Before you start

SportPulse is a block theme for sports sites, and it ships eight complete starter sites: a tipster service, a sports newsroom, a football club, an esports organisation, a sports academy and a bookmaker-review publication, plus light-palette twins of the tipster service and the newsroom. You pick one, import it, and then replace its words and pictures with yours.

Ten minutes spent on this chapter saves an hour later. The two things that catch people out are both here: the plugin that travels beside the theme, and the fact that a demo import replaces the content on the site it runs on.

What you downloaded

Your purchase is a single file, sportpulse_main.zip. Unzip it. Inside:

The same manual is published at docs.themes.anpsthemes.com/sportpulse/, which is the copy to read before you buy and the one that is updated with each release. The copy in your download is the one that works with no connection.

Do not upload sportpulse_main.zip to WordPress. It is the wrapper, not the theme, and WordPress will reject it with "The package could not be installed". Unzip it on your computer first and upload sportpulse.zip.

The plugin is deliberately not inside the theme zip. Envato's Theme Check rejects any .zip file shipped inside a theme, so the plugin travels beside it in the download and you upload it once, by hand or with the button the theme offers you. See Installing.

What your site needs

Everything below is ordinary shared hosting. The numbers matter most during a demo import, which moves several hundred posts and copies every image the demo uses into your media library in one run.

You do not have to check any of this by hand. Once the theme and plugin are active, Appearance → Theme Options → System requirements prints your server's real values against the ones above, grouped into four tables, with a Copy all as text button. If you have to open a ticket with your host or with us, paste that instead of describing it.

Anything that would actually break is marked as needing a fix; the rest is listed because support will ask for it. The Demo import screen repeats only the failing rows, immediately above the demo cards.

How the theme, plugin and demos fit together

Three parts, and it is worth knowing which does what before you customise anything.

SportPulse, the theme, is the design layer: the block templates, the header and footer parts, the type scale, the palettes and the per-demo CSS. It is what an update replaces, which is why your own edits belong in the child theme or in Custom CSS.

Anps Theme Plugin carries the working parts: all the SportPulse blocks, the Theme Options screen, the sports content types — fixtures, predictions, players, bookmakers and the rest — and the demo importer. It is required. With the theme active and the plugin missing, you get a plain site and a notice telling you so.

The demo packs live inside that plugin. Each one is a real site that a designer built and exported: pages, media, menus, content, settings and a colour and font layer. Importing a pack reproduces that site here.

The plugin is not optional. Blocks, settings, content types and the demo importer are all in it. Install it before you do anything else.

How to read this manual

Read Installing and The eight demos now, then Importing a demo — in that order, because an import replaces content and you want to choose once.

After that the manual is reference, not a course. Go to the chapter for the job in front of you:

• Changing colours, fonts, header, footer and settings — Theme Options, tab by tab and Colours, fonts and spacing.
• Editing pages and adding sections — Building pages, or Building pages with Elementor if you work in Elementor.
• Fixtures, squads, predictions, bookmakers and the other data behind the pages — Sports content and data.
• Selling kit or merchandise — Shop and products.
• Looking a block up by name — Block reference.
• Publishing an accessibility statement — Accessibility.
• Installing a cache or optimisation plugin — Caching and optimisation plugins, before you turn its JavaScript settings on.
• Changing how something behaves in code — Extending the theme.
• Something looks wrong — Troubleshooting.

Admin paths are written as arrow chains, like Appearance → Theme Options → Theme styles. Anything in code type is a slug, a setting key or a file path — something you type or search for, not something you translate.

Installing

Two zips, in this order: the theme, then the plugin. Ten minutes on a normal host. On almost every host nothing here needs FTP, and nothing here is irreversible — the irreversible step is the demo import, and that comes later.

Install the theme

1. Go to Appearance → Themes → Add New → Upload Theme.
2. Choose sportpulse.zip from your unzipped download.
3. Click Install Now, then Activate.

Upload the right zip. sportpulse.zip, not sportpulse_main.zip. The _main file is the wrapper around the whole download; WordPress answers "The package could not be installed" if you hand it that one. If your host refuses the upload on size, it is the upload_max_filesize row in What your site needs.

On activation you land on Appearance → Theme Options, on the Demo import tab. That is deliberate; see What happens next.

Install the Anps Theme Plugin

The theme cannot work alone, and it says so. Every admin screen shows a notice: SportPulse needs the Anps Theme Plugin for its blocks, demos and settings. It is in your download, in the plugins folder. — with an Upload plugins/anps_theme_plugin.zip button that opens the upload screen for you.

1. Click that button, or go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.
2. Choose plugins/anps_theme_plugin.zip from your unzipped download.
3. Click Install Now, then Activate.

The plugin zip is about 23M. It carries the eight demo packs — every page, product, fixture and photograph of all eight starter sites — which is why it is far larger than the theme. Most hosts accept it. A host still capped at the old 2M or 8M default will refuse the upload with The uploaded file exceeds the upload_max_filesize directive, and that is a limit on the upload, not a problem with the file.

Three ways past it, in the order worth trying:

1. Raise the limit. upload_max_filesize and post_max_size to 32M. Many hosts expose both in their control panel; otherwise ask support to set them. You want this anyway — the requirements table asks for 32M for the demo import too.
2. Upload by FTP or your host's file manager. Unzip plugins/anps_theme_plugin.zip on your computer, then upload the resulting anps_theme_plugin folder into wp-content/plugins/ so you end up with wp-content/plugins/anps_theme_plugin/anps_theme_plugin.php. Activate it under Plugins. No size limit applies to FTP.
3. Use WP-CLI, if your host offers it: wp plugin install /path/to/anps_theme_plugin.zip --activate.

You do this once. The plugin travels as its own zip beside the theme because a WordPress theme may not carry plugin files inside itself — it is not something that went missing from the theme zip.

If the plugin is already on the site but switched off, the notice changes to a single Activate Anps Theme Plugin button, and one click is the whole job.

In Plugins the entry is called Anps Theme Plugin. That is its real name; there is no separate "SportPulse" plugin to look for.

Without it, the theme renders base templates and nothing else. Specifically, you lose:

One plugin per ANPS theme, and it must be this one. If you have used another ANPS theme on this site, its plugin is still installed and it will not register SportPulse's blocks. The notice names the theme the installed plugin was built for and offers Upload the right plugin; upload plugins/anps_theme_plugin.zip from the SportPulse download and it replaces the other one. Do not run two of them.

A version notice works the same way: if the plugin is older than the theme needs, you are told which version to update to. See Licence, updates and support.

The child theme

sportpulse-child.zip is optional, and most sites never need it. Install it only if you intend to edit theme files — a template, a template part, or PHP in functions.php. Colours, fonts, menus, Custom CSS and everything on the Theme Options screen are stored in the database, survive an update on their own, and are not a reason to use a child theme.

If you do want it:

1. Install sportpulse-child.zip the same way as the theme.
2. Activate SportPulse Child — instead of SportPulse, not as well as. Only one theme is ever active.
3. Leave SportPulse itself installed. The child theme is only the files you changed; everything else still comes from the parent, and deleting the parent breaks the site.

Switching to the child theme keeps your settings and content. It does re-run the one-time redirect described in What happens next, unless a demo is already imported.

Install WooCommerce

WooCommerce is not required by the theme, and six of the eight demos do not use it. Install it if either of these is true:

• You are importing Team or E-gaming. Both packs ship products — club kit and accessories, apparel and gear — and without WooCommerce those products are skipped and the store pages are empty.
• You intend to sell something, whichever demo you start from.

Install it from Plugins → Add New → Search plugins, search for WooCommerce, then Install Now and Activate. Do it before importing a demo, so the products land in the same pass as the pages. If you install it afterwards, re-import the demo.

WooCommerce's own setup wizard asks for your country, currency and shipping. Answer it; the demo overwrites the currency and unit settings when it imports, so it is worth finishing the wizard first and letting the demo have the last word. What the theme adds on top — catalogue columns, showcase mode — is in Shop and products.

Check it worked

Four quick checks, in the admin:

• Appearance → Themes shows SportPulse (or SportPulse Child) as active, and no notice at the top of the screen.
• Plugins shows Anps Theme Plugin as active.
• Appearance → Theme Options opens, with a Demo import tab at the top of the left rail.
• Appearance → Theme Options → System requirements shows your server values, with nothing flagged as needing a fix.

If a requirement is flagged, fix it before importing a demo, not after — a half-finished import is much more work than a raised memory limit. Your host does this; the Copy all as text button gives them the exact list.

What happens next

Right after you activate the theme, it sends you once to Appearance → Theme Options → Demo import. Once only, and never again on a site that has already imported a demo.

That is the whole of the first-run behaviour. There is no setup wizard and no activation questionnaire: every block, setting and demo is available the moment the plugin is active. Updates and support are a separate matter, and they depend on where you bought the theme — see Licence, updates and support.

So the next decision is which starter site you want. Read The eight demos, then Importing a demo.

The eight demos

Eight starter sites ship with the theme. Six of them are different sites, with their own pages, their own content types and their own look; the other two, Tipster Light and News Light, are those two demos in a light palette rather than new sites. Choosing carefully is worth the ten minutes, because a site holds one demo at a time: see One demo per site.

Which demo is for you

Every pack ships an Elementor build as well as a block build — the two light packs use their parent demo's — so no demo locks you out of Elementor and none of them requires it. With Elementor active the importer picks that build for you and the card says so — see Importing a demo.

WooCommerce is only needed by Team and E-gaming, the two packs that ship products. The other six sell nothing and never mention a cart, though you can add a shop to any of them later.

Each pack also pins a look: its palette, fonts and section CSS, and in some cases the shop and post skins as well. Where a pack leaves a slot on Automatic, that slot follows whichever demo is active, which is what you want unless you are deliberately mixing two demos' styling. That is done afterwards, in Style pickers: automatic or a demo name.

Tipster: verified predictions

Verified sports predictions — every pick time-stamped, every record public.

A tipster and analysis service that sells access to picks. The site is built around a claim you can check: every prediction records the selection, the odds at publication, the stake and the profit, and every analyst carries a public record. An access term on each prediction — free, premium or private — is what separates the tiers.

It imports 11 pages, and behind them Predictions, Fixtures, Competitions, Reviews and People, the analysts, each with a profile carrying their subscription price, cadence and markets. It sells no products: the paid tier is a price on the analyst, not a checkout. It pins the Tipster look for the site, the news pages and single posts, runs its news pages with a sidebar on the right, and points every call-to-action button at /pricing/ until you change that in Business info.

Tipster Light: Tipster in a light palette

The same tipster service on light paper — same pages, same content, different colours.

Not a second site: the same 11 pages as Tipster, the same predictions, fixtures, competitions, reviews and analysts, the same layouts and the same words. What changes is the colour layer — light grounds and dark text in place of the dark chrome. Picking between the two is only a matter of which card you import.

It carries no content of its own; the import reads Tipster's pages, images and records and dresses them in the light palette, so everything said about Tipster above applies here too. Its style pickers name Tipster rather than sitting on Automatic, because the light pack runs on Tipster's stylesheet, fonts and templates with the light palette on top. There is no live preview site for it yet, so its card carries no Preview button.

E-gaming: an esports organisation

Polaris Esports — four divisions, players and creators, a match centre with live and results, competitions, a newsroom, the club store and match alerts.

The largest demo by block count and the most modular. An organisation with several game divisions rather than one squad, so the roster is split by division and the people are both competitors and streamers.

It imports 24 pages and the widest spread of content types: Divisions, Players, Creators, Streams & VODs, Fixtures, Competitions, Clubs, Sponsors and Team. Players carry an esports profile — real name, season statistics, channels, career history, achievements and equipment — beside the football-style panels. It is the second pack that sells products, apparel and gear, so WooCommerce belongs on the site before you import.

It pins the E-gaming look for the site, the news pages, single posts, the shop and the product page. Its action link points at /watch/, the match centre.

News: a sports newsroom

Independent sports journalism — results, analysis and the money behind both.

A publication, not a club site, and the busiest of them editorially: a scores board, section fronts, live blogs, a transfer centre, a video hub, a newsletter and ad slots for sponsors.

It imports 15 pages, more posts than any other pack — the articles are the site — and a deep data model: Fixtures, Competitions, Clubs, Standings, Transfers, Live updates, Newsletter issues, Ad slots and a Team of staff writers. It sells no products.

This is the one demo that leaves every style picker on Automatic, including the site preset. That is deliberate — a news site is meant to be re-skinned, so pick any preset on Theme styles and the newsroom layout wears it. Its news pages use a sidebar on the right and its action link points at /newsletters/.

News Light: News in a light palette

The same newsroom on light paper — same pages, same articles, different colours.

The News demo in a light palette: the same 15 pages, the same posts and the same data model, down to the live updates and the ad slots. Only the colours differ, so the choice between the two cards is a choice of palette, not of site.

It ships no content of its own — the import reads News's pages, images and records — so everything above applies here as well. Unlike News, which leaves every style picker on Automatic, this pack names News in them, because it runs on the newsroom's stylesheet, fonts and templates and puts the light palette over them. There is no live preview site for it yet, so its card carries no Preview button.

Team: a football club

A football club's official site — fixtures, table, squad, tickets, membership and the club store.

Built for the fictional Meridian FC: next match and last result, the league table, the squad with per-competition season figures, ticket and membership pages, sponsors, and a shop selling kit and accessories.

It imports 26 pages — ticketing, membership and store pages included — and Players, Fixtures, Competitions, Clubs, Standings, Sponsors and Team. It is one of the two packs that sells products, so install WooCommerce before importing it or the store arrives empty. It is also the one demo whose admin menu is not filtered, so every sports content type in the theme is listed while it is active.

It pins the Team look everywhere it can: site, news pages, single posts and — unusually — the shop and single product too, so the store reads as part of the club rather than a generic catalogue. Its news pages run full width. Its action link points at /tickets/.

Betting: bookmaker reviews

A bookmaker-review affiliate site — reviewed sportsbooks, a compare table, offers, guides, editorial predictions, sport-by-sport coverage and a responsible-gambling hub.

An affiliate publication for the fictional Oddsmark. It earns from outbound links, so it is built around comparison: a filterable table of bookmakers, a compare screen, signup offers, and a library of guides organised by topic and by level.

It imports 28 pages and Bookmakers, Offers, Guides, Predictions, Fixtures, Competitions and People for the editorial team. Best-for tags on a bookmaker are the filter chips you see on the home table, the compare page and the reviews. It sells no products. It pins the Betting look for the site, the news pages and single posts, runs its news pages full width, and points its action link at /compare-bookmakers/.

This demo ships a responsible-gambling hub for a reason. If you launch a gambling-affiliate site, the age statement, the licence disclosure and the help links are usually a legal requirement in your market, not decoration. Keep those pages and put your own regulator details in them.

When you have chosen, go to Importing a demo, and read its first two sections before you click anything.

Academy: a sports academy

Programmes, coaches, fees and term dates, holiday camps, a trial booking and the academy news.

Built for a fictional tennis academy, Rowan Hall, and the most easily repurposed of them — a swimming club, a football academy or a single coach's business all fit the same structure. The site's job is to fill sessions, so everything points at the trial enquiry.

