Learnhaven documentation

A WordPress theme for schools and education: private schools, colleges, kindergartens, language schools, online academies and arts schools. Six demos, admission enquiries, an events calendar, teachers, courses with fees, office hours and a fee estimator.

Thank you for choosing Learnhaven. 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 education demos imported in one click
• Admission enquiry form with student details, start date and visit type, saved in your dashboard
• Events calendar with date badges, programme and upcoming-only lists
• Teachers with role, qualifications, subjects, campus and email
• Courses with fee, age or level, length and next start date
• Departments and event types to group courses, teachers and events
• Office hours with an "Open now" badge
• Fee estimator with a sibling discount
• 18 Elementor widgets (free Elementor)
• Every section also works as a shortcode
• Call / book 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-learnhaven-wordpress-theme/
├── learnhaven.zip               ← the theme: upload this in WordPress
├── learnhaven-child.zip         ← child theme, for your own code changes (optional)
├── plugins/learnhaven-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 learnhaven.zip and click Install Now, then Activate.
3. Optional: install and activate learnhaven-child.zip the same way (see Child theme).

Upload by FTP instead: unzip learnhaven.zip and copy the learnhaven 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 school features (courses, teachers, events, admission form…).

Importing a demo

The import gives you the demo site: pages, courses, teachers, events, 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, office hours and fees. Replace them with yours, in this order:

1. Phone number and top bar: Appearance → Customize → Learnhaven options → Header and top bar. Set Phone number, Top bar text (a short line such as your office hours) and the Label next to the phone. 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. Office hours, fees and admission emails: Settings → Learnhaven Core (see Office hours, Fee estimator and Admission enquiries).
5. Footer widgets: Appearance → Widgets → Footer column 1–4: edit the Contact details widget (address, phone, email).
6. Your content: edit the courses, teachers, events and reviews in the dashboard menus of the same names, and replace the grey placeholder photos with your own.

Courses, teachers, events and reviews

The Learnhaven Core plugin adds four content types, a Departments list and an Event types list to the dashboard. Each content type has a Details box under the editor.

Departments (under Courses) group courses and teachers, for example Early years or Music & arts. Each department has its own page at /department/<name>/, a course page shows the teachers of its department, and the Courses and Teachers widgets can show one department only. Event types (under Events) group events, with a page at /event-type/<name>/; the Events widget can show one event type only.

Events are listed by date, soonest first. With Only upcoming events on (the default), past events are hidden; when no event is coming up, the widget shows the latest ones instead of an empty section, marked Past event.

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

Admission enquiries

The Admission form widget (or the [learnhaven_admission] shortcode) asks for the parent's name, phone and email, the course or class, the student's name and age or year group, when they would like to start, a preferred visit date and time, how they would like to meet you (campus tour, online information session or phone call) and an optional message. Name and a phone number or email are required. Spam protection is built in (a hidden field and a limit on repeated sends) and no other plugin is needed.

• Every enquiry is saved under Admissions in the dashboard, with a counter of new ones. Open an enquiry to see the details and set its status: New, Contacted, Visit booked, Place offered, Cancelled.
• The courses in the form come from your Courses, so they stay up to date.
• Settings → Learnhaven Core → Admission enquiries: 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; enquiries are saved in the dashboard either way.

The form is an enquiry, not a booking calendar: your admissions team confirms each visit by phone or email. The form collects details about children, so check the privacy rules that apply to your school before you go live.

Prefer a form plugin or an online application system? Put its shortcode in a Text Editor widget instead. Everything else keeps working.

Office hours

Settings → Learnhaven Core → Office hours: set an opening and a closing time for each day. Leave both empty on days you are closed, and add an optional note (for example "Closed in school holidays").

• The Office hours widget (Elementor) or [learnhaven_hours] shortcode shows the hours beside your address and phone number. The Learnhaven: Office hours widget shows them in the sidebar or footer.
• Today's row is highlighted, and a badge says Open now (with the closing time) or Closed now. The badge uses the time zone in Settings → General, and it is worked out in the visitor's browser, so it stays right even when your pages are cached.
• The week starts on the day set in Settings → General → Week Starts On; times use the time format set there.

Fee estimator

Settings → Learnhaven Core → Fee estimator: list your programmes, one per line as Programme|fee per term|terms a year, for example Middle school|4200|3. Set the currency symbol, the sibling discount (taken off the fee of the second child and each child after that) and the note under the result.

The Fee estimator widget (or [learnhaven_calculator]) lets a family pick a programme and the number of children. It shows the yearly fee and the fee per term ("About $23,940 a year, or $7,980 a term"), worked out in the browser: nothing is sent or stored. Turn on List the programmes in the widget to show every programme and its yearly fee for one child beside the estimator.

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 demo home page its own colour.
• Colour scheme: light or dark for this page only (the Music & arts 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 Learnhaven 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 Learnhaven: … in the widget list:

• Contact details — phone, email, address, each with a link.
• Office hours — your hours from Settings → Learnhaven Core, with an "Open now" badge.
• Courses list — links to your courses, optionally from one department.

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 Learnhaven 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: Courses, Teachers, Events, 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:

[learnhaven_courses count="6" columns="3"]
[learnhaven_events count="3" upcoming="yes"]
[learnhaven_admission title="Book a school visit"]

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: [learnhaven_hero], [learnhaven_courses], [learnhaven_reviews], [learnhaven_teachers], [learnhaven_stats], [learnhaven_features], [learnhaven_steps], [learnhaven_pricing], [learnhaven_faq], [learnhaven_cta], [learnhaven_trust], [learnhaven_calculator], [learnhaven_events], [learnhaven_posts], [learnhaven_emergency], [learnhaven_about], [learnhaven_admission], [learnhaven_hours].

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 → Learnhaven 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 → Learnhaven options → Blog. Posts show the author, date, category, share links (turn them off in Settings → Learnhaven Core) and related posts.

Light and dark mode

Customize → Learnhaven 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 learnhaven-child.zip and activate Learnhaven Child. Put your CSS in the child theme's style.css and your PHP in its functions.php; copy a template file from learnhaven 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 learnhaven/languages/learnhaven.pot and learnhaven-core/languages/learnhaven-core.pot.

1. Easiest: install Loco Translate → Loco Translate → Themes → Learnhaven → New language, and translate in your browser. Do the same under Plugins for Learnhaven Core.
2. Or use Poedit: open the .pot file, translate, and save the files as learnhaven-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 learnhaven.zip → Replace current with uploaded; or
• replace the wp-content/themes/learnhaven folder by FTP.

When the theme comes with a newer Learnhaven 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.