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Twenty Twelve: simple and effective

Hypotheses offers its users the graphic themes developed by the WordPress team in priority, to ensure the long-term sustainability, homogeneity and flexibility of the platform. Find all the graphic themes proposed in the “Appearance” category of the House of blogs.

Twenty Twelve is a simple but elegant graphic graphic theme, ideal for a blog with fairly long articles. Some bloggers have already adopted it, such as Become a Historian or Ce n’est pas une image juste.

A header image in between the menu and articles

One of this theme’s distinctive features is its header image, which is sandwiched between the menu and the posts (see above). To add or change a header image, go to the Appearance menu > Customize > Header Image in your dashboard. Choose an image by clicking on “Add a new image”. You then have the choice between uploading a new image file from your computer or choosing an image already present in the media library of your blog. The Twenty Twelve graphic theme recommends the choice of a 960 × 250 pixel header image. Think about optimization: prefer.jpg format and a resolution of 96 DPI for a lighter image.

Header text settings

If you have integrated the title and subtitle of your blog into the header image, you may not want to display the same title and subtitle in text on the blog. Under no circumstances should this information be deleted from Settings > General or Appearance > Customize > Site Identity. This removes the “Title” and “Subtitle” metadata from your blog and greatly hinders its proper referencing and indexing in search engines and databases. In Appearance > Customize > Site Identity, you can uncheck “Show site title and description”, which hides this data without deleting it.

In Appearance > Customize > Colors, you can customize the color of the header text.

Widgets on every page

Unlike the Twenty Eleven theme, Twenty Twelve allows you to keep a widget column on the side of your blog at all times, even when viewing a specific blog article. Once in the Appearance > Widgets menu, simply place the widgets you want to display on your blog in the “Main column” area of the widgets so that they appear throughout the navigation.

Furnish the side spaces

By going to the Appearance menu > Customize > Colors, you can choose the color that will fill the left and right margins of your blog. If you prefer an image, select it in Appearance > Customize > Background image > Select an image.

Make your homepage a little bit special

You can get a slightly different homepage in three steps.

Customized homepage under Twenty Twelve

To do this, you need to create a page. In the editing interface of this page, you have a settings block called “Page Attributes” (framed in red in the image below). In this area, choose “Front Page template” as the template.

Select the “Front Page template” with Twenty Twelve

You can add a “featured image” to this page by clicking on “Set featured image”. This image will be added next to the text on your page (see image above). Save this page and then go to the Settings menu > Reading.

In the “Your homepage displays:” setting, select “A static page” and then the page you just created as the home page.

You can then add widgets in the “First Front Page Widget Area” and “Second Front Page Widget Area” areas. The “Recent Publications” widget allows your readers to access your latest content from your homepage, for example.

To learn more about this theme and its features, see Twenty Twelve’s presentation in the Codex WordPress.

You now have all the necessary information to get started with Twenty Twelve. If you have any questions about this topic, and you don’t find the answer in this post, don’t hesitate to contact the community of bloggers (hypocommunity[at]groups.openedition.org), who will certainly be able to help you with the handling and use of your blog. If you are not subscribed to the list, send us a request to hypotheses[at]openedition.org.

Featured image: 12  by Leon Rice-Whetton under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.

This post is a translation of this one, by Helen Tomlinson.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
François Pacaud (December 1, 2014). Twenty Twelve: simple and effective. The house of blogs. Retrieved March 28, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/ppa3


François Pacaud

Responsable du service blogging scientifique / Head of science blogging department (OpenEdition)

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