It imports 19 pages and three content types: Programmes, Coaches and Camps, the last carrying its own dates and days. It sells no products — fees are published on the page and the enquiry form does the converting, so there is no checkout to configure and no gateway to set up.

It pins the Academy look for the site, the news pages and single posts, and leaves the shop and product styles on Automatic: install WooCommerce to sell club kit and the shop simply follows the academy palette. Its news pages run full width and its action link points at /book-a-trial/.

Importing a demo

An import turns an empty install into the demo you picked: pages, images, menus, sports data, settings, colours and fonts. It takes a few minutes and it is the fastest way to a finished site. It is also the one destructive thing in this theme, so read the first two sections before you click Import.

The Demo import screen

Go to Appearance → Theme Options → Demo import. It is the first entry in the left rail, above the Design group, and its lead reads Set up the whole site in one click.

One card per demo, each with its thumbnail, title and pitch; the demo you are already running is marked Active demo. Above the cards, always, is the warning Importing a demo removes and replaces the content on this site. Take it literally — see What an import writes.

Above that, and only when there is something to say, sits a second panel: Your hosting may not have enough capacity to import a demo, followed by the settings that are too low, each with your value and the recommended one. It stays hidden while everything passes, because a panel that is always green teaches you to skim past the one time it is not. If it appears, stop: a failing row means the import can halt part-way and leave the site half-built. Send the list to your host — it is the same data as Appearance → Theme Options → System requirements, which has a Copy all as text button. Fixing a memory limit takes your host minutes; repairing a half-imported site takes you hours.

One demo per site

An import is a full replace, not a merge, and a site holds exactly one demo at a time. You cannot run the club demo's fixtures page beside the betting demo's compare table.

That is not a licensing limit, it is how WordPress works. Templates, template parts, options and Global Styles all resolve site-wide by slug: there is one single template, one header part, one palette, one anps_demo_style. None can be scoped to "the pages from demo four", so an import clears every demo's objects rather than only its own — otherwise the last import's templates fight the new one's.

Nothing about an import can be undone. There is no rollback and no half-imported state worth keeping. On a site with content you care about, take a full backup — database and uploads — first. If you only want to look at a demo, import it on a staging site or a fresh install.

If you want eight sites, use eight installs. To mix looks rather than content, use the style pickers.

Import, Re-import and Preview

Import demo installs that pack. The browser asks you to confirm first — This will DELETE all pages, posts, products and menus on this site and replace them with the demo — and only then does anything happen.

Re-import is the same button on the demo that is already active. Use it after breaking something beyond repair. It is just as destructive as a first import: your edits to the demo's pages go too. Re-importing does not duplicate your media library — an image the previous import already brought in is reused rather than copied again.

Preview opens that demo's live preview site in a new tab, and appears only on packs that ship a preview address. It changes nothing here.

A demo that needs a plugin will say so

Team and E-gaming build a shop, so they need WooCommerce. If it is not active, those two cards carry the notice This demo cannot be imported yet and their import button is dead — nothing is deleted and nothing is written. Install and activate WooCommerce on the Plugins screen, reload the Theme Options page, and the card unblocks itself.

Activate it before you import, not after. There is no "import now, add the shop later" path: without WooCommerce the products and the cart, checkout and account pages cannot be created at all, so the importer refuses the pack rather than building you a club site with an empty shop and dead Buy links.

If the pack ships an Elementor build and Elementor is active, the card also shows an Elementor version marker. That is what you will get: the importer loads the Elementor build instead of the block build, automatically, with no setting to choose. Pages, settings, products and colours are identical either way — only the editor differs. To get the block version, deactivate Elementor first, and see Building pages with Elementor.

Once you confirm, a dialog headed Importing the demo takes over the screen. It cannot be dismissed, on purpose: from the first step onwards there is nothing to return to. It names each phase as it runs — clearing the old content, applying the settings and colours, reading the content, reconnecting it, building the menus. Leave the tab open. A second import started while one is running is refused, and nothing is changed.

What the result actually tells you

A clean run reads Demo imported. Your site now matches the demo. — and that sentence now appears only when everything really did arrive.

If anything fell short you get The demo did not import completely, followed by the counts: 412 of 480 pages, posts and menu items arrived, and, when the pack ships images, 96 of 120 images arrived. Anything the importer could not read is listed under What did not import. The screen then tells you a retry is safe, because a re-import starts over from a clean site — and if it stops in the same place every time, the host limits on the System tab are the usual cause: an import that needs more memory or more time than the server currently allows.

Separately, a Worth a look notice can appear whether or not the import was complete. Those are things the demo could not finish setting up — a menu that matched no menu location, no page to use as your home page, permalinks left on Plain. None of them stopped the import; each is worth two minutes.

The item counts cover pages, posts, sports records and menu items. Images are counted on their own line because a re-import deliberately leaves your media library in place.

What an import writes

Two quieter passes matter. Relations between records — a prediction's fixture and analyst, a fixture's clubs, a table row's club — are reconnected after the content lands, because the numbers in an export point at the designer's database, not yours. And the demo's kickoff times are shifted onto your site's clock, so a fixture list reads as upcoming, not as last year.

What survives an import

Left alone: your users, with roles and passwords untouched; your media library, where the demo's images are added beside your own; other plugins and their settings, none of which are deactivated; and WooCommerce's own pages — shop, cart, checkout, my account, terms, refunds — along with the privacy policy page, because each is wired to an option and deleting it would break a feature no demo replaces.

Deleted and rebuilt: every page, post, product and product variation, product categories and tags, every navigation menu, any template or template part a previous demo installed, and every SportPulse record — fixtures, players, predictions, guides, programmes. So an import is safe on a fresh install, safe on a site you have only been styling, and never safe on a live site carrying your own content.

After the import

1. Look at the front end, then at Settings → Reading. The importer sets the demo's home page as your front page; change it there if you want another one.
2. Check the menus. They are rebuilt and assigned, but if you had your own locations in mind, set them in Appearance → Menus — see Menus.
3. Put in your own business details. Appearance → Theme Options → Business info holds the name, phone, email, address, opening hours and the action link every call-to-action button uses. Until you change them, your site says it is Meridian FC or Oddsmark.
4. Replace the demo's words and pictures. Work through the pages in Building pages and the records behind them in Sports content and data.

Treat the demo's photography as placeholder content: it is there to make the layout read correctly, and what your purchase covers is set out in licensing/README_License.txt in your download. Replace the images before you launch — Performance and going live has the pre-launch list.

Starting empty instead

You do not have to import anything. Activate the theme and the plugin, skip this screen, and you still have a working block theme: every SportPulse block is in the inserter, Theme Options works, and the base templates render your pages with a plain header and footer. Choose this if you are building to your own design, or migrating a site that already has content. You get no demo pages, no sample data and no pinned look — every style picker stays on Automatic, which with no demo active means the theme's own defaults, and the admin menu lists every sports content type because nothing is filtering it. Start at Building pages.

Switching demos later

Importing a second demo is the same operation: open the screen, click Import on the other card, confirm. Everything in What an import writes and What survives an import applies again, so the first demo's pages, menus and records go, and your work on them with them.

One thing looks alarming and is not: the admin menu changes. Seven of the eight demos show only the content types they use, so moving from the news demo to the academy demo makes Clubs, Standings and Transfers disappear. Only the menu is hidden — the type is still registered, and the menu returns for as long as anything of that type exists, including a draft, so a club you add by hand on an academy site brings it back. People, Locations, Team and Messages are never hidden, and the Team demo filters nothing at all. What a switch really deletes is the previous demo's records, pages and menus, and that is the import rather than the menu.

Theme Options, tab by tab

Everything the theme lets you set outside the editor lives on one screen: Appearance → Theme Options. You need the edit_theme_options capability — an administrator has it, an editor does not. The screen is part of the Anps Theme Plugin, so if it is missing, the plugin is inactive.

Each field on this screen is one setting saved on its own, and each one says what it does under its label. This chapter is the long version: what the tab is for, and every field with its values and its default.

How this screen is organised

A rail on the left lists the tabs. Demo import leads on its own, above the rest, because on a fresh site it is the first thing to do — it is covered in Importing a demo. A build without the importer says so instead of offering it.

The remaining nine tabs are grouped:

The WooCommerce tab appears only while WooCommerce is active; with no shop plugin there is nothing behind those fields, so the tab is hidden rather than shown broken.

Each tab saves on its own. Fields you have changed but not saved are held until you press the tab's save button, so switching tabs mid-edit is not a good idea.

Theme styles

Colours and fonts for the whole site. These are written to the Site Editor's own styles, not to a private table, so Appearance → Editor → Styles shows the same values and the editor canvas matches the front end.

Preset picks a whole demo's look at once — its colours, fonts, section CSS and its header, footer and shop. It is the blunt instrument, and it is the one most people want. Automatic — follow the imported demo is the default and keeps you in step with the demo you imported; see Style pickers: automatic or a demo name. The named entries are the theme's own style variations, so a demo may offer more than one (a light and a wire treatment of the news look, for instance). Applying a preset overwrites the six colours below it.

Six colour pickers follow, in the order most people think about them: Page background, Text, Primary, Secondary, Accent and Buttons / CTA. Every pattern in the theme references the colour slug and never a raw hex, so changing one here recolours every button, link and accent that uses it, site-wide, in one save. The rest of the palette is derived and rides along with the preset.

Keep contrast readable. Page background against Text is the pair that decides whether your site can be read at all. The screen measures your choices as you make them — under each picker it names the tightest pairing that colour is involved in and its ratio, and warns you when one falls below the minimum the theme is checked against. It never blocks the save, so the decision is still yours: check it on a phone in daylight before you ship a dark background with mid-grey text. Accessibility explains what is measured and what is not.

Fonts offers Heading font and Body font, each a list of what the site already has. Add a Google Font… fetches a family and installs it for you; Upload a font… hands you to the Site Editor's font library for a file you own. Once installed, a face appears in both lists.

Type scale exposes only the four sizes worth setting per site: Hero / H1, Section heading (H2), Sub-heading (H3) and Body text. Sizes are in pixels, 12 to 200; leave one blank to keep the theme default, which is fluid and scales with the viewport. Everything else in the type system follows these four. More on the whole system in Colours, fonts and spacing.

Header

The strip at the top of every page. The menu inside it is not here — it is in Appearance → Menus, described in Menus.

Header layout re-lays out the header site-wide. Three shapes, not demo names: Standard — logo left, actions right (the default), Centered — logo and nav stacked, Minimal — logo and nav only. A demo pack sets this too, so importing one may change it.

Top bar style is a style picker: it chooses which demo's top bar to show without touching the rest of the site. Default Automatic — follow the demo.

Three logo slots: Main logo, Sticky logo and Mobile logo. Main is the master switch — leave it empty and the site title is used as the logo, and the other two do nothing. Set it, and the sticky logo swaps in once the page scrolls and the header pins, while the mobile logo is used on small screens. Both fall back to the main logo when empty. All three are media-library images, so they keep their srcset and survive a domain change.

Three switches under Header elements, all off by default:

Footer

What sits in the footer is content, edited in Appearance → Editor → Patterns; this tab sets its shape. See Header, top bar and footer.

Footer columns is 2 columns, 3 columns or 4 columns, default 4 columns. It stacks to one column on phones.

Copyright text is the line at the very bottom, default © {year} {site}. {year} and {site} are replaced with the current year and your site title, so the year stays right without anyone editing it.

Sticky mobile bar gates the Call / action / Directions bar pinned to the bottom of a phone screen. Three values:

Automatic is the default, and none of the eight SportPulse demos opts in — so if you want the bar, choose Always show. Its contents come from the data you already have: a slot with nothing behind it — no phone number, no address — is left out rather than rendered dead.

Site layout

Content width (px) is the maximum width of the constrained content column: 600 to 1920 in steps of 10, default 1200. It applies to the whole site and to the editor, so what you build is the width you get.

It does not affect sections with a full-width background — those still bleed edge to edge, and only the content inside them is capped. It is also not a page-by-page setting: one number, whole site. A demo pack sets it to match its design.

Blog

Styles the news page and your posts. Which page lists your posts is core's setting, in Settings → Reading → Posts page; without one, the fields here have nothing to style. Writing and organising posts is News and the blog.

Posts per row is 2 per row, 3 per row or 4 per row, default 3. It collapses to two and then one on smaller screens, and a single Post grid block can override it from its own sidebar.

Sidebar adds a column beside the news page and your posts holding search, categories, recent posts and tags:

On phones the sidebar always sits under the content. What is in it is edited in Appearance → Editor → Patterns → Blog sidebar.

News page style and Single post style are both style pickers, and they are deliberately independent: you can pair one demo's article styling with your own news page. The list one covers the post list and the category, tag, author and date archives; the other covers one open post.

WooCommerce

The shop grid and how much of it is for sale. Payments, shipping, tax, emails and accounts all stay in WooCommerce → Settings — this theme adds no second copy of them.

Products per row (1 to 6) and Rows per page (1 to 12) are WooCommerce's own catalogue settings, surfaced here because they decide how the shop grid reads. Products per page is the two multiplied, and the card shows you that number as you change them.

Showcase mode — nothing can be purchased turns the whole store into a catalogue: prices still show, but Add to cart, the cart and checkout are removed. It is the "enquire, don't buy" storefront, and it is off by default. Product editing lives in Shop and products.

Business info

Typed once here, then read by the header, the footer, the contact page, the map, "Open now" and your structured data. Nothing on this tab is required, and each empty field simply removes what depends on it.

Contact holds Business name, Phone, Email and Address. Phone becomes tel: links wherever the theme shows a number. Address is one free-text block, written the way it appears on your door; it feeds the map, the Directions button in the mobile bar and your structured data, and without it the map has nothing to point at.

Opening hours is a seven-day grid, Monday first, with up to six open–close ranges a day — enough for a split shift and an overnight tail. A day with no ranges is closed: there is no separate closed flag to contradict the times. The hours drive "Open now" wherever the theme shows it, and are published as structured data.

Primary action link under Call to action is where every call-to-action button in the theme points — the one in the header, the one in the mobile bar, and the one in each pattern.

An empty action link removes the buttons. Leave Primary action link blank and those buttons are not rendered at all. A button that goes nowhere is worse than no button, so the theme omits it rather than pointing it at your home page.

Search engines has Business type (for Google), which sets @type on the LocalBusiness node in your structured data — LocalBusiness by default, with Organization, SportsActivityLocation, Store and others in the list. Let an SEO plugin own structured data hands the whole job to Yoast or Rank Math and adds no nodes of its own; see SEO and structured data.

Newsletter decides what happens after a signup. Every signup — newsletter forms and Follow buttons — always lands in the site's own Messages inbox; Where signups go adds a destination on top of that:

For the URL route, Email field name is what that provider's form calls its email field — EMAIL for Mailchimp and Brevo, fields[email] for MailerLite, email_address for ConvertKit — and Extra form fields takes one name=value per line, where {email}, {tags} and {name} are filled in for you. For the API route you need a Mailchimp API key (Account → Extras → API keys) and a Mailchimp audience ID (Audience → Settings → Audience name and defaults); Double opt-in — new members must confirm by email is a switch on the same card. The forms themselves are in Forms, contact and newsletter.

Spam protection takes a Turnstile site key and a Turnstile secret key from Cloudflare Turnstile, which is free. Both keys or neither: with one of the two filled in, the protection cannot run. It guards the built-in contact form.

Advanced

Custom CSS is added to every page of the site, and survives theme updates because it is a setting rather than an edited file. Reference the theme's own tokens so your CSS follows preset and colour changes instead of freezing a value:

.my-band {
	background: var(--wp--preset--color--primary);
	max-width: var(--wp--style--global--content-size);
}

Backup sits below it. Export settings downloads every anps_ setting on this screen as a file; Import settings from a file reads one back. Imported values go through the same validation as typing them in, so a file cannot write something the screen could not. Two things do not travel, on purpose:

• Colours, fonts and the type scale, because they live in the Site Editor's styles rather than in these settings.
• The two write-only secrets — see Write-only secrets.

Because every key carries the shared anps_ prefix, a backup is portable between ANPS themes: your business info, hours and logos move with you, and keys the new theme does not have are dropped.

System requirements

What this host provides against what SportPulse needs, in four tables: Server, PHP extensions, WordPress and SportPulse. Each row shows the value found, the value wanted, and a verdict — OK, Check or Fix. A Fix row is something the import or the theme will genuinely struggle with; a Check row is a recommendation.

Copy all as text puts the whole report on your clipboard as plain text. Paste it into a support ticket and the conversation starts with facts instead of guesses. See also Performance and going live.

Style pickers: automatic or a demo name

Nine settings across this screen ask the same question — which demo's look should this one thing wear — and they all offer the same values: Automatic — follow the demo first, then one entry per demo the theme ships a stylesheet for. The list is derived at run time from those stylesheets rather than written down anywhere, so it is always exactly what your copy of the theme can actually render.

Automatic is the default for all nine and means "whatever demo I imported". Naming a demo instead mixes that one demo's look into that one slot and leaves everything else alone.

The four with a control on this screen are the ones a buyer changes. The other five are set by the demo pack you imported, and stay in step with it through Automatic unless a developer writes them directly. The top bar, header and footer swap a template part; the rest swap a whole template.

A demo that ships no variant changes nothing. These pickers only take effect where the demo you named actually ships a file for that slot. If it does not, the shared version renders and the page looks exactly as it did. That is not a bug — it is the fallback working.

Sidebar on the Blog tab is not one of these. It is a plain three-value setting and has nothing to do with demos.

Write-only secrets

Two fields on this screen are stored write-only: the Turnstile secret key and the Mailchimp API key. Both are shared secrets that would be a liability in a settings file or an API response, so the theme never reads them back.

Write it down somewhere else. A saved secret is masked and never shown again, is absent from Export settings, and cannot be recovered from the database through this screen. If you lose it, generate or copy a fresh key from Cloudflare or Mailchimp and type it in again. That is the only route back.

Everything else on the screen reads back normally, which is why a backup is useful in the first place — see Advanced.

Menus

SportPulse uses classic WordPress menus rather than menus embedded in a template. You build them in Appearance → Menus — the screen every WordPress user already knows — and assign each one to a location the theme publishes. Nothing about a menu lives inside the header, so re-saving or resetting the header can never orphan your navigation.

Importing a demo builds its menus for you and assigns them, so the first thing most people do here is rename an item or add a page.

Build the menu

1. Go to Appearance → Menus.
2. Pick a menu from Select a menu to edit, or click create a new menu, name it and press Create Menu.
3. Add items from the panels on the left — Pages, Posts, Custom Links, Categories, and one panel per sports content type. Those panels list every type the plugin registers, not only the ones your demo uses, because the types stay registered whichever demo is active. Under Screen Options you can hide the panels you never touch.
4. Drag an item slightly right to nest it under the one above; that is what makes a dropdown.
5. Tick a location under Menu Settings → Display location, then press Save Menu.

A menu can sit in more than one location, and a location holds one menu.

Only two levels are rendered. The header draws top-level items and their children. Nest an item three deep and it is dropped silently — it will not appear anywhere on the site. Flatten the structure or link the deepest pages from the page body instead.

Menu locations the demos use

Seven locations are registered. The header uses one; the rest are the footer's link columns and the utility strip above the header. Each column is a separate menu, which is what lets you retitle and reorder them independently.

You do not need to fill all seven. A location with no menu assigned renders nothing, so the demos that use three footer columns simply leave Topics and Guides empty.

The footer's fourth column is the brand block — logo, tagline, social links. That is content, not a menu, and it is edited as a template part; see Header, top bar and footer.

The current page

The item matching the page you are on is highlighted automatically, and so is its parent when you are on a child page. WordPress writes the class itself, so this works whether the item was added as a page, a post, a category or a custom link — you do not have to mark anything.

If the highlight looks wrong, the usual cause is a Custom Link pointing at a URL that differs from the real permalink, such as one with a missing trailing slash or a stale ?page_id=. Add the item from the Pages panel instead of typing the address and the match becomes exact.

Long dropdowns become a mega menu

A top-level item with six or more children stops being a narrow dropdown and opens as a full-width panel laid out in columns. It is the case a guide section or a long list of sports needs, and it happens by itself — there is no setting for it in Theme Options.

Two demos use it — Tipster and News — and so do their light twins, which run their parent's header. Team, E-gaming, Academy and Betting pin their dropdowns to the ordinary narrow panel on purpose, because their headers are designed around a compact menu. On those four, a sixth child stays in the list.

To decide it yourself per item, use the item's CSS Classes field:

The CSS Classes field is hidden until you switch it on: open Screen Options at the top right of Appearance → Menus and tick CSS Classes. The class goes on the top-level item, not on a child.

The menu on phones

Below the header's breakpoint the menu collapses behind a burger button. Tapping it opens the panel; tapping again closes it. Submenus are not dropdowns there — every child list is already open and indented, so a visitor scrolls one list instead of hunting for tap targets. That is also why the mega-menu rule is a desktop-only affair: on a phone a long list reads the same either way.

The burger and the panel are part of the menu itself, so they follow whichever demo's header you are showing.

If the header shows no menu

Nothing is assigned to Primary (header). When you are logged in as an administrator the header shows a link reading Assign a menu to this location (Appearance → Menus) in place of the navigation; visitors see nothing at all, which is why this is easy to miss after a manual setup.

Work through these in order:

1. Open Appearance → Menus and check that a menu exists at all — a fresh site with no demo imported has none.
2. Check Menu Settings → Display location on that menu and tick Primary (header).
3. Press Save Menu. Assigning a location without saving changes nothing.
4. If a footer column shows a heading with nothing under it, the same fix applies to that column's location from the table above.

If the header is missing entirely rather than just its menu, the problem is the header part or the top bar switch, not the menu — see Header, top bar and footer. If a whole demo's navigation vanished after switching demos, the menus of the demo you left are still in Appearance → Menus; reassign the one you want.

Header, top bar and footer

The strips that wrap every page are template parts — small pieces of content the templates reuse. Their shape is a handful of settings; their contents are blocks you edit in the Site Editor. Knowing which is which saves a lot of hunting.

What is a part and what is a setting

A part is content: the wordmark, the search field, the action button, the footer's brand column and its link columns. You edit those in Appearance → Editor → Patterns.

A setting is a switch or a number: how many footer columns there are, whether the top bar renders at all, which logo image is used, whether the mobile bar shows. Those live in Theme Options, tab by tab.

Where to edit each part

Go to Appearance → Editor → Patterns. The template parts are listed there by name:

Below them you will see the per-demo versions — Header — News, Footer — Team and so on. Those are the files each demo ships. Edit the one your site actually renders, not the shared one, or your change will appear to do nothing. If you are unsure which that is, the demo you imported is the answer.

Click a part, edit it like any page of blocks, and press Save. A part is shared by every template that references it, so one edit changes the whole site.

The top bar

The top bar carries utility links and, on some demos, the phone number or a short promotional line. Its links come from the Top bar — Utility menu location, so retitle or reorder them in Appearance → Menus; everything else in it is blocks.

Turn the whole strip off with Disable top bar on the Theme Options Header tab. That is a site-wide switch, not a per-page one.

Only three parts change per demo — the top bar, the header and the footer. Each has a shared version plus one file per demo, and the swap is decided by a style picker: Style pickers: automatic or a demo name.

A swap only happens when the demo ships that file. If the demo you name has no variant for a slot, the shared part renders and the page looks unchanged. Every SportPulse demo has its own top bar, header and footer, so in practice you will see the change — but this is why picking a demo name is safe to try.

The header strip

The header holds the logo, the navigation and an actions area. Three of those are settings rather than blocks.

The logo slots. The header's site-logo block is fed by Main logo, with Sticky logo used once the page scrolls and the header pins, and Mobile logo used on small screens. Set the main logo first: it is the master switch, and with it empty the site title is used instead and the other two do nothing.

The search icon. The magnifier in the actions area opens the site search. Disable search icon removes it from the header and nothing else — search results, and any search block you have placed on a page, keep working.

The primary action button. The right-hand button — Tickets, Watch, Book a trial, Compare bookmakers, depending on the demo — points at Primary action link on the Theme Options Business info tab. Leave that field empty and the button is not rendered, here or anywhere else in the theme. Its label is part of the header part, so change the wording in the Editor and the destination in Theme Options.

The header pins to the top as you scroll unless you turn on Disable sticky header. On phones the navigation collapses behind a burger; see Menus.

The footer

The footer is one part with a brand column and up to three link columns, each column its own menu. Set the number of columns and the copyright line in Theme Options → Footer; set the links in Appearance → Menus; set everything else — the logo, the tagline, the social icons, a newsletter card — by editing the Footer part.

Two demos use five link columns rather than three. The extra two are the Footer — Topics and Footer — Guides menu locations, so if a column looks empty on those demos, it wants a menu rather than an edit.

The sticky mobile bar

The bar fixed to the bottom of a phone screen, holding Call, the primary action and Directions. It is the one piece of chrome that is not swapped per demo: there is a single shared part, and each demo either shows it or does not.

Control it with Sticky mobile bar on the Theme Options Footer tab — Automatic — follow the demo, Always show or Never show. Automatic is the default and shows the bar only on demos built around it, which means none of the eight ships with it on; choose Always show if you want it.

Its buttons resolve themselves from data you have already entered: the phone number and address from Business info, the action button from Primary action link, the cart from WooCommerce. A slot with nothing behind it is left out, so a bar on a site with no phone number simply has fewer buttons. Edit the wrapper in Appearance → Editor → Patterns → Sticky Mobile Bar.

Undoing an edit to a part

The demo versions of these parts are files that ship with the theme, not rows in your database. That is deliberate: it means an edit is always reversible and one demo's header can never leak into another's.

The first time you save a part, WordPress stores your version and marks it as customised. To go back to the shipped file, open Appearance → Editor → Patterns, find the part, open its options with the three dots and choose the reset option offered there. Your version is discarded and the theme's file renders again.

Reset throws away every change to that part. It is all or nothing — there is no per-block undo once you have left the editor. If a part holds work you might want back, copy its blocks into a draft page before you reset it.

Two things that look like part edits but are not: the navigation, which is in Menus and survives any reset, and the page content itself, which is in Building pages.

Building pages

Every page in the demos is a stack of bands. A band is one block that draws a whole strip of the page — a hero, a row of figures, a card grid, a table, a price list, a form — and everything that band shows is one of its own settings. There is no page-builder layer underneath: these are ordinary WordPress pages made of blocks, edited in the block editor you already use for a post. Elementor is offered as an alternative, not as the foundation — see Building pages with Elementor.

How a demo page is built

Open Pages, pick a page and edit it. In the list view, at the top left of the editor, you will see six to a dozen blocks, one per band, in the order they appear on screen. A band is not a group of columns you have to rebuild — it is one block that already knows how to lay itself out on a phone and on a desktop.

Bands render on the server, so the canvas shows the real thing rather than an approximation, and a band has no editable text on the canvas: click it and every field appears in the settings sidebar on the right.

Editing what the demo imported

Work down the sidebar panels of the band you selected. Each panel is a group of plain fields — text, a number, a toggle, a drop-down, an image picker, a link, or a repeating list of rows. Save the page and the front end matches.

Edit the demo page rather than starting a blank one: it already has the right bands, in the right order, at the right widths. Delete a band you do not want instead of emptying it, and duplicate one to repeat a pattern further down.

An import replaces pages, it does not merge them. If you edit the demo pages and then re-import the same demo, your edits are gone. Read What an import writes first.

Adding a band to a page

Use the inserter — the + button — and type the name of the block. Sport Pulse blocks are grouped under Theme, with a handful of the generic ones under Design and Widgets, so searching by name is quicker than browsing.

Stay inside your demo's own family, described below. Mixing one demo's bands into another's page works — no block is ever unregistered — but the two were styled for different palettes and typefaces, so the join will show.

The block families

The plugin registers a shared set of blocks every demo uses, plus one family per demo, named by prefix.

You never need the full list to build a page. The demo already used the blocks it needs, and the inserter search finds the rest by name. When you do meet a band you do not recognise, Block reference names every one of them, family by family, with the description the editor shows — it is generated from the plugin itself, so it is never out of date.

The blocks you will edit most

The page hero, or page head

The masthead of a page: kicker, headline, an accented phrase inside the headline, lede, buttons, and optionally a photograph, breadcrumbs, trust chips and a row of figures. The shared page-hero also has a Text comes from setting, so on a single item or an archive it can take its title and lede from the post or the term instead of from what you typed.

The section head

team-section-head, news-section-head, egaming-section-head, academy-section-head and betting-section-head draw the small title block that introduces a band: kicker, two-tone heading, intro, and on the right either a button or a line of small print. The tipster demo has no separate section head, because every shared band carries its own Kicker, Heading, Accented phrase, Lede and action link fields.

The post grid, forms and the newsletter card

post-grid is the card grid used for the news list, for a latest-stories band on any page and for related articles under an article; its settings are covered in The post grid, option by option.

form is the shared contact form — heading, name, email, topic chips, extra fields you define, a message and a consent line — and academy-enquiry, egaming-enquiry, egaming-contact, news-contact and betting-contact-form are the demo-styled equivalents. newsletter-card is the single-field signup card used in sidebars and footers. Where submissions go is in Forms, contact and newsletter.

The rest of the daily handful

stat-band and data-table deserve a second look: both can print what you typed or read the site's own content, which is how a figure stays true after you publish another twenty predictions.

The controls inside a block

Four control types repeat across every band. Learn them once.

A repeater is a list of rows — stats, questions, plans, table rows. Each row is numbered, with arrows to move it up or down and a bin to delete it, and an Add button underneath. Row order is display order.

A media control stores two things for one image: the attachment id and its URL. That is deliberate — the page can print the URL directly while still knowing which library item it came from, so alternative text and image sizes keep working. Use Select image, Replace and Remove.

A link control is a single URL field. Paste a full address for an external link or a site path such as /tickets/ for an internal one. A band with an empty link usually hides its button rather than rendering a dead one.

A term drop-down lists a taxonomy's terms with an "All" option first — that is how you point a grid at one category or one role.

