Rheostat documentation

Getting started

Rheostat is a WordPress theme for AI platforms, developer tools and SaaS products. A coloured page frame holds rounded content panels; pages are built with Elementor and the Rheostat Core plugin, which adds the widgets, post types and demo import. The theme's own templates — blog, single post, archive, search, page and 404 — work without any plugin.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.5 or later (tested up to 7.1)
• PHP 7.4 or later (PHP 8.1+ recommended)
• Elementor (free) — tested with 4.3

What is in the download

Installation

1. Go to Appