related links at the end of a paragraph.

[section-title]

[section-title]Our verdict on the product[/section-title]

[button] and [menu-button]

A full-width row that acts as a link, with an icon or a picture. [menu-button] is the same thing without the frame, for a list of links.

[button label="Guide" title="How to set it up" subtitle="In ten minutes"
        icon="https://example.com/icon.svg" link="https://example.com/guide"
        mobile="Short line shown on phones"]
  The longer description, between the tags.
[/button]

[tabnav]

A row of tabs. The entries are an attribute, separated by commas, and current counts from zero.

[tabnav titles="Introduction, The test, The numbers, The verdict" current="0"]

The tabs become links when you add link, one address per entry, in the same order and separated by commas the same way; target="_blank" then opens them in a new tab. With images each tab takes a small picture beside its words, again one per entry. style chooses the look: light (the default), dark, flat-light or flat-dark. Wrapping a title in double braces prints it in bold — {{The verdict}}.

[tabnav titles="Introduction, The test, {{The verdict}}"
        link="/intro, /test, /verdict"
        images="https://example.com/a.svg, https://example.com/b.svg, https://example.com/c.svg"
        style="dark" current="2" target="_blank"]

[horizontal-menu]

A row of small cards that scrolls sideways, fading at the right edge so it is clear it continues.

[horizontal-menu name1="Phones" link1="/phones" img1="https://example.com/1.svg"
                 name2="Tablets" link2="/tablets" img2="https://example.com/2.svg"]

Up to ten items. The picture is img1, img2 and so on; image1 is accepted too. Add new1="New" to put a badge on an item.

[video]

A video player with a still. The source goes between the tags, not in an attribute. The still is img; poster is accepted too. Give it name and description as well and the video is described to search engines.

A video that speaks should carry its subtitles: captions takes the address of a WebVTT file and the player offers them. captions_lang says which language they are in (the site's own if you leave it out) and captions_label what the menu calls them.

[video img="https://example.com/poster.jpg" controls="yes"
       captions="https://example.com/subtitles.vtt" captions_lang="en"]
https://example.com/video.mp4
[/video]

[video img="https://example.com/poster.jpg" name="The title" controls="yes"]
https://example.com/video.mp4
[/video]

[timed-content]

Content that stays hidden until a moment you choose — anything can go inside: text, a picture, a video, an iframe, a live blog. The time zone goes at the end of the date, in database form.

[timed-content show="2026-06-08 16:00 Europe/Rome"]
  Whatever appears at that moment.
[/timed-content]

With no time zone written, the site's own is used.

Language

The language of the panel, and translation import and export.

Pulsar ships in English and Italian. This screen sets the language of the panel only — the site itself follows WordPress, which is what you want: keeping the panel in your language should not put the whole site in it.

• Export gives you a .po file of the English catalogue, to hand to a translator or to a machine.
• Import takes a .po or .mo back, compiles it and stores it in wp-content/languages/themes/ — outside the theme, so it survives updates. Entries left untranslated are discarded rather than saved as empty.

About the theme

Version, credits, and registering your copy.

Registering is optional and gates nothing. The theme behaves identically whether you register or not; it exists so that we have your purchase code in hand when you ask for support.

1. Find your purchase code in your ThemeForest downloads, under Licence certificate & purchase code.
2. Paste it into the box and press Register.

An optional second step. Once the code has been checked against the sale, the screen offers a Confirm with Envato button. It takes you to Envato, you sign in to your own account, and you come back with a green tick that says two things: the purchase code was verified, and this copy belongs to you. It exists because a purchase code is not a secret — anyone holding a copy of it could otherwise claim your registration — and it lets us tell the owner of a licence from anyone else. Like the registration itself it gates nothing, and a copy that is never confirmed keeps every feature. We ask Envato for your account name and nothing else.

What is sent, and only when you press that button: the purchase code, the address and name of the site, the administrator's email, the theme version, the WordPress and PHP versions and the locale. If our server is unreachable the code is saved anyway and delivery is retried on its own — after an hour, then a few hours apart, then once a day, for about a week — until it goes through. A server of ours being down is not your problem. While it has not gone through, the panel says Not delivered yet rather than Registered, and the Credits screen carries a button to try again straight away.

Removing the code. Remove the code from this site deletes it here and tells our server to withdraw the registration: the site address, its name, the administrator's email and the network address are erased from our records, and only the purchase code and the date remain, so we know the registration existed and was withdrawn. The address itself is stored without its last part, so it never identifies one connection. What is left of a withdrawn registration — a purchase code and two dates — is deleted a year later. Write to us and we will delete any row on request.