Everything a band shows on screen is one of these values. No heading, figure, button label or photograph is hardcoded in the theme, which is why you can turn a demo page into your own page without touching a template.

Patterns you can drop in

Patterns are ready-made arrangements of blocks, in the inserter's Patterns tab, grouped into categories the theme registers under its own name: Hero, Services, Pricing, Calls to action, Contact, Reviews and trust, and Shop. Insert one and it becomes plain blocks in your page, with no link back to the pattern — edit it freely.

The parts that surround every page — top bar, header, footer, blog sidebar and sticky mobile bar — are template parts, edited from the Site Editor's Patterns screen. That is Header, top bar and footer.

Page templates

A page's template decides what surrounds its content. Pick one in the editor sidebar under Page → Template.

An Elementor page must use one of the two Elementor templates, or its full-width bands stay trapped inside the constrained content wrapper.

Setting your front page

Importing a demo points Settings → Reading at the pack's own pages: the page slugged home becomes the static front page, and the demo's news index becomes the posts page. To change either, return to Settings → Reading, choose A static page and pick both there. Never delete the page you set as the posts page — the news archive has nowhere to render without it.

Full-width and constrained bands

Content is constrained to 1200 pixels by default; change that in Appearance → Theme Options → Site layout, described under Site layout. Individual bands can escape it: select a band, open the toolbar alignment button and choose Wide width or Full width. A full-width band runs its background to both edges of the window while keeping its text on the same measure as the rest of the page. A few heroes — the academy and betting page heroes among them — are full width only, because a boxed hero with a photograph bleeding off one side is not a layout anyone wants.

Sports content and data

Beyond pages and posts, the plugin registers the sports records the demos are built on: fixtures, competitions, clubs, players, predictions, programmes, bookmakers and the rest. You edit them on ordinary WordPress edit screens, and the blocks on your pages read them. Nothing on a match page, a squad list or a comparison table is typed into the page itself.

Why the admin menu changes per demo

The admin menu depends on the demo you imported: a betting site has no use for a Divisions screen, so it does not get one. The important half of that sentence is the half you cannot see — every content type is always registered. Only the menu is hidden. Nothing is unregistered, nothing is deleted and no meta is dropped, so switching demos never orphans content.

People, Locations, Team and Messages sit outside the gate entirely and appear under every demo.

Two cases surprise people. The Team demo declares no list of its own, and an unrecognised demo — including a fresh install with nothing imported yet — is treated the same way, so on both you get roughly twenty sports menus at once, Bookmakers, Guides, Offers, Programmes and Camps included, none of which a club site uses. And on a site that has held more than one demo the menu is the union of everything that still has content, not a picture of the demo you imported last.

Shared content types

Two people-shaped types coexist, and they are not alternatives.

On a person, the subscription price is not decoration: it is what places them in the Pro or Free tier, and an Access tier term is derived from it automatically. On a team member, User account is the WordPress user whose byline this is — leave it empty and the person gets no story count and no profile link. The News, Team and E-gaming packs arrive with Team filled in. Neither a team member nor a message has a page of its own, so never link to one; the staff bands render those records in place.

Three taxonomies are shared across the model rather than owned by one type:

The post-side additions — the Feature and Video panels, Formats, Video kinds and Shows — belong to the blog and are covered in News and the blog.

Locations

Locations is your address book: the stadium, the academy site, the office. Each one has a Location details panel with Address, Phone, Email, Latitude and Longitude, an Order pickup point tick, a Getting here note and Opening hours, one open and close time per day. Leave a day blank to mark it closed.

Fill the coordinates in if you want a map that lands on the right building rather than in the middle of the postcode. Address, phone and hours are also what the contact page and the structured data publish — see SEO and structured data.

Fixtures, competitions and clubs

Used by the tipster, news, team, e-gaming and betting demos.

Fixtures point at a competition rather than naming one, which is what lets a competition page list its own matches and table. The seven optional match panels are repeating lists of rows, so a full match report is data entry rather than page building. Tick "This is our club" on your own side: bands use it to decide which way round to draw a scoreline.

Predictions and analysts

The tipster demo's whole product, and the betting demo's editorial tips.

A prediction is a ledger entry: published with a timestamp and settled once, because the public record is the thing being sold. Yield, hit rate and profit on a profile are all derived from these rows, so keep Stake and Profit honest.

Access is the paywall, and it is enforced on the server. A locked pick's selection and analysis never reach the page at all, so nothing can be revealed by disabling styles or reading the source.

Players, divisions and creators

The e-gaming demo's roster, plus the club demo's squad.

Programmes, coaches and camps

The academy demo. Almost all of its front end comes from these three types, so their panels are long by design — the pages are assembled from the records rather than from typed copy.

Programmes and camps both reference coaches by picking them, so a coach's portrait and role appear on a programme page without being retyped there.

Bookmakers, offers and guides

The betting demo.

The override panels exist so one bookmaker can contradict the guide's defaults without a bespoke page. Fill them only where the truth differs; an empty override falls back to the shared copy. Best-for tags are the filter chips on the comparison table, so keep them few and meaningful.

Transfers, standings and live updates

The news demo's data desk.

Enter standings as home and away rows only: the league table block adds the columns up, so you never type a total and a corrected result never leaves a stale one behind.

Repeater fields on an edit screen

Most panels above contain at least one repeating list — line-ups, term dates, fee options, price rows, channels, achievements. A repeater on an edit screen behaves exactly like one in a block: numbered rows, arrows to move a row up or down, a bin to delete it, and an Add button underneath. Row order is display order.

Delete a row you do not need rather than blanking it. Most bands skip an empty row, and a band with no rows at all hides itself instead of printing an empty shell.

Relations are picked, not typed

Records point at each other. A prediction points at a fixture and at an analyst; a fixture points at a competition; an offer points at a bookmaker; a transfer points at two clubs; a live update points at a live blog post or a fixture.

Every one of those is a picker, not a text field — you choose an existing record from a list. Two consequences follow. Rename a competition and every fixture, table and page that mentions it updates, because they reference the record and not its name. And create the thing you will point at first: the competition before the fixture, the fixture before the prediction, the bookmaker before its offers. The other order means going back to finish the link.

News and the blog

Posts are still posts. What the theme adds is a set of skins for them, a sidebar you can switch on, a card grid with real options, and a handful of extra panels for the story types a sports site publishes — a video, an interview, a live blog. Everything here works with plain WordPress posts, so a site that only ever writes articles can ignore the extras entirely.

The news archive

The news archive is your posts page: the page you nominate under Settings → Reading. Importing a demo sets it for you — the pack's own index, named News, All stories, Advice or Journal depending on the demo. The page's own content is irrelevant on that route; the archive is drawn by a template.

Two settings control what it lists:

Category, tag, author, search and not-found archives are drawn from the same family of templates and follow the same skin, so styling the news list styles all of them at once.

Do not delete the posts page. With no page nominated, WordPress has nowhere to render the archive and your news list disappears from the menu while every post stays published.

The single post

An article is rendered by the theme's post template, or by the demo variant of it when the active skin ships one. The variants differ in shape, not only in colour: the news article page adds a byline block and a share rail, the club and academy pages lead with their own hero, and the betting article carries the review furniture. Underneath, the content is your post content, so the block editor behaves exactly as it does on a page.

Related posts under an article are a post-grid band inside the template with its source set to Related, not something you add per post.

The two skins, and why they are separate

Appearance → Theme Options → Blog offers two independent pickers:

They are separate on purpose. A newsroom-style archive in front of magazine-style articles is a legitimate combination, and so is the reverse.

Both offer Automatic plus one entry per demo the theme ships. Automatic follows the demo you imported; naming a demo mixes that demo's look into that one slot. The mechanics, and the other seven pickers that behave the same way, are in Style pickers: automatic or a demo name.

Only demos that ship a differently shaped article page have a variant; the rest fall back to the shared template, so choosing one of those changes the colours and the section styling rather than the layout.

Choosing a sidebar for the news pages

The same tab holds Sidebar, with three values: No sidebar (full width), On the right, and On the left. It is a fixed choice, not one of the style pickers, and it defaults to no sidebar. The imported demos differ — the tipster and news packs put it on the right; the team, academy and betting packs run full width.

What goes in the sidebar is the Blog sidebar template part, edited in the Site Editor exactly like the header and footer — see Where to edit each part. The news demo's version is worth opening as a reference: a standings table, a contents list, a small post grid, an ad slot and a newsletter card. Add or remove blocks there and every news page follows.

News categories and tags

Categories and tags are the ordinary WordPress ones, edited under Posts → Categories and Posts → Tags, and every demo's section navigation is built from categories. Two habits keep the front end tidy: give a category a description, because the archive masthead prints it, and set a featured image on your lead stories, because the card grid falls back to a plain card without one.

Posts also carry the shared Sports and Flags taxonomies described in Sports content and data. Flags are curation markers — featured, breaking, pick of the day — and the card grid can print them as badges.

Features, videos and shows

The plugin adds two panels and three taxonomies to posts, for the story types a sports newsroom publishes. Use them when they apply and ignore them otherwise.

Formats has public archives; Video kinds deliberately does not, because the watch page filters on it and a public archive would hijack that URL. A post with a Video URL and a video kind is what a video hub band lists — you do not create a separate video post type.

The post grid, option by option

post-grid is the block behind the archive list, the related band and every "latest stories" strip. Its sidebar has four panels.

Posts shown. Source is the important one:

Layout. Grid, Lead story plus side stack, or Numbered list without images. The lead layout adds Cards beside the lead — zero gives the lead the full width — and a Lead column ratio such as 1.7fr 1fr; anything the lead and its stack do not use falls into a grid underneath, so no post is ever hidden. Otherwise you get Posts per row, where 0 follows the site-wide setting on the Blog tab, and Narrowest card, which is the width below which a row drops to fewer columns rather than squeezing.

Heading. Eyebrow, Heading, Link label and Link URL — the band's own title row, so you rarely need a separate heading block above it.

Card. Toggles for Featured image, Category, Flags, Date, Author, Read time and Excerpt. Date can print as a date or as an age such as "2h ago". Author can take its byline from the WordPress author or from the linked person, falling back to the WordPress author when no person is attached, and can show a portrait beside the name. Excerpt has a word count, and the Read more label and the Text when there are no posts are yours to write.

Reading time and pagination

Read time is counted from the post's own words every time the page renders, so it is never stale. The Reading speed slider sets the words per minute used, at 200 by default; raise it for a technical audience that skims, lower it for long-form. Guides in the betting demo are the exception — they carry a Reading time field you set by hand, because an editor's estimate beats a word count on a reference article.

Pagination applies when the source is the page's own posts, and has three values:

Load more is a real link to page two underneath, so it works before the script loads and a search engine can follow it. When it is on you can also set the button label and a progress line that counts what is shown against the total.

How the news demo front page differs from a plain blog

On a plain blog the front page is the archive: a masthead and a grid of cards, and nothing else to maintain.

The news demo separates the two. Its front page is a static page built from bands — a scores board, a lead post grid, a live blog band, a video hub, an ad slot and a newsletter card — while the archive lives on a second page, All stories, which lists every post in date order. That split is what lets the front page lead on a live match while the archive stays complete and chronological.

To copy the arrangement on your own site: build a page out of bands as described in Building pages, create a second, empty page for the archive, then set the first as your front page and the second as your posts page under Settings → Reading. Nothing else is required — the archive page needs no content, because the template draws it.

Shop and products

SportPulse does not need WooCommerce. The theme, the plugin and six of the eight demos work with no shop plugin installed, and nothing in the theme asserts a minimum WooCommerce version. Install it only if you sell something.

When you need WooCommerce

Two demos ship products, and they are the two that need WooCommerce: Team (the Meridian FC club store — kit and accessories) and E-gaming (the Polaris store — apparel and gear). Tipster, Tipster Light, News, News Light, Academy and Betting ship none, so on those six the shop is absent until you build one — which you can, on any of the eight, because the theme's shared shop and product templates render for every demo.

Set up WooCommerce

Install and activate WooCommerce the usual way — see Install WooCommerce — then run WooCommerce's own setup: store address, currency, tax, shipping, payments. It creates the Shop, Cart, Checkout and My account pages, and SportPulse replaces none of that. It skins what WooCommerce builds.

Activate WooCommerce before you import the Team or E-gaming demo. The pack's products need the product post type to exist at import time. If you imported first, activate WooCommerce and re-import from Importing a demo.

What the theme skins

Three separate things. The shop archive is a whole template the theme ships in place of WooCommerce's own — hero band, toolbar, filter column, grid — and the product page is another: gallery, buy column and the sections beneath. Cart, checkout and My account stay WooCommerce's own pages, with a bridge stylesheet that maps Woo's buttons, notices, prices, ratings and form fields onto the active palette. It changes colour, border and radius only, never layout, so a WooCommerce update that reshapes a component keeps working and only its skin is ours.

The shop and the product page have their own style pickers, separate from the rest of the site — see Style pickers: automatic or a demo name. The two store packs pin both to themselves; the other six leave both on Automatic. Only those two demos ship a designed shop and product page, so any other value falls back to the theme's shared pair rather than failing.

Add a product

Products → Add new, exactly as WooCommerce documents it. The theme's layouts read Woo's own fields, so there is nothing to type twice:

Reviews are Woo's own, under Products → Reviews, and the page shows the real ones with their real average. Nothing there is hardcoded copy: every panel renders what you typed, or disappears.

SportPulse details on a product

The product editor's Product data box gains a SportPulse details tab holding the copy the shared product page shows beyond Woo's own fields:

The two detail tabs are titled by you because one theme sells shirts, mouse mats and coaching courses, and no fixed pair of headings is right for all three. Type "Fabric & care" and "Fit & sizing" on a kit product, "In the box" and "Specification" on a peripheral, "What is included" and "Who it is for" on a course. Leave a title empty and the shipped default is used; leave the text empty and the tab does not appear at all.

Badge and the from-price switch are read on every shop card, so they work under any shop skin. The description tabs and the checklist are read by the shared product page only — the Team and E-gaming product pages have their own designed sections, so leave the detail tabs and Highlights empty on a club-store product.

The size run and the printed name and number

This is the sports-shop selling that used to be reachable only by running the Team demo, and it now works on any product under any skin. Fill in Size run and the buy box offers those sizes; fill in Printing fee and it offers a printed name and number under them.

Neither is a variation, on purpose. One shirt in five sizes with a £12 print is ONE product: as variations it is forty products carrying one price between them, and the print is a fee rather than a price. The chosen size and the printed name and number ride the cart line as item data, the fee is added to that line, and both are copied onto the order — so the picking list says "Home Shirt · M · ROONEY 10" without a single extra product.

Use variations where the sizes genuinely differ in price or stock (an XXL that costs more, a colour that is sold out on its own), and the size run where they do not. Leave Size run empty on a variable product: its sizes are already a control row of their own.

The buy box

The buy column is a block, not a Woo shortcode, and there are three: one shared, one per store demo.

• Shared. Price, one control row per variation attribute, the size run and the printed name and number when the product offers them, a quantity stepper and Add to cart. Every choice is resolved on the server, so the button reads the right total, the stock line reads the right sentence and the right variation is selected before any JavaScript runs. A combination no variation covers is unselectable rather than silently added, and a sold-out one says so.
• Team. The same selling with the club store's design: the member price beside the list price, size pills, the printing panel and a live total. It reads the same Size run, Sizes sold out and Printing fee fields as the shared box.
• E-gaming. Price, stock, the short description, size pills and the facts rows beneath.

The panels under the buy column — delivery and returns, fabric and care, sizing — are content on the block, so edit them in Appearance → Editor.

When something is sold out

A sold-out product page is an email address you have not asked for yet, so there is a block for it: Back-in-Stock Alert. Drop it in the product template (or on any page, naming a product in the sidebar) and it takes an address on a product that cannot be bought — and renders nothing at all while the product is in stock, so it can sit in the template permanently.

The address lands in Messages with the product's name, link and SKU, like every other form on the site, and it is spam-guarded by the same honeypot, fill timer, rate limit and optional Turnstile check the contact form uses. It is not a newsletter signup: nothing captured here is passed to a mailing-list provider, whatever Theme Options → Contact is set to.

Product categories and the category tiles

Categories are WooCommerce's own, under Products → Categories; give each one a thumbnail there. The Category tiles block builds its band from the real category list — name, thumbnail and the count Woo already maintains — and drops any category with nothing in it, so a renamed or added category appears with no editing. A category page has its own template, so it gives a shopper the same grid as the full shop.

Showcase mode and the shop grid

Appearance → Theme Options → WooCommerce holds both. Under Selling mode, Showcase mode — nothing can be purchased turns the store into a catalogue: prices still show, but Add to cart, the Store API's add-item route and the mini cart all read the same flag, so nothing is left that could quietly add an item. Use it for a range you take orders for by phone, a partner range you only display, or a store you are still pricing; switching it off makes everything buyable again and changes nothing about the products.

Above it, Products per row (1–6) and Rows per page (1–12) are Woo's own catalogue options, surfaced here so you do not have to go looking. Products per page is the two multiplied — four across by four down is sixteen before pagination.

Shop extras that ship as blocks

These extras are blocks, not settings, so each one is switched on by being present in a template: add or delete it in Appearance → Editor.

Instant search covers products only and answers as you type instead of reloading. Quick view fetches the live price and image when it opens, so it cannot show a stale price. The wishlist lives in the visitor's own browser, so it needs no account and is per device. The two store demos use their own store grids, so they ship without quick view and the wishlist heart.

The sticky bar on a shop

The bar across the bottom on phones resolves each slot from real data and drops any slot with nowhere to go: Call from the Business info phone number, Directions from the address, the primary action from the Primary action link, and Cart once WooCommerce is active. Its on/off setting is The sticky mobile bar; the phone and address it reads are in Business info.

Before you take a real payment

Everything above is presentation; the money is WooCommerce's. Walk this list on the real site, not on the demo.

1. Showcase mode is off — with it on, nobody can buy anything.
2. Payments are live, not in test mode, under WooCommerce → Settings → Payments, and tax, shipping and the store address are yours.
3. The demo's copy is gone. The packs ship fictional stock and European delivery lines, some written into the product template.
4. HTTPS is on and permalinks are not Plain, both flagged on System requirements, and order emails arrive.
5. The shop is fast enough — see Performance and going live.

A test order is the only real check. Every setting above can look right and still fail on a gateway nobody switched out of sandbox. Buy something from your own shop before you tell anyone it is open.

Forms, contact and newsletter

Every form in SportPulse is a real HTML form. It posts, it redirects, and it works with JavaScript switched off — there is no third-party form service, no API key to buy and nothing to embed. That also means there is one place a submission lands and one set of anti-spam checks in front of it, which is what the rest of this chapter is about.

The form blocks

The shared block is Form. Drop it on any page and it draws one card: a kicker and a heading, name beside phone, an email field, a row of topic chips, any extra fields you declare, the message box, an optional consent line and the send button. The block sidebar edits all of it — the header copy, the topic chips and their label, your own extra fields, every label and placeholder, the consent line and its link, the button text, and the message that replaces the form once it is sent.

An extra field has a label, a key and a type — text, email, url, tel, number or select. Its answer is appended to the message as a labelled line, so it reaches the inbox and the notification email with no extra configuration. That is why the tipster application and the contact desk are one block drawn twice with different extra fields, rather than two blocks that drift apart.

Each demo also ships its own enquiry or contact block so the form matches the page it sits on: the academy's trial enquiry, the e-gaming enquiry and contact forms, the betting site's contact form and the newsroom's tip form. They are designed shells over the same machinery. Two are worth knowing individually — the newsroom form can be sent anonymously, which files the message under "Anonymous" and marks it so you do not record the sender, and the academy enquiry asks the extra questions a parent expects.

The shop has one of its own: Back-in-Stock Alert, which asks a visitor for nothing but an email address on a product that has sold out and stores it with the product's name, link and SKU. It runs the same guards and lands in the same inbox as everything else here, and it is never treated as a newsletter signup — see When something is sold out.

Where a submission goes

Two places, always, and in this order:

1. Messages. A read-only screen in the admin menu. Every submission is stored there as a private record with the sender's name, email, phone, the topic and the page it came from. There is no Add New button: these are records of what a visitor sent, not content to write.
2. An email, to the address in Appearance → Theme Options → Business info. With no address there it falls back to the WordPress admin email. The subject is your site name plus "New message", the reply-to is the sender, and the body repeats every field plus a link to the record.

Storing happens first on purpose. If mail delivery fails you still have the message; if the store fails, the email says so in as many words. So a missing notification with the row present in Messages is a mail problem on the host, not a broken form — see Troubleshooting.

Every form runs the same guards first: the WordPress nonce, a hidden honeypot field, a minimum fill time of three seconds, a rate limit of five submissions an hour per connection per form, and then Turnstile. A submission that trips one of them comes back to the page saying which, and nothing is stored.

The contact page

The contact page's own details are not typed on the page. They come from Appearance → Theme Options → Business info, which is filled in once and then read by the header, the footer, the contact page, the map, the "Open now" line and your structured data:

Opening hours are Monday first, up to six ranges a day, and an empty day means closed. They drive the "Open now" state and are published as structured data — see SEO and structured data.

Leave the Primary action link empty and every call-to-action button in the theme is not rendered at all, rather than pointing nowhere.

The map and the Directions button

The map block builds its embed from the Address field, so there is no map key to buy and nothing to paste. Without an address there is nothing to point at, and the block says so instead of showing an empty grey square.

The embed is behind a click. Until a visitor asks for it the page contains no map element at all — not a hidden one, not one with an empty source — because a Google embed hands over the visitor's IP address the moment it resolves.

The Directions button is never gated: it is an ordinary link to the map service, so it works with no JavaScript, needs no consent, and still works for a visitor who declines the embed. It is also the second slot on the sticky mobile bar.

Spam protection with Turnstile

Cloudflare Turnstile is free, optional and off until you configure it. Get a site key and a secret key from your Cloudflare dashboard and paste them into Business info, under Spam protection.

Both keys, or neither. The widget renders when a site key is present, and submissions are verified only when the secret is present too. So a site key on its own shows visitors a check that is never verified, and a secret on its own verifies a token no visitor can produce. Either way you get no protection. Clearing the site key is the documented off switch.

What a visitor sees is a small Cloudflare check above the send button. The script is not loaded with the page; it is fetched the first time someone interacts with the form, so a page that merely contains a form does not report its readers to a third party. Turnstile cannot produce a token without JavaScript, so the block prints a line telling a scripting-off visitor why the form will refuse them. If Cloudflare itself is unreachable the submission is allowed through: an outage is evidence of nothing, and the four cheaper guards have already run.

The newsletter card

The Newsletter card block is one email field, a heading, a sentence, an optional fine-print line and a button. It posts to the same place every other form does, with the same guards, and it works with scripting off.

Two settings matter beyond the copy. List ID names the letter being joined: it becomes the "From" column in the inbox, so two cards are told apart without opening a row, and it travels to your provider as a tag. Consent text prints your own wording above the button and is stored with the signup, which is the record you want if anyone asks. Follow buttons — on a section masthead, an author page or a match — are signups too, filed under what they follow.

Newsletter destinations

Under Newsletter in Business info, Where signups go has three values. Every signup lands in Messages whichever you pick; a provider is an addition, never a replacement.

For a form URL, paste the action of your provider's own signup form and tell the theme what that form calls its email field — EMAIL for Mailchimp and Brevo, fields[email] for MailerLite, email_address for ConvertKit. Anything else the form needs goes in Extra form fields, one name=value per line; {email}, {tags} and {name} are filled in, so tags={tags} hands over the list that was joined. Nearly every provider has a hosted form, so this route fits almost all of them.

For Mailchimp, paste an API key and the audience ID from Audience → Settings → Audience name and defaults. The key must keep its data-centre suffix — the -us21 on the end — because that is how the theme finds the right API host. Double opt-in is on by default and adds the member as pending, so Mailchimp sends its own confirmation; turn it off only if you are certain you may.

Either way the outcome is written back onto the message and shown in the inbox: sent, rejected with its status code, or not forwarded with the reason.

Keys you cannot read back

The Turnstile secret key and the Mailchimp API key are stored write-only. They are never returned to the settings screen, so both fields look empty after saving even though the values are working, and neither appears in an exported settings file. Re-entering the key is the only way to change it — see Write-only secrets. Keep them wherever you keep your other credentials; the site will not give them back.

Colours, fonts and spacing

SportPulse has one design system and every block obeys it. Change a colour in one place and the whole site follows — buttons, links, badges, tables, charts, the WooCommerce notices, all of it. This chapter is where each dial is.

How the colour system works

The theme defines a palette of named slots, not a list of colours. Every pattern, block and stylesheet in the theme and the plugin references the slot by name — never a raw hex value — so a slot is a promise: whatever is in primary is what every primary thing on the site is.

There are around twenty slots, most of them structural or derived and riding along with the palette:

Each of those has an on- partner — on-primary, on-accent, on-cta — which is the text colour that sits on top of it. That pairing is what keeps a recoloured button legible, so if you change a fill, check its partner.

Because nothing hardcodes a value, this system is also why you should never paste a hex code into custom CSS when a token will do.

Change the palette

Appearance → Theme Options → Theme styles, in the Colours card. Six pickers are exposed, in the order you think about them: Page background, Text, Primary, Secondary, Accent and Buttons / CTA. Those are the brand decisions; the rest of the palette follows.

The card says Saved to Site Editor styles, and it means it literally: these values are written to the site's global styles, the same entity Appearance → Editor → Styles edits. So the editor previews exactly what the front end renders.

Watch the contrast line under each picker. As you change a colour the screen measures every pairing that colour takes part in and tells you the tightest one — either a grey readout ("Closest pair: … 4.62:1 — the minimum is 4.5:1") or a warning naming the pair that fell below it. It never stops you saving; the judgement stays yours. A pale accent on a white page fails at small sizes even though it looks fine in the picker, and the on- partner colour is what carries the text over it. See Accessibility.

The style variations

Above the pickers is Preset. Its default is Automatic — follow the imported demo, and below that it lists every style variation the theme ships by name — the six demo palettes, including two alternative tipster palettes, a light and a wire newsroom palette, and a dark variation called Dusk.

Picking one applies the whole look: colours, fonts, the section CSS and the header, footer and shop skins. It is the fastest way to wear one demo's appearance on a site built from another's content.

A preset is a full replace. Applying one discards individual colour and font tweaks you made afterwards, which is why the screen asks before it does it. Pick the preset first, then adjust.

Three more variations are section styles rather than site styles: Section — Alt, Section — CTA and Section — Inverted. They are not in the preset picker because they apply to one band: select a group or a SportPulse section block in the editor and pick the style there, and that band alone flips.

Fonts and the four font roles

The theme uses four font roles, and every heading, paragraph, table and figure in it is assigned to one of them:

Out of the box all four are system stacks — the fonts already on the reader's device — which is why the theme paints instantly and ships no font files it does not need.

In Fonts on the same tab you pick the heading and body faces from whatever is installed. Add a Google Font… browses the whole Google catalogue and installs the family onto your own server, so your visitors never contact Google, the font needs no cookie banner and it costs no third-party request. Upload a font… opens the Site Editor's Font Library, where you add your own licensed files; once installed, the family appears in these dropdowns. Either way the font is self-hosted — nothing in Sport Pulse fetches type from a third party at page load.

Type sizes

The Type scale card exposes the only four sizes worth setting per site: Hero / H1, Section heading (H2), Sub-heading (H3) and Body text. Everything else in the theme is derived from them.

Leave a field blank and the theme's own fluid size applies, scaling between a phone and a desktop on its own. Type a number and that size is used across the whole site at every width, so only override a step you need pinned.

The content width

Appearance → Theme Options → Site layout sets Content width (px) — 600 to 1920, default 1200. It caps the page's content column everywhere, including inside the editor, so what you build is what you see.

Sections with a full-width background still stretch edge to edge; only their inner content is capped. That is the difference between a wide site and a wide band.

Spacing and the section rhythm

Spacing is a scale, not free numbers. The theme ships seven steps and every block's padding and gap controls offer exactly those:

The last three are fluid: they shrink on a phone and open up on a desktop with no media query. Section is the one that creates the rhythm between bands, and the demos use it everywhere — which is why their pages read as designed. Give a band you add Section padding rather than a typed value and it will match the ones the demo built.

Custom CSS, and where to put it

Small, additive tweaks go in Appearance → Theme Options → Advanced, in Custom CSS. It is printed on every page of the site, it survives theme updates, and it travels in an exported settings file.

Write it against the tokens rather than raw values, so your CSS follows a palette change instead of fighting it:

/* A heavier shop hero title, still on the theme's own palette. */
.anps-shop-hero__title {
	font-family: var(--wp--preset--font-family--heading);
	color: var(--wp--preset--color--primary);
	letter-spacing: -0.02em;
}

Use the child theme instead when you are doing more than tweaking: changing a template, replacing a template part, overriding a whole stylesheet or adding PHP. The child theme ships in the same download; install it, activate it in place of the parent, and leave the parent installed. Nothing you put in a child theme is touched by a SportPulse update.

The demo skins are stylesheets

Each demo's look is a stylesheet the theme ships — one file per demo, built from the theme's own sources into assets/dist/demo-<slug>.css — and the style pickers decide which one loads. Those files are theme files.

Never edit the theme's own files. A SportPulse update overwrites assets/dist/ wholesale, and a hand-edited demo stylesheet disappears with it, silently, at the worst possible moment. Put the change in Custom CSS if it is a rule or two, or in the child theme if it is more. Both outlive every update.

If a change fights the demo skin instead of extending it, that usually means the wrong skin is selected — check Style pickers: automatic or a demo name before you write CSS to undo it.

Building pages with Elementor

SportPulse builds its pages out of blocks, in the WordPress editor. If you prefer Elementor, you can build the same pages there instead: the theme ships an Elementor widget for almost every content band, and each of the eight demos ships an Elementor version of its pages.

Elementor is optional. Nothing in this chapter loads unless Elementor is active — with the plugin absent, the theme and its demos behave exactly as the rest of this manual describes.

What Elementor covers here

Elementor owns page content only. The header, the top bar, the footer and the sticky mobile bar stay WordPress template parts, edited in the Site Editor, because Theme Options drives them — see Header, top bar and footer. Colours, fonts, type sizes, business info, opening hours, structured data and the shop are still set in Theme Options, tab by tab whichever editor you build pages in.

So Elementor replaces one thing: how you lay out and edit the middle of a page.

Elementor Free is enough

There is no Elementor Pro dependency. Every control the widgets use — text, media, repeaters, colour pickers, responsive dimensions — is in the free edition. Free shows some of its own upgrade prompts inside the editor; that is Elementor's chrome, not a missing feature of the theme.

To keep the first run clean, the theme skips Elementor's onboarding wizard and its usage-tracking notice, and it switches Elementor's own default colours and fonts off, so Elementor's native widgets inherit your palette and typefaces instead of fighting them. If you want Elementor's untouched behaviour, a developer can turn all of that off with the anps_elementor_clean_ui filter — one of the hooks listed in Extending the theme.

The widgets, one per block

SportPulse registers 187 widgets — one for each content block that has an Elementor equivalent. They sit in a single group in the Elementor inserter, called Theme Sections, and each one is named after the block it renders: the Elementor widget for the team-league-table block is the same league table you would insert in the block editor.

That is not a lookalike. A widget builds the block's own field values and calls the block's own renderer, so the markup, the CSS and the front-end behaviour are the same in both editors. It also means a fix to a block reaches your Elementor pages with no extra work.

Importing a demo with Elementor active

Activate Elementor before you import. All eight demos ship an Elementor build of their pages — the two light packs use their parent demo's — and the importer picks it automatically when Elementor is active; with Elementor off, the same import writes block pages. The demo card on Appearance → Theme Options → Demo import marks the pack as having an Elementor version, and the screen tells you Elementor was detected.

Everything else about the import is unchanged — it is still one demo per site and still a full replace. Read Importing a demo first.

Activating Elementor afterwards does not convert anything. An import that already ran wrote block pages, and they stay block pages. To get the Elementor build, activate Elementor and then re-import the demo — which replaces your content again.

Editing a SportPulse widget

Drop a widget on the page and its Content tab is the block's own field list: the headings, the text, the links, the repeater rows, the images. A band that reads live data — fixtures, predictions, players, products — exposes the query (how many, which category, what order) and never a copy of the data, so it keeps showing what your site actually holds.

Two controls are worth knowing:

Band padding is deliberately empty by default, so the demo's own responsive spacing stands until you override it. Colour controls are full Elementor colour pickers, seeded with your palette so they follow Colours, fonts and spacing until you pick something specific.

Elementor page template

An Elementor page must use the Elementor page template. Open the page in the WordPress editor sidebar, or Elementor's own page settings, and set Template to Elementor (full-width content). There is also Elementor landing (no header or footer) for a page with no chrome at all.

This is not cosmetic. The No title template constrains the content column, and an Elementor container cannot break out of it the way a block band can. On the wrong template, every full-width band on the page is trapped in a narrow strip with the page background showing down both sides. The demo's Elementor pages are already set correctly; a page you create yourself is not.

Block pages keep No title. Do not move them to the Elementor template.

Blocks with no widget

Some blocks are deliberately absent from Elementor, because they are site furniture rather than page content: crests and wordmarks, cart and account links, the search field, the match and article heads that belong to a single template. Those live in templates and parts, and you edit them in the Site Editor.

Long legal documents are the other exception. The privacy, terms and cookie pages stay block content even in an Elementor demo — their nested structure does not survive a page builder's repeater, and a page with block content renders perfectly well beside Elementor pages.

Mixing block pages and Elementor pages

You can, page by page. The choice is per page: a page with Elementor data is rendered by Elementor, and every other page is rendered by its blocks. Both read the same Theme Options, the same palette and the same demo stylesheet, so they match visually. Only remember the template rule above — Elementor pages on the Elementor template, block pages on No title.

One thing that surprises people: the moment you press Edit with Elementor, Elementor owns that page. Its blocks are still in the database, but the block editor's canvas is hidden for that page while Elementor is active, and the editor shows Elementor's own switch instead. Use Back to WordPress Editor in Elementor's panel to hand the page back. So open a block page in Elementor only when you mean to convert it.

Turning Elementor off

Deactivate Elementor and the widgets and the Elementor page template stop being offered. What happens to a page depends on how it was built:

• A demo page converted by the import keeps its block markup underneath, so it renders as the block version of the same page. Set its template back to No title and it is a block page again.
• A page you built from scratch in Elementor has no block markup to fall back on, so it renders empty. Rebuild it with blocks, or reactivate Elementor.

Nothing else changes: your options, colours, menus, posts, products and sports data are untouched, because none of them were ever Elementor's to hold.

If a page looks wrong after any of this, start with Troubleshooting.

SEO and structured data

Structured data is the machine-readable copy of a page: the same facts a visitor reads, written so Google, Bing and AI assistants do not have to guess. Sport Pulse publishes it from data you have already entered, so there is nothing to maintain twice.

The theme handles the parts that come from your own settings. Titles, per-page meta descriptions and sitemaps belong to WordPress or to an SEO plugin — see Titles, meta descriptions and sitemaps below.

What the theme publishes, and from where

Unless an SEO plugin is already publishing one, every page carries one JSON-LD graph. What goes into it depends on the page:

That is the whole list, and the omissions are deliberate. The theme publishes no article or video markup, and it never attaches a star rating to your business — ratings belong on products, where WooCommerce owns them. Breadcrumbs are published only where a page genuinely sits under something; if you want a trail on every page, an SEO plugin adds one without conflicting with any of the above.

An FAQ block only contributes questions when its schema option is on, so a question-and-answer band used purely for layout does not claim to be an FAQ.

Matches, clubs and players in search results

A fixture page is published as a sports event: when it kicks off, who is playing, where, which competition it belongs to, and that tickets are on sale when you have said so. That is the entry Google can show as an event rather than as one more blue link, and it is the part of your SEO a general-purpose theme cannot produce for you.

Three fields on the fixture decide how complete that entry is:

• Kick-off. Without it there is no event at all. A match with no date is nothing a search engine can list, so the theme publishes no event rather than a dateless one.
• The two sides. Link each to a club record and that side is published with its own page and crest. A side typed as plain text is published as a name, which is still correct — the club link is optional everywhere in the theme.
• The venue. Name it exactly as one of your Locations and the match inherits that branch's address and map position. Otherwise the venue line you typed is published as it stands.

Everything else follows one rule: a field you have not filled in is left out, never published blank and never guessed. A postponed match says postponed. A match that has been played carries no ticket offer, whatever its sale status still says. Ticket prices are not published at all — the ticket figures on a fixture are free text with a currency symbol in them, and a price read wrongly by a machine is worse than no price.

A club page is published as a team: name, crest, short name and three-letter code, sport and club colour. Only a short name and code you have actually entered are published as alternatives; the theme will not pass off the abbreviation it invents for crowded table cells as the club's real code.

A player page is published as a person in that squad — position, date of birth, birthplace, nationality — and as a member of the club you ticked This is our club on. Without that tick there is no club to belong to, and the connection is left out rather than assumed.

A competition page is published as an event spanning its own fixtures, from the earliest kick-off to the latest, so a league page carries real dates without you entering a season twice. A competition with no dated fixture publishes nothing.

A developer can send ticket offers to a ticketing provider instead of the match page with the anps_schema_ticket_url filter.

The Business info hand-off

One screen feeds all of it: Appearance → Theme Options → Business info. Fill it in once and the same values reach the contact page, the footer, the map, the "open now" state and the structured data together.

Business type is the field most people skip. It decides whether you are described as an organisation, a shop, a local business or a professional service, and Google treats those differently. Pick the closest match once. Full details of the screen are in Business info.

An empty field is simply left out rather than published blank, so partial information is safe — but incomplete information is a weaker listing.

With an SEO plugin installed

Two plugins publishing structured data on one page produce two competing graphs, which is worse than either alone. SportPulse never lets that happen. It recognises Yoast SEO, Rank Math, SEOPress, All in One SEO, The SEO Framework and Slim SEO, and it also notices any other plugin that has taken over your page titles.

If Yoast or Rank Math is installed but has not been set up — Rank Math publishes nothing until its wizard is finished, for instance — the theme notices that nothing was emitted and falls back to its own graph, so a half-configured plugin never leaves a page with no structured data at all.

Handing structured data to an SEO plugin

If you would rather your SEO plugin owned every node, including the business and the opening hours, switch Let an SEO plugin own structured data on in Business info. The theme then publishes no JSON-LD and no FAQ nodes at all, and you enter your business details again in the plugin.

Only turn this on if you have actually configured the plugin. With the switch on and the plugin unconfigured, the page ends up with no structured data from anyone — the fallback described above is deliberately skipped.

Locations in search results

A location's own page publishes that branch as a business in its own right — its address, its phone number, its hours, its map position — and links it to the organisation from Business info as the parent. That is the shape Google expects from a business with more than one address, and it is why a branch page can rank for its own town.

Add and edit branches as described in Locations. Two things matter for search: fill in the address and the hours, and give each branch a page of its own rather than listing them all on one.

AI assistants and the llms.txt file

Your site also serves a short plain-text profile at yoursite.com/llms.txt. It is the same idea as robots.txt, but for assistants such as ChatGPT and Perplexity: your business name, a one-line summary, your key pages, your products and your contact details, so an assistant answering a question about you reads your own data instead of inferring it.

It is generated on request from the same settings as everything else, so there is no file to edit and nothing to regenerate. It is served as plain text and marked not to be indexed, and it stays short on purpose — a crawler wants a map, not your whole catalogue. Keeping Business info accurate is the entire maintenance task. A developer can switch it off with the anps_llms_txt_enabled filter — see Search results, structured data and AI.

Titles, meta descriptions and sitemaps

• Titles come from WordPress: the page or post title, plus your site title. Write page titles as you want them read.
• Meta descriptions are filled in by the theme so no page ships without one. It uses the best available words for that URL and trims them to the length Google shows. The moment an SEO plugin is active — Yoast, Rank Math, SEOPress, All in One SEO, The SEO Framework or Slim SEO — the theme stops, because two descriptions on one page is a fault every audit reports.
• Sitemaps are WordPress's wp-sitemap.xml, or your SEO plugin's if it replaces it. The theme does not generate one.

So an SEO plugin is optional. Install one when you want to write per-page titles and descriptions by hand, or want article markup and a breadcrumb trail on every page; skip it and the site is still complete.

Search checks before you launch

Do these once, in this order:

1. Fill in Business info completely, including the business type and the opening hours.
2. Rewrite the demo copy on your home page and your main landing pages. The structured data and /llms.txt repeat what you write, so demo text becomes a demo claim about your business.
3. Open yoursite.com/llms.txt and read it. If a line is wrong, the setting behind it is wrong.
4. Test one page of each kind — home, a fixture, a club, a location, a page with an FAQ, a product if you sell — in Google's Rich Results Test.
5. Check that Settings → Reading does not still discourage search engines.

The rest of going live is in Performance and going live.

Performance and going live

A fast site is mostly a matter of what you add after the theme. SportPulse ships lean and stays out of the way; the two things that reliably slow a WordPress site down are oversized images and too many plugins, and both are yours to control.

This chapter is the last thing to read before you make the site public.

What the theme already does

You do not need to configure any of this. It is how the theme is built.

• One demo stylesheet per site. Each demo has its own compiled stylesheet and only the active demo's is loaded. The other five never reach the browser.
• Per-block CSS. A block's stylesheet loads only on pages that actually render that block, so a page pays for the bands it uses and nothing else.
• Deferred scripts. Front-end JavaScript is deferred and loaded at the end of the page, and a block's script travels with the block — a page with no interactive band loads no script for one.
• Sensible image loading. The main image at the top of a page is given loading priority; images further down the page load as you scroll to them.
• Self-hosted fonts. The typefaces ship inside the theme as woff2 files, so there is no request to Google, no third-party round trip and no privacy question to answer. Adding a Google Font in Theme Options installs it onto your own server too, rather than linking to Google's.

What is left to you

Two habits are worth more than any setting: crop a photograph before you upload it, and remove a plugin you stopped using instead of deactivating it.

One warning about that cache plugin. Page caching is safe and worth having. The JavaScript settings next to it — delay, combine, aggregate, lazy-load JavaScript — switch off every interactive band on the site without reporting anything. Enter the exclusions in Caching and optimisation plugins before you turn any of them on.

How to check a page honestly

A measurement you cannot repeat is not a measurement. If you test a page, test it like this:

1. Test the live site over HTTPS, not a local copy and not a staging site on shared hosting.
2. Test logged out. As an administrator you load the admin bar and editor assets that no visitor ever sees.
3. Run it twice and use the second run. The first request builds the page and warms the caches.
4. Test a real page with your content, on mobile as well as desktop.
5. Change one thing at a time. If a number moves after you install a plugin, that plugin moved it.

Google's PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse in Chrome both work. Read the opportunities, not just the score — "properly size images" is the one you can usually act on.

The launch checklist

Work through this in order. Every step is something a buyer has shipped without at least once.

1. Permalinks. Settings → Permalinks — anything except Plain. Plain permalinks break clean URLs and the search-engine visibility of everything.
2. HTTPS. Site address and WordPress address both https://, with a valid certificate.
3. Requirements. Open Appearance → Theme Options → System requirements and clear everything marked Fix. Use Copy all as text if you need to send it to your host.
4. Business info. Name, phone, email, address and opening hours filled in — they feed the contact page, the footer and your structured data.
5. Menus. Check every menu location the demo used, and click through the header and footer on a phone as well as a desktop.
6. Home page. Settings → Reading points at the page you mean, and the posts page is the one you mean.
7. Contact form. Send a real message from the front end. It should appear under Messages and arrive by email. If it is stored but never arrives, the problem is email delivery, not the form.
8. A real purchase, if you sell. Place an order with live payment credentials, then refund it. Check the order email, the tax and the shipping total.
9. Search-engine visibility. Settings → Reading — the box that discourages search engines must be off. This is the single most common launch mistake.
10. Demo images. Replace them, as below.
11. Read your own pages. Demo copy names fictional clubs, players and prices. Anything you leave is a claim about your business.

Replace the demo images

The photographs in the demos are licensed for the demo, not for your site. They are there so an empty site looks finished while you work, and they must come off before you launch — every hero, every card and every gallery.

This is a licence obligation, not a suggestion. Read Licence, updates and support before you decide to keep one. Replacing an image is the same as replacing any other: open the block or the widget, pick your own file, delete the demo attachment from Media when nothing uses it.

Fictional names go with them. Meridian FC, Polaris Esports, Rowan Hall and Oddsmark are invented, and so are their fixtures, prices and records.

If something looks wrong once the site is live, Troubleshooting covers the symptoms this theme can actually produce.

Licence, updates and support

SportPulse is one product bought through two routes, and the route decides only how updates reach you. Everything the theme does is the same either way.

What the licence covers

The download contains a licensing/ folder with two files, and together they describe a split licence:

In practice: you may modify and reuse the code, and the design and assets are licensed for the site you bought the licence for. One licence, one production site. A staging or development copy of that same site is not a second site.

