We understand that it can be quite a process getting started with WordPress & Avada. There’s a lot to learn!

In light of this, we have prepared a starter pack for you pertaining to the Avada Website Builder, WordPress and everything in between.

Below are links to help files, online documentation, and videos and other tutorials, to help make this process easier and more enjoyable for you. Remember to use the Live Search function at the top of the page, as most of the time, answers to your questions will be in our documentation or videos, waiting to be found. There are also community resources like the Facebook Users Group. If you are unable to find an answer to your questions, you can always submit a support ticket, and one of our global support gurus will personally assist you. Before you can do this, you must first register for support by following these steps.

Avada is one of the most fully featured and capable WordPress based Website Builders in existence. Like any software product, there is of course a learning curve, but thanks to the intuitive features, the extensive documentation, tutorial videos and customer support, we know you’ll soon be building websites like the pros. Welcome to Avada!

Apart from the required and other bundled premium plugins in Avada, there are also links in the Avada > Plugins section to seven other recommended plugins. They are completely optional to install, and are all free. Some of these plugins are used in various prebuilt websites, and so these are required to be installed for the full import of these websites. These plugins are also fully design integrated with Avada.

They are PWA, WooCommerce, the Events Calendar, Yoast SEO, HubSpot, and bbPress. For more information on these leading plugins, please read below, and watch the video for a visual overview.

HubSpot is a powerful inbound marketing and sales cloud-based software suite, and their free plugin help connects your HubSpot account to your website. Their tools and service offerings help companies and individuals attract visitors, convert leads, control their marketing efforts, manage their sales processes, and much more.

WooCommerce is one of the world’s leading eCommerce solution, and is owned by Automattic, the creators of WordPress. With almost 80 million downloads, WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce platform on the web. There is deep design integration with Avada with this plugin, and it’s the perfect solution if you have something to sell.

For more information on how to integrate WooCommerce with Avada, please see the WooCommerce docs.

The Events Calendar plugin is one of the world’s most popular events plugins, and is created and developed by Modern Tribe. It has a huge range of features and full design integration with Avada. For events, you can’t go past it.

For more information on how to set up The Events Calendar with Avada, please see the linked documentation.

Yoast SEO is one of the world’s leading SEO plugins, and uses a simple traffic light system to show you how well your pages rank in SEO terms for the search engines. This is often one of the first plugins added to a site, and with Avada, you can add it with a single click.

Are you looking for a timeless, elegant, and streamlined discussion board? bbPress is easy to integrate, easy to use, and is built to scale with your growing community.

bbPress is intentionally simple, yet infinitely powerful forum software, built by contributors to WordPress. With bbPress, you can quickly set up a place for discussion, subscriptions, and more!

PWA stands for Progressive Web App. This is being developed by Google, and provides new caching strategies to the Avada experience, and also allows your users to install your website as an app, for deeper user engagement.

Read more about PWA and Avada in the Avada And Progressive Web Apps doc.

Apart from the two required plugins, Avada Core and Avada Builder, the Avada Website Builder also includes six other bundled, premium plugins. They are completely optional but are very useful and are required for the full import of some of the prebuilt websites. They are Avada Custom Branding, Slider Revolution, LayerSlider WP, Advanced Custom Fields PRO, Convert Plus, and FileBird Pro.

These premium plugins come bundled with Avada and do not require additional licensing to use. But before you can install the bundled plugins, you must first register your purchase. If so required, each of these plugins can also be downloaded from the Downloads page (found under Support > Downloads) on My Avada.

Many themes sold on ThemeForest come bundled with premium plugins from CodeCanyon. A plugin offers additional functionality and features beyond a typical WordPress installation, and you do not need additional licensing in order to use the plugin with your theme. Support for the plugins, however, will come from ThemeFusion, and not the plugin author. The terms and conditions for bundled plugins are set out by Envato.

The Avada Website Builder includes two required plugins – Avada Core & Avada Builder.

