Set up the site

A fresh install has none of the pages the theme reads. The notes stream, the portfolio grid and the archives index each render on a page named in the Customizer, and the homepage and the blog are WordPress’s own two. Setting all five by hand and then building a menu out of them is the dull half hour between activating the theme and seeing it.

Go to Fern → Setup and press Set up the site.

What it builds

The five above join the primary menu, in that order. Search does not: a search page belongs in a footer or a widget rather than in a five-item primary nav. If the site already has a menu, the setup fills that one; if it has none, it creates one and assigns it.

It is safe to run twice

Everything the setup does is idempotent. A page already assigned to its setting is left alone, so is a page that merely shares the slug, and so is a menu item already pointing at one. Running it again changes nothing; running it on a site you half set up by hand fills in only the gaps. The button then reads Run setup again.

No demo content

The pages come out empty. There is no import, no wizard and no placeholder copy — a page with someone else’s words in it is worse than no page at all. The one exception is Search, which needs the core search block in it to be a search page.

Rename the note base first

The setup creates a page slugged notes, and notes are published under /notes/ out of the box. Those two paths collide, and the collision produces a redirect loop on /notes/. Before or after running the setup, go to Settings → Permalinks and set Note base to something else — note, fieldnote and journal all work — or give the page a different slug. The same applies to the portfolio if you point it at a page slugged like its own base. See Notes for the detail.

Changing your mind

Nothing the setup does is special. The pages are ordinary pages, the menu is an ordinary menu, and the settings are the ones you would have set yourself. Delete or reassign any of them at will.