Nothing in the theme is switched off by a licence check. An unlicensed installation keeps every feature it has, including the demo importer and every block — what a licence adds is automatic updates and support.

If you bought an ANPS Club licence

Open Appearance → ANPS Club Licence, paste your key and activate. The screen then reports the licence as active, and this site gets automatic updates and support.

• Updates arrive in the normal places. Both the theme and the Anps Theme Plugin appear under Dashboard → Updates and in Appearance → Themes and Plugins, and you update them the way you update anything else.
• The licence re-checks itself in the background every few days. You do not need to revisit the screen.
• Development domains are recognised and skipped. A local or staging domain is not licensed and does not use up your licence slot, so testing there costs you nothing.
• Moving to a new domain is offered on the same screen: if the key is already active on another production domain, activating here offers to move it.

If the screen says the key is valid but for a different theme, or that it cannot verify the licence, do not re-purchase — the message tells you which of the two it is, and both are settled by support.

If you bought on ThemeForest

Your purchase is complete and permanent; there is no key to enter. Updates are manual:

1. Download the new version from your ThemeForest downloads page.
2. Unzip it and take sportpulse.zip and plugins/anps_theme_plugin.zip.
3. Upload the theme at Appearance → Themes → Add New → Upload Theme and choose to replace the current version when WordPress offers.
4. Upload the plugin at Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, the same way.

That is the whole procedure, and it is the same procedure as the first install — see Installing. An ANPS Club licence is the alternative if you would rather updates arrived in the dashboard; it is offered on the licence screen.

Keeping the theme and plugin in step

The theme and the Anps Theme Plugin are released together and expect each other's version. Update both at the same time, from the same download.

If the plugin is older than the theme needs, the theme says so with a notice: SportPulse needs Anps Theme Plugin (version) or newer; (version) is installed. Update the plugin. Nothing is broken at that point, but a block added in the newer release will not be registered until you update.

The reverse also matters: a plugin newer than the theme is not a supported combination either. One download, both zips, every time.

Before you update

An update replaces theme and plugin files. It does not touch your database, but "does not touch" is not the same as "cannot go wrong", so:

1. Read changelog.txt. It sits in the root of the download, newest release first, and it is where anything you have to act on is written down.
2. Back up the database and wp-content. Your host almost certainly has a one-click backup; take one.
3. Export your settings. Appearance → Theme Options → Advanced has Export settings, which writes a small file you can import again. It is the fastest way back to a working configuration.
4. Note your secrets. The Turnstile secret and the Mailchimp API key are stored write-only and are deliberately absent from that export — see Write-only secrets. Keep them where you can find them.
5. Update on staging first if the site earns money.

What an update never touches

An update replaces the theme's and plugin's own files, and nothing else. It leaves alone:

• Your pages, posts, products, media and sports data.
• Your Theme Options — every setting on that screen is stored in the database.
• Your palette, fonts and type sizes, including edits made in the Site Editor.
• Your menus, widgets and template parts you have customised.
• Your child theme, and anything in it.

The one thing an update does overwrite is a file you edited inside the parent theme. That edit is gone, silently, with no way back. Put custom code in the child theme, and custom CSS in Theme Options → Advanced → Custom CSS, and an update is a non-event.

Demo photography is licensed for the demo

The photographs that arrive with a demo are licensed for use in the demo. They are not licensed for your live site, and neither are the fictional clubs, players, sponsors or prices they illustrate. Replace them before you launch — there is a checklist in Performance and going live.

The same applies to the theme's demo content in general: it exists so an empty site looks finished while you build, not to be published as your own.

Getting support

Support runs through ANPS Club at club.anpsthemes.com for licensed sites, and through the item's support channel where you bought it if you bought on ThemeForest.

Include this in the first message and you will usually get an answer rather than a question:

Check Troubleshooting first. Most of what reaches support is in there, with the fix.

Troubleshooting

Each section below is one symptom: what you see, why it happens, and what to do about it. They are ordered roughly by when in a build you meet them.

Two symptoms live in their own chapters and are not repeated here: a header with no navigation is answered by If the header shows no menu, and Elementor's own rules are in Building pages with Elementor.

Blocks are missing from the block inserter

None of the theme's sections are offered — no hero, no section head, no fixture board — in the editor or the Site Editor.

Every block lives in the Anps Theme Plugin, so this means the plugin is not running. The admin notice tells you which of four cases it is:

• Not installed: upload plugins/anps_theme_plugin.zip from your download at Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin. The notice's button opens that screen for you.
• Not activated: Plugins → Anps Theme Plugin → Activate.
• Built for another theme: upload plugins/anps_theme_plugin.zip from this theme's download; it replaces the one installed. Another ANPS theme's plugin registers that theme's blocks, not these.
• Too old: update it from the same download as the theme, per Licence, updates and support.

Install steps in full are in Installing.

Theme Options is not under Appearance

The menu item is simply absent. The settings screen ships in the plugin, so the first cause is the same as above. If the plugin is active, the cause is your user: the screen needs the capability an administrator has, so an editor or a shop manager never sees it. On multisite, check you are on the site rather than in the network admin.

The demo import will not start because of a requirement

The Demo import tab lists red requirements above the demo cards and importing gets nowhere. Those are the checks an import cannot proceed without — PHP memory, upload and post size, execution time, the DOM and XML extensions, an image library, and a writable uploads folder. They are your host's settings, not the theme's.

Open Appearance → Theme Options → System requirements, use Copy all as text and send that to your host, asking for the failing values to be raised. The tab is described in System requirements.

The demo import stops part-way or times out

The progress modal stalls, or the page errors with some pages imported and some missing. An import writes hundreds of posts and copies every demo image into your Media library, so it is the longest single request your site will ever serve; a host that caps execution time interrupts it.

Do not leave it half-done — run Re-import on the same demo. An import replaces rather than merges, so a second run repairs a partial first one. Keep the browser tab open while it works. If it fails at the same point twice, ask your host to raise the PHP time limit.

Demo images are broken or missing after an import

Pages and text arrived; images are empty frames.

The demo's photography ships inside the plugin and is copied from disk, so nothing is downloaded and your server's internet access is never the cause. What fails is the step after the copy — saving the file and generating its crops — and the System requirements tab names which one:

• Uploads folder: Not writable. Nothing can be saved, so every image is missing. Ask your host to make wp-content/uploads writable.
• Image editing (GD or Imagick): Missing. The files arrive but no thumbnail or crop is generated, so cards and heroes render as empty frames.
• Memory limit below 256M. Resizing the largest hero images is the high-water mark of an import, so the big ones fail while the small ones succeed — which is why some images are there and some are not.

Fix whichever the tab reports, then Re-import. Importing again is the only way to bring in the media it missed.

A page looks unstyled after changing a style picker

You picked a demo name in a style picker and now that part of the site renders plain: no section colours, no band spacing, default type.

The pickers choose which demo's look is used for one slot — header, footer, shop, single post, and so on — and a demo only supplies a variant for the slots it actually ships. Point a slot at a demo that has no variant for it and the neutral base version renders instead. That is the plain look.

Set the picker back to Automatic, which always follows the demo you imported, then change one slot at a time. See Style pickers: automatic or a demo name.

Menus are empty after an import

Pages exist, but the header, the footer or both show nothing, or a partial list. An import writes the demo's menus and assigns them, but a menu can be left unassigned when the site already held menus of the same name, and a page you delete later leaves a gap in whichever menu pointed at it.

Open Appearance → Menus, check a menu is assigned to every location the demo uses, and remove items pointing at pages that no longer exist. Menus render two levels deep, so a third-level item never appears. See Menus.

Admin menus I do not recognise, or one that vanished

Either you see around twenty sports menus you have no use for, or a menu you were using — Predictions, Bookmakers, Programmes — has left the sidebar. Both are the same mechanism: a sports post type's admin menu is shown or hidden according to the demo you imported. Each of the five filtered demos shows its own types; the Team demo and a site with no demo imported show everything, because an unrecognised demo hides nothing. On top of that, a type that still holds posts keeps its menu whichever demo is active — so one menu the current demo does not use is normal on a site that has had other content through it.

A hidden menu is never lost content. The post types are always registered — only the menu is hidden — and a type that still holds posts keeps its menu whatever the demo. Nothing is deleted by switching demos, and re-importing the demo that used a type brings its menu back.

People, Locations, Team and Messages sit outside this entirely and are always present.

The sticky mobile bar shows when it should not

A bar is pinned to the bottom of the screen on phones and you do not want it, or you want one and there is none. It is a three-state setting whose default is to follow the demo, so a demo designed around the bar switches it on for you.

Go to Appearance → Theme Options → Footer → Mobile bar and set Sticky mobile bar to Never show or Always show rather than Automatic. The bar itself is described in The sticky mobile bar.

A new Google Font does not load

You added a font through Theme styles → Add a Google Font… and either the list never appeared or the site still shows the old typeface.

Fonts install onto your server rather than link to Google's, so two things can fail. If the catalogue will not load, your server cannot reach the internet: installing a font is one of the few things here that genuinely needs outbound HTTP, and the System requirements tab shows it as Outbound HTTP (cURL): Blocked. If the install failed, the font directory under wp-content is not writable; the error says so.

If the font installed and nothing changed, you have not selected it yet: pick it as the Heading font or Body font in Theme styles, save, and clear any page cache. Browsers cache fonts hard, so confirm in a private window.

The shop looks wrong, or nothing can be bought

Product pages render oddly, the shop page is a bare list, or Add to cart is nowhere. Three causes, in the order worth checking:

1. WooCommerce is not active. The theme does not require it, so the shop templates only apply once it is. Only the Team and E-gaming demos ship products at all.
2. Showcase mode is on. It removes every price and purchase button by design — that is how a catalogue-only site is built. Turn it off in WooCommerce.
3. The shop style picker points at a demo with no shop of its own. Set it back to Automatic, as above.

The rest of the shop is in Shop and products.

The contact form does not send

Either the visitor is rejected, or the form submits and no email arrives. Those are unrelated causes, and one check separates them: every submission is saved on the site under Messages first, then emailed to the address in Business info, falling back to the WordPress admin email.

• In Messages, but no email. That is mail delivery, not the form. WordPress sends through your server by default and most hosts' mail is treated as spam. Install a transactional-mail plugin and confirm the address in Business info.
• Submissions rejected. Usually spam protection half-configured: a Turnstile site key with no matching secret rejects everything. Both keys or neither. The secret is write-only, so it never shows again and is not in a settings export — re-enter both if in doubt. See Write-only secrets.
• Turnstile needs JavaScript, so a visitor who has it switched off cannot submit. The form tells them why.

The newsletter form does not subscribe

Someone signs up and never reaches your list. The form has three destinations and only does what the setting says, so check Business info → Newsletter → Where signups go:

• Inbox stores the signup on the site; it was never going to Mailchimp.
• Form URL posts to a third-party form, and the email field name here must match the name that service expects or the signup arrives empty.
• Mailchimp needs both the API key and the audience ID. The key is write-only like the Turnstile secret, and a saved-but-invalid key looks identical to a correct one, so re-enter it first.

If double opt-in is on, a subscriber stays unconfirmed until they click Mailchimp's email. That is not a failure, and it is the setting most often mistaken for one.

An Elementor page's bands are trapped in a narrow column

Full-width sections sit in a centred column with the page background down both sides, and it looks correct inside the Elementor editor. The page is on the wrong template: an Elementor container cannot break out of a constrained content column the way a block band can.

Set Template to Elementor (full-width content) on that page. The demo's Elementor pages already are; a page you created is not.

A fixture, prediction or match page looks thin

A single fixture, prediction, player or programme page renders with a title and little else, while the demo's own pages look full. Those pages are built from the fields in the editor panels, and a band with no data renders nothing rather than a placeholder — correct on a live site, and bare on a half-filled one.

Open the entry and fill in its panel: a fixture needs its competition, kickoff time, venue and both sides; a prediction needs its fixture, analyst, selection and odds. See Sports content and data.

Images are missing after moving the site

You moved to a new domain, or from staging to live, and images are gone while pages and settings survived. Attachment URLs are stored in the database with the old domain, and the files themselves live outside it.

1. Copy wp-content/uploads across in full — a database export contains no images.
2. Search and replace the old site URL with the new one across the database, with a tool that handles serialised data.
3. If images appear at the wrong sizes, regenerate the intermediate sizes.

Do this before re-importing anything: an import replaces content and will not repair a move.

A calculator, search box, tab strip or map does nothing

A band renders correctly but will not respond: the earnings calculator never recalculates, the instant search never narrows the list, the mobile menu button will not open, the before/after handle will not drag, the live blog and the scores never refresh, or the map's consent button does nothing at all. Usually several of them at once, on the live site, while everything works for you as an administrator.

That is one setting, not several bugs. An optimisation plugin is delaying, combining or lazy-loading JavaScript, which breaks the module loading every interactive band depends on. Many of those plugins skip their own optimisation for logged-in users, which is why you cannot see it.

Test it logged out in a private window, with the plugin's JavaScript optimisation switched off and its cache cleared. If the bands come back, add the exclusions from Caching and optimisation plugins and turn the feature on again.

Accessibility

Many buyers — clubs with public funding, schools, anyone selling to a public body — have to publish an accessibility statement about their own website. This chapter exists so you can write one honestly: it says what the theme does for you, what it cannot do for you, and what is simply not there yet.

This is a description of the theme, not a certificate. Nothing here is a claim of conformance to WCAG or to any national regulation. Accessibility is a property of a published site — your colours, your copy, your images, your plugins — and no theme can hand you it. What a theme can do is not get in your way, and give you a defensible starting point.

What the theme does for you

These are built in. There is no setting to switch them on.

A visible keyboard focus indicator. Links, buttons, form fields (input, select, textarea), expanding summary elements and anything given an explicit tabindex draw a two-pixel outline in the current text colour, offset from the element so it stays visible against a filled button. It is drawn on :focus-visible, which means keyboard users get it and mouse users do not see a ring left behind after a click. It is never removed.

Contrast checked on the palettes we ship. The colour pairings the design depends on — body text on the page, muted text on the page, text on cards and panels, text on primary and CTA fills, text on inverted bands — are declared as a contract and measured on every build, against the base palette and all nine style variations. Text pairings are held to a 4.5:1 minimum, larger and non-text pairings to the ratios their role requires. A palette that drops a pair below its floor fails the build rather than shipping.

And your own colours are measured too. In Appearance → Theme Options → Theme styles, each of the six editable colours carries a contrast line underneath it, updated as you drag the picker: the tightest pairing that colour takes part in, with its measured ratio and the minimum that pairing is held to, or a warning naming any pairing that fell below it. The arithmetic is the same as the build gate's, so the numbers agree. It never stops you saving — the screen tells you what you are choosing and leaves the choice with you.

Reduced motion is honoured. Every animation in the theme is either written inside a prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference query or switched off under prefers-reduced-motion: reduce. A visitor whose operating system asks for less motion gets the static state of the same component — a live badge that does not pulse, a counter that does not count up — not a broken one.

Landmarks and real controls. Every page template wraps its content in a <main> element, the header and footer parts are <header> and <footer>, and menus render inside a <nav> with an accessible name, so screen-reader users can jump between the regions of a page. Controls in the interactive bands are real <button> and <a> elements rather than clickable <div>s, so they sit in the tab order and respond to Enter and Space without the theme having to reimplement what a browser already does.