When you install and then register Avada, you will be prompted to install the required plugins. All plugins with Avada can be found at Avada > Plugins. Here, a single click will install each of the required plugins. It’s the same with updates. When Avada is updated, updates for Avada Core and Avada Builder will be available as well, and again, a single click will update each of the plugins. It’s that simple.

The Avada Builder is our 100% in-house built page and content builder. It is intuitive, performance-enhanced, user-friendly, and has useful features that save precious time by improving your web design workflow.

The Avada Builder plays a major role in site creation and is a vital part of the Avada ecosystem. It allows for quick and easy site creation and customization and includes an intuitive Avada Live drag ‘n’ drop visual builder.

Current version 3.11.11

The Avada Core is Avada’s companion plugin, and is required to be installed, alongside the required Avada Builder plugin for the Avada Website Builder to operate as intended.

Current version 5.11.11

A WordPress child theme allows you to apply custom code changes to your site. Using a child theme ensures that all your customizations will not be overwritten even when you update the parent theme. Continue reading below to learn how to setup your own child theme, and watch the video for a visual overview.

A child theme is a theme that has all the functionality and styling of another theme, called the parent theme, which in our case is Avada. Child themes are the recommended way of modifying the code of an existing theme, because a child theme preserves all custom code changes and modifications even after a theme update.

If you modify code directly in a parent theme, and then update the parent theme, your changes will be lost. Always use a child theme if you intend modifying core code. Child themes can be used for a number of things, such as custom CSS applications, template file modifications, and custom PHP functions and/or hooks. There are a couple of methods to modify a child theme. Child themes don’t guarantee that an update of custom code on the parent theme will not require further maintenance. This is especially true if you copy files from the parent theme to your child theme.

Before anything else, you must first download and install the Avada child theme to begin making your customizations. The Avada child theme comes with downloading Avada’s Full Package from ThemeForest, and the method of installing it is exactly the same as installing Avada normally. Please follow the detailed steps below on how to download and install the Avada child theme.

Step 1 – Login to your ThemeForest account and go to your Downloads tab.

Step 2 – Locate your Avada purchase, and click Download. Choose the ‘All Files & Documentation’ option.

Step 3 – Once the .ZIP file is finished downloading, locate it on your computer and extract it. You will then have a folder called Avada_Full_Package.

Step 4 – Navigate to Avada_Full_Package > Avada Theme and you will see an Avada.zip file and an Avada-Child-Theme.zip file.

Step 5 – Before installing the Child Theme, you must first have Avada (the parent theme) installed. You install the child theme using the exact process of installing the parent theme. You can choose to install the theme zip files via WP upload or via FTP upload.

There are a several methods you can use to modify a child theme, and we’ll be explaining 3 methods below. These methods are copying files from a parent theme, pluggable functions, and actions and filters. To learn more about each one, please continue reading below.

Copying files from the parent theme to a child theme is a common method to make code customizations. This is the easiest method available, but there are limitations to it. Due to the limitations, we recommend only copying the files inside the templates folder from the parent theme into the child theme.

Pluggable functions are PHP functions that can be changed inside a child theme or a even a plugin. If a function is wrapped inside a function_exists call within the parent theme, you can create the same function in the child theme which will override the original function from the parent theme, because child theme functions are loaded first.

To change the rendering of the Page Title Bar, you can override Avada’s avada_get_page_title_bar_contents function, which is located in Avada/includes/custom_functions.php. The function definition looks like this:

Simply copy the function to the functions.php of the child theme, which will override the parent theme’s one. Once done, you can modify it to meet your needs.

The correct and safest way of updating or modifying theme functions within a child theme is using actions and filters. Apart from the actions and filters built-in within Avada, you can use the default WordPress actions and filters to modify the theme’s functionality.

A simple example would be changing the image size generated for blog large layout thumbnails in Avada. The correct way to re-register within the child theme is to use after_setup_theme action in the child theme functions.php, remove the image size and then re-register the image size.

If you’d like to learn and read even more about child themes, please follow the links below.