Menus

Five positions, built the usual WordPress way.

Build them in Appearance → Menus. Menus created by the theme are named Pulsar - … so you can tell them from your own.

Mega menu

Any top level item of the header menu can open a panel with the categories on the left and their latest articles beside them, as cards. It is built in the menu screen, with no setting of its own:

1. Open the item in Appearance → Menus — the top level one that should open the panel, say News — and tick Open as a mega menu. The box is only offered on top level items, because only those open a panel.
2. Put categories under it, indented one level. Each one becomes a tab on the left of the panel; the first is the one shown when the panel opens.

A menu built before this box existed used the CSS class mega instead. That still works and needs no change: the theme reads the box or the class, whichever it finds.

Each tab lists the four most recent articles of its category, drawn with the same card the homepage uses. A category with nothing in it says so rather than opening an empty panel.

The children have to be categories: a page or a custom link under a mega item is drawn as an ordinary submenu entry and does not become a tab. If the item marked mega is itself a category and has no categories under it, the panel shows that one category.

Image sizes

What the theme generates, and what to upload.

Translating the site

Two different things, often confused.

1. Translating the theme's own words — "Read more", "comments", the labels around your content. Use the import and export in Language.
2. Running the site in several languages — that is a job for a multilingual plugin (WPML, Polylang and the like). Pulsar uses standard WordPress functions throughout, so those plugins work with it, but the theme does not do it on its own.

Filters for developers

The hooks the theme exposes, for a child theme's functions.php.

There is also an action, pulsar_preset_applied, fired right after a preset is written.

FAQ

I activated the theme and the homepage looks like a blog, not like the demo.

The homepage is built from blocks and starts with a sensible default. Apply a preset (Presets) and, on a new site, import the demo content.

The shortcodes print as text in my articles.

The Pulsar Core plugin is not active. Install it from the package, or use the Install the plugin button on the Shortcodes screen.

My images look soft, or the pages are heavy.

Images uploaded before the theme was installed do not have the sizes it asks for. Run Regenerate Thumbnails once — the Performance screen tells you whether you need to.

I changed a setting and the site looks the same.

Three usual reasons, in the order worth checking:

1. You have not pressed Save settings yet. The bar at the bottom of the panel is still showing.
2. A page cache is serving the old HTML. Clear it after saving.
3. The critical CSS is still the old one. If you switched it on, a slice of stylesheet is printed inside every page, and it is a snapshot of the theme as it was when it was generated: until it is rebuilt, the first thing a visitor sees is painted with the old rules. It regenerates by itself while you are in the admin — at most once every fifteen minutes — or immediately from Performance → Generate.

Where do my settings go if I switch theme?

They stay in the database, untouched. Switch back and they are all there. The shortcodes keep working under another theme too, because they live in the plugin.

Can I use it on more than one site?

That is set by the licence you bought on ThemeForest, not by the theme. A regular licence covers one end product.

The comment counts on the cards are wrong for a moment.

They are refreshed after the page loads so the HTML can be cached. The number you see first is the one from the cached page; a second later it is the real one.

Licences and credits

The PHP inherits the GNU GPL v2 or later, because it extends WordPress. Stylesheets, scripts, images and the design are covered by the licence you accepted when you bought the theme, which defines how many installations you may run and what you may not redistribute. Support and updates come from where you bought it.

Third party work included

External services, and what leaves your site

The theme can make exactly two calls outside your server, both optional and both stated in readme.txt: Apple's public iTunes lookup, for the app banner and the [app] shortcode; and our registration endpoint, only when you press Register.

Registering your copy

Nothing is sent until you press Register. When you do, exactly this goes to ispazio.net, and nothing else:

• the purchase code you typed;
• the address and the name of this site;
• the administrator email address;
• the theme name and version, the WordPress and PHP versions, and the site language.

It is used for two things: verifying the purchase with Envato, and reaching you about updates and security fixes. It is kept while the licence is in use, because that is what the record is for. Your network address is never stored whole — its last part is dropped before it is written, so it identifies nobody.

You can take it back. Press Remove the code from this site, in Pulsar → Credits, and the site asks the server to withdraw the registration: the site address, its name, the administrator email and the network address are erased at once, and what remains — a purchase code and two dates — is deleted a year later. Or write to ispazio@gmail.com and ask.

The address the theme talks to can be changed, or the whole thing switched off, with the pulsar_registration_endpoint filter: a theme that phones home should be a theme you can point elsewhere.