Three bands go further than that, and it is worth knowing which:

• team-fixture-list — the Upcoming/Results tabs follow the full tabs pattern: Left and Right arrows move between tabs, Home and End jump to the first and last, and the selected tab is announced as selected. With JavaScript off the block still renders its default tab and every fixture in it.
• ticker — the scrolling strip has a pause button at the end of it, reachable by keyboard and usable on touch. Press it and the strip stops, and stays stopped. A visitor whose system asks for reduced motion gets a still, scrollable strip instead.
• earnings-calculator — the preset buttons announce which preset is selected rather than showing it as a colour change alone.

Icon-only controls carry text. A control whose label is only an icon — a close button, a carousel arrow, a share button — ships hidden text for screen readers alongside the icon, and decorative icons are hidden from them.

Results that change without a reload are announced. The bands whose content updates in place — instant search, the scores board, quick view, the product buy box and the earnings calculator — write their result into a live region, so a screen reader hears that the number or the list changed.

No third party loads before you ask. The map is behind a consent gate and the spam-protection widget loads on first interaction, so a visitor using assistive technology is not handed an unannounced third-party widget on page load. This is a privacy decision that happens to help here too.

What stays your responsibility

Everything in this list is content, and content is where accessibility is usually won or lost.

What is not there yet

Being straight about the gaps is the point of this chapter.

• There is no skip-to-content link in the page templates. A keyboard user reaching a page tabs through the header before reaching the content.
• No independent audit has been carried out, and the theme ships no conformance report or VPAT. Automated checks cover the colour contract and parts of the front end; they are not an audit, and no automated tool measures more than a fraction of the criteria.
• The demo content is demo content. Its alt text, its heading structure and its link labels were written to show a layout, not to pass a review. Replacing the demo images and copy — which the licence requires anyway, see Replace the demo images — is also where you fix this.

Accessibility fixes ship in theme updates like anything else; keeping the theme and plugin current is part of keeping a site accessible. See Keeping the theme and plugin in step.

Writing your own statement

If you have to publish a statement, describe your site rather than the theme. A workable shape:

1. Scope. Which site, and when you last reviewed it.
2. What you have done. You can point at the facts above: a visible focus indicator, contrast-checked palettes at a 4.5:1 floor for text, reduced motion honoured, landmark regions, live regions on the bands that update in place.
3. Known problems. The gaps above that apply to you, plus anything your own testing found, plus third-party embeds you cannot fix.
4. How to report a problem. A real email address that a person reads.
5. What you will do about it. A review interval you will actually keep.

Do not copy a conformance level into that statement on the strength of this chapter. If you need one stated, commission an audit of your published site.

If a band is unusable by keyboard on your live site

Check this before you report it: an optimisation plugin that delays, combines or lazy-loads JavaScript disables the interactive bands outright, which looks exactly like an accessibility defect. Tabs stop switching, a search box stops narrowing anything, a modal never opens. See Caching and optimisation plugins for the exclusions those plugins need, and re-test with the plugin's JavaScript optimisation off before concluding anything about the theme.

Caching and optimisation plugins

Install a page-cache plugin. It is the single best thing you can do for speed, and Performance and going live recommends it.

But one family of settings in those same plugins will quietly switch off every interactive band on your site: delaying, combining or lazy-loading JavaScript. This chapter names the settings and the exact exclusions to enter, because the failure is silent — nothing errors on screen, the band simply sits there doing nothing.

Read this before you report a broken calculator, search box, tab strip or map.

Why the interactive bands are fragile

The theme's front-end JavaScript is modern ES modules, loaded through WordPress's own module system: 80 of the 290 blocks ship one, and each imports WordPress's Interactivity runtime by name — @wordpress/interactivity, not a file path. WordPress prints an import map in the page that turns that name into a real URL, and the browser reads the map before it runs any module.

That is a good arrangement — nothing is bundled twice, and a page with no interactive band loads no script at all. It has one weakness: it depends on the page's script tags surviving intact.

An optimisation plugin that delays JavaScript rewrites <script type="module"> into something the browser does not treat as a module — WP Rocket, for example, replaces the type attribute with text/rocketlazyloadscript and restores it on first interaction. A module that is no longer a module never consults the import map, so its import of a bare name fails. Combining or aggregating scripts breaks it a second way: several modules concatenated into one file lose their own module scope, and the import map may end up after the code that needs it.

Neither failure is reported anywhere a site owner would look. The band renders its HTML from the server, so the page looks finished — it just does not respond.

What breaks, and what it looks like

Every one of these is the same root cause:

If several of these die at once, it is not several bugs. It is one setting.

The exclusion list

Paste these into the exclusion box of whichever optimisation feature you have enabled — delay, defer, combine, minify, lazy-load, "unused JavaScript". Most plugins match on a substring, so paths are enough and no wildcards are needed.

/wp-includes/js/dist/script-modules/
/wp-includes/js/dist/interactivity
/wp-content/plugins/anps_theme_plugin/blocks/
/wp-content/plugins/anps_theme_plugin/assets/load-more.min.js
importmap

What each line is:

• /wp-includes/js/dist/script-modules/ — WordPress's own module folder, where the Interactivity runtime lives on WordPress 6.7 and later. Excluding the folder rather than one file also covers the modules core loads beside it.
• /wp-includes/js/dist/interactivity — the same runtime's older location, for a site still on WordPress 6.5 or 6.6. Harmless to keep in the list either way.
• /wp-content/plugins/anps_theme_plugin/blocks/ — every block's own view.min.js. There are up to 80 of them and which ones load depends on the page, so exclude the folder, not individual files. If a plugin insists on a file pattern rather than a folder, view.min.js works.
• .../assets/load-more.min.js — the shared "load more" module used by the post grid, the prediction board and the leaderboards.
• importmap — the import map itself, for plugins that also delay or combine inline scripts. WordPress prints it with the id wp-importmap; if a plugin wants an id rather than a keyword, use that.

Nothing above needs the theme folder: the theme itself ships no front-end JavaScript. All of it belongs to the ANPS Theme Plugin.

Plugin by plugin

Names as they appear in each plugin's own screens.

Two general rules that outlive any of these version numbers:

1. "Delay until interaction" is never safe here. Modules are already deferred by the browser; delaying them buys almost nothing and breaks them completely.
2. Adding defer is fine, combining is not. A feature that only adds a defer attribute changes nothing for a module. A feature that merges files or rewrites the type attribute is the one to exclude.

What is safe, and worth keeping

Do not switch your cache plugin off after reading this. These features are fine, and several are genuinely worth having:

• Page caching, object caching and browser-cache headers. The interactive bands read their data after the page has loaded, so a cached page is fine.
• CSS minification and combining. The theme's stylesheets are plain CSS with no import map to lose.
• HTML minification, GZIP or Brotli, and a CDN for static files.
• Image optimisation, WebP conversion and lazy loading below the fold — the theme already marks the top image as high priority, so let the plugin skip it rather than lazy-loading everything.

Treat "Remove unused CSS" as something to test rather than to trust. The theme already loads a stylesheet only on pages that render that block, so there is little unused CSS left to find, and a tool that decides what is unused by looking at the page before anyone clicks can strip the styles a drawer, modal or open accordion needs. If you enable it, open a page with a drawer, a quick view and an accordion and use them.

Checking that the exclusions worked

You cannot judge this while logged in as an administrator — several plugins skip their own optimisation for logged-in users, so everything works for you and nothing works for your visitors.

1. Open a page with an interactive band in a private window, logged out.
2. Use the band. Filter something, drag the handle, switch the tab.
3. If it does nothing, open the browser console (F12). A message about failing to resolve a module specifier — usually naming @wordpress/interactivity — is this problem, confirmed.
4. View the page source and search for importmap. If it is not there, or its type attribute has been renamed to something with "lazyload" or "rocket" in it, the plugin rewrote it.
5. Clear the plugin's cache after every change. You are otherwise testing the page it built before you changed the setting.

If the band works with the optimisation feature switched off entirely and fails with it on plus the exclusions above, the plugin is matching those paths differently — send us the plugin, its version and the setting, and we will tell you the pattern it wants.

Extending the theme

Sooner or later something has to behave slightly differently: a sport that does not award three points for a win, a ticket link that has to point at your ticketing provider, a permalink that should read /player/ rather than /person/. The theme has a set of filters for exactly these moments.

Use them. Do not edit the theme or the plugin. An update replaces both, and your change goes with it. A filter written in a child theme survives every update, and every filter listed here is part of the theme's public surface — we keep them working.

This chapter is for someone comfortable writing a few lines of PHP, or briefing a developer who is.

Where the code goes

Two safe places, in order of preference:

1. The child theme's functions.php. The child theme ships in the download; The child theme covers installing it. This is the right home for anything site-specific.
2. A small plugin of your own, or a code-snippets plugin, if the change must survive switching themes.

A filter is a function that receives a value and returns a value. The shape is always the same:

add_filter(
	'anps_standing_win_points',
	static function ( int $points, int $standing_id ): int {
		return 2; // This league awards two points for a win.
	},
	10,
	2
);

Three things go wrong most often, so they are worth stating once:

• Return the right type. Every filter below is cast after it runs, so returning a string where an integer is expected does not crash the site — it produces a nonsense value, which is harder to spot.
• Accept the arguments you use. The fourth argument to add_filter() is how many arguments your function receives. It defaults to 1, so a filter that needs the post id will get nothing without it.
• Return the value you were given in the cases you are not interested in, rather than returning nothing. Returning null from a filter is how a page ends up blank.

Names are prefixed anps_ for the plugin's filters and sportpulse_ for the two the theme provides on its own. That is not cosmetic: the sportpulse_ ones are in the theme so they still work with the plugin deactivated.

Sports data, tables and fixtures

The filters buyers reach for most, because sports rules are not universal.

Shop and services

Buttons, maps and page chrome

Forms, spam protection and the newsletter

Search results, structured data and AI

Elementor

What is not a filter

Some things people ask for are settings, not code:

• Colours, fonts and spacing are in Theme Options and the Site Editor, and custom CSS has its own box — see Custom CSS and where to put it.
• Which blocks a page uses is the page, not a filter.
• Templates are edited in the Site Editor, and a child theme can override any of them by file. Do not edit the parent theme's copy.

If you need a hook that is not here, ask before you fork: a filter we add for you ships in the next update and keeps working. See Getting support.

Translating the site

Two different jobs share one word. Translating the theme means putting the handful of words the theme itself prints — "Read more", "Add to basket", a form's "Sending…" — into your language. Running a multilingual site means every page existing twice, in English and in Spanish, with a switcher between them. The first needs nothing but a .po file. The second needs a multilingual plugin, and the theme ships the configuration it asks for.

One language, not English

If your whole site is in one language and that language is not English, you do not need a multilingual plugin at all.

1. Set Settings → General → Site Language to your language. WordPress downloads its own translation.
2. If a translation of the theme's own words exists for that language, it is used automatically.
3. If it does not, make one. The catalogue to translate is languages/sportpulse.pot in the theme and languages/anps_theme_plugin.pot in the plugin — two files, because the theme prints the words around your content and the plugin prints the words inside the blocks. Open either in Poedit, translate, and save the result as sportpulse-es_ES.po/.mo into wp-content/languages/themes/, and anps_theme_plugin-es_ES.po/.mo into wp-content/languages/plugins/.

Save them in wp-content/languages/, not inside the theme: files in the theme are replaced by the next update, files in wp-content/languages/ are not.

Your own content — the words you typed into a block, a fixture's venue, a product's description — is not in those catalogues and never will be. It is content, and you edit it directly.

Two or more languages, with WPML

The theme is built for WPML and ships the configuration file it reads: wpml-config.xml, in the theme folder and in the plugin folder. You do not have to do anything with that file. WPML finds it, and the moment it does, everything below is already set up the way it should be.

What you need installed: WPML Multilingual CMS, WPML String Translation (for the Theme Options texts) and, if you sell, WooCommerce Multilingual. Media translation is optional — see the note about images.

What the file tells WPML:

Two practical notes:

• The footer copyright line contains {year} and {site}. Those two are replaced when the page renders. Keep them exactly as they are in every translation; translate only the words around them.
• Images are not translated by default, and that is usually right. A photo of a match means the same thing in every language. If you do want different images per language, turn on WPML's media translation and set each translation's image as usual.

After a demo import

Import the demo first, in your main language, then add the second language. An import writes several hundred records; doing it with two languages already active makes WPML queue a translation job for every one of them.

Other multilingual plugins

Polylang reads the same wpml-config.xml file, so most of the table above applies to it as well.

TranslatePress and similar front-end translators work differently — they translate the rendered page and need no configuration from the theme. They work here too; you will simply not see the fields listed above anywhere, because that plugin never looks at them.

Whichever you choose, run one. Two multilingual plugins on one site fight over the same URLs.

Right-to-left languages

Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Urdu need nothing beyond setting the site language. Every layout in the theme is written in logical properties, so the whole design mirrors itself — including the demos' asymmetric bands, the fixture rails and the shop. There is no separate RTL stylesheet to enqueue and no setting to find.

Block reference

Every band in every demo page is a block, and this is the list of them. It is here for one question: what is this thing on the page I am editing, and what is it for?

This chapter is generated from the theme plugin itself each time the manual is built. Every name and every description below is the same text the block inserter shows you in the editor, read from the block's own definition — so the manual and the editor cannot drift apart, and a band added to a demo appears here without anybody retyping it.

How to look a block up

Click the band on the page. Its name appears in the block toolbar and in the editor's list view; the settings sidebar shows the same name at the top of the Block tab. That is the Name column below.

If you want the exact identifier — useful in a support message, or when you are reading a page's markup — open the block's options menu (the three dots) and choose Edit as HTML. You will see a comment naming the block, like <!-- wp:sportpulse/egaming-map-breakdown -->. Everything after the slash is the Block column below.

Reading it the other way round works too: pick a family, skim the descriptions, and insert the band you want by typing its name into the inserter. Chapter Building pages explains the families and the handful of blocks you will edit every day; this is the complete list behind it.

A few things worth knowing before you skim:

• Every block is registered on every site. Nothing is unregistered when you import a demo, so a band from another family always inserts and always renders — it will simply carry the other demo's design language.
• A description says what the band draws, not what it decides. The settings are in the sidebar, and the ones you meet most often are described in The controls inside a block.
• Some bands read the page they are on. A description that says it reads the fixture, the division or the person being viewed will show nothing useful on a plain page — put it on the single template for that content instead.
• Design numbers in a description (design 76) are the reference number of the layout the band was drawn from. They are there so a description matches what our support can look at; you can ignore them.

The plugin registers 290 blocks in the sportpulse/ namespace.

Shared blocks

45 blocks, with no prefix.

Tipster demo blocks

3 blocks, prefixed tipster-.

News demo blocks

38 blocks, prefixed news-.

Team demo blocks

51 blocks, prefixed team-.

E-gaming demo blocks

69 blocks, prefixed egaming-.

Academy demo blocks

43 blocks, prefixed academy-.

Betting demo blocks

41 blocks, prefixed betting-.