Housecall documentation

A WordPress theme for plumbers, electricians, heating and cooling engineers, roofers, cleaners and handymen: six trade demos, quote requests, service areas and before/after photos.

Thank you for choosing Housecall. This guide takes you from a fresh WordPress site to a copy of the demo with your own details. If something is not covered here, write to support@codememory.com — we answer within one working day.

• Version1.0.0
• WordPress6.5 or later
• PHP7.4 or later
• Live demoOpen the demo

Highlights

• Six trade demos imported in one click
• Quote request form, saved in your dashboard
• Service area checker (towns and postcodes)
• Before/after photo slider for your work
• Services, projects, team and reviews
• 18 Elementor widgets (free Elementor)
• Every section also works as a shortcode
• Three header layouts and a 24/7 top bar
• Call / quote bar on phones
• Light and dark mode
• Colours and fonts from the Customizer
• Block patterns and every core block styled
• Self-hosted fonts, nothing loaded from Google
• Translation ready, right-to-left support
• Child theme included

What is in the download

themeforest-housecall-wordpress-theme/
├── housecall.zip               ← the theme: upload this in WordPress
├── housecall-child.zip         ← child theme, for your own code changes (optional)
├── plugins/housecall-core.zip  ← the theme's plugin (also installed from inside the theme)
├── demo-content/               ← demo files for a manual import
├── documentation/              ← this guide, as HTML and PDF
└── licensing/                  ← GPL licence, font licences and credits

Requirements

• WordPress 6.5 or later (tested up to 7.1).
• PHP 7.4 or later (8.2 or later recommended).
• For the demo import: PHP memory_limit 256M, max_execution_time 300, upload size 32M. Most hosts already allow this; if an import stops half-way, ask your host to raise these values.

Every plugin the theme uses is free from wordpress.org. Nothing needs a paid licence.

Installing the theme

1. In your dashboard, go to Appearance → Themes → Add New Theme → Upload Theme.
2. Choose housecall.zip and click Install Now, then Activate.
3. Optional: install and activate housecall-child.zip the same way (see Child theme).

Upload by FTP instead: unzip housecall.zip and copy the housecall folder to wp-content/themes/, then activate it under Appearance → Themes.

Plugins

After activation, a notice at the top of the dashboard lists the plugins the theme uses. Click Begin installing plugins (or go to Appearance → Install Plugins), select them all, choose Install, then activate them.

The theme works without any plugin: posts, pages, menus, widgets and search are styled the same. The plugin is needed for the trade features (services, quote form…).

Importing a demo

The import gives you the demo site: pages, services, projects, team, reviews, posts, menus, widgets and the Customizer settings. Use it on a new site: it adds content next to what you already have.

1. Install the plugins above.
2. Go to Appearance → Import Demo Data.
3. Pick a demo and click Import. It takes one to three minutes; keep the page open.
4. Done: visit your site. The home page, menus and blog page are already set.

All six home pages are imported with every demo; the demo you pick decides which one is the front page and which colours and header the Customizer uses. To switch later, go to Settings → Reading and choose another home page.

Manual import

If the one-click import is blocked by your host, use the files in demo-content/:

1. Tools → Import → WordPress (install the importer when asked) → upload content.xml.
2. Install Widget Importer & Exporter → Tools → Widget Importer & Exporter → upload widgets.wie.
3. Install Customizer Export/Import → Appearance → Customize → Export/Import → upload customizer-<demo>.dat.
4. Appearance → Menus → Manage Locations: set the main, top bar and footer menus. Settings → Reading: choose the home and blog pages.

After the import: your details

The demo uses a made-up phone number, address and service area. Replace them with yours, in this order:

1. Phone number and top bar: Appearance → Customize → Housecall options → Header and top bar. Set Phone number, Top bar text (your opening hours) and the Emergency label. Every "Call" button on the site uses this number.
2. Logo and site icon: Appearance → Customize → Site Identity.
3. Colours: Appearance → Customize → Colors. The six demo home pages each have their own accent colour (see Page options); clear it there to use the Customizer colour.
4. Service areas and quote emails: Settings → Housecall Core (see Quote requests and Service areas).
5. Footer widgets: Appearance → Widgets → Footer column 1–4: edit the Contact details and Opening hours widgets.
6. Your content: edit the services, projects, team members and reviews in the dashboard menus of the same names, and replace the grey placeholder photos with your own.

Services, projects, team and reviews

The Housecall Core plugin adds four content types to the dashboard. Each one has a Details box under the editor.

The featured image of a service, project or post is used on its card and at the top of its page. Use landscape photos at least 1600 × 760 px.

Quote requests

The Quote form widget (or the [housecall_quote_form] shortcode) asks for name, phone, email, town or postcode, the service they need and a message. It has spam protection built in (a hidden field and a limit on repeated sends) and needs no other plugin.

• Every request is saved under Quote requests in the dashboard, with a counter of new ones. Open a request to see the details and set its status: New, Contacted, Booked, Closed.
• Settings → Housecall Core → Quote requests: turn email alerts on or off, choose the address (empty = the site admin email), and edit the thank-you message and the privacy note under the form.
• Emails are sent by WordPress. If they do not arrive, install an SMTP plugin such as WP Mail SMTP; requests are saved in the dashboard either way.

Prefer Contact Form 7 or another form plugin? Put its shortcode in a Text Editor widget instead. Everything else keeps working.

Service areas

Settings → Housecall Core → Service areas: list the towns and postcodes you cover, one per line. The Service area checker widget lets visitors type their town or the start of a postcode ("OK4") and tells them whether you cover it, with the two messages you set on the same page (%s is replaced by what they typed). Turn on List the areas in the widget to show every area as tags under the checker.

Page options

Each page has a Page options box in the editor sidebar:

• Accent colour for this page: overrides the Customizer accent on this page only. The demo uses it to give each trade home page its own colour.
• Colour scheme: light or dark for this page only (the Electrical demo is dark).
• Header layout: classic, centered or contact, for this page only.

Leave them empty to follow the Customizer.

Page templates

Customizer settings

Appearance → Customize. Colours are in the Colors section; everything else is in the Housecall options panel. Changes show in the preview before you publish them.

The site title, tagline, logo, site icon, background and homepage settings are WordPress's own, in Site Identity, Background image and Homepage Settings.

Menus

Appearance → Menus. Create a menu, add pages, services or custom links, then tick a Display location:

• Primary menu — the header. Drag items under another to make a drop-down.
• Top bar menu — the small links in the top bar.
• Footer menu — the links in the footer's bottom row.
• Social links menu — links to your profiles (Facebook, Instagram…), shown in the footer. Add them as Custom Links.

Widgets

Appearance → Widgets. Areas: Blog sidebar and Footer column 1 to Footer column 4 (set the number of footer columns in the Customizer). The plugin adds three widgets, named Housecall: … in the widget list:

• Contact details — phone, email, address, each with a link.
• Opening hours — one line per day or range, with an optional note.
• Services list — links to your services, optionally from one trade.

Building pages with Elementor

All demo pages are built with the free Elementor plugin and the theme's widgets.

1. Create a page, set its Template to Full width, no title, and click Edit with Elementor.
2. Search for the widget or open the Housecall group in the left panel and drag a widget onto the page.
3. Edit its text and options in the left panel. Every widget has a Background option (light, paper, dark or accent colour) so sections alternate like the demo.

The widgets fill themselves from your content: Services, Projects, Team, Reviews and Latest posts show the items you add in the dashboard. List fields (prices, steps, questions…) take one item per line, with the parts separated by |, as the help text under each field shows.

Elementor's own Google Fonts loading is switched off by the demo import, so the site keeps using the theme's self-hosted fonts.

Without Elementor: shortcodes

Every widget is also a shortcode, so you can build the same sections in the block editor: add a Shortcode block and type, for example:

[housecall_services count="6" columns="3"]
[housecall_stats items="25+|Years in the trade||4.9|Average rating"]
[housecall_quote_form title="Get a free quote"]

Options are the same as in Elementor. In list options, separate items with || and parts with |. Images take an attachment ID (Media → Library → the number in the address) or a full URL.

Shortcodes: [housecall_hero], [housecall_services], [housecall_projects], [housecall_compare], [housecall_reviews], [housecall_team], [housecall_stats], [housecall_features], [housecall_steps], [housecall_pricing], [housecall_faq], [housecall_cta], [housecall_trust], [housecall_area], [housecall_posts], [housecall_emergency], [housecall_about], [housecall_quote_form].

Block editor and patterns

Posts and simple pages use the WordPress block editor. Every core block is styled to match the theme, and the editor shows the theme's fonts and colours. Click + → Patterns → Housecall for ready-made sections: hero with call button, three services, call to action, questions and answers, three reviews, price table and contact details. The theme also adds block styles: Card (Group), Check marks (List), Eyebrow (Paragraph) and Framed (Image).

Blog

Settings → Reading → Posts page sets the page that lists your posts (the demo uses "Blog"). Choose a grid or list layout and the sidebar position in Customize → Housecall options → Blog. Posts show the author, date, category, share links (turn them off in Settings → Housecall Core) and related posts.

Light and dark mode

Customize → Housecall options → Style and fonts → Colour scheme: Light, Dark or Follow the visitor's device. With Show a light/dark switch on, visitors can switch with the moon button in the header; their choice is remembered on that device. A single page can be forced to light or dark in its Page options.

Child theme

If you want to change the theme's code, install housecall-child.zip and activate Housecall Child. Put your CSS in the child theme's style.css and your PHP in its functions.php; copy a template file from housecall into the child theme to override it. Theme updates replace the parent theme only, so your changes are kept.

Small style changes do not need a child theme: use Customize → Additional CSS.

Translation and right-to-left

Every text in the theme and the plugin can be translated. The templates are housecall/languages/housecall.pot and housecall-core/languages/housecall-core.pot.

1. Easiest: install Loco Translate → Loco Translate → Themes → Housecall → New language, and translate in your browser. Do the same under Plugins for Housecall Core.
2. Or use Poedit: open the .pot file, translate, and save the files as housecall-fr_FR.po/.mo in wp-content/languages/themes/.

Right-to-left languages (Arabic, Hebrew, Persian…) are supported: when WordPress runs in such a language, the layout mirrors automatically.

Updating

When a new version is released, download it from your ThemeForest Downloads page. Then either:

• Appearance → Themes → Add New Theme → Upload Theme → choose the new housecall.zip → Replace current with uploaded; or
• replace the wp-content/themes/housecall folder by FTP.

When the theme comes with a newer Housecall Core, the dashboard notice offers to update the plugin. Your content, menus, widgets and Customizer settings are kept. Changes you made to the parent theme's files are lost: keep them in the child theme.

Questions

Support

Support is included with your purchase and covers questions about the theme's features and fixing bugs. It does not cover custom changes or problems caused by other plugins.

Email support@codememory.com with your purchase code and your site address. See the changelog for what changed in each version and third-party materials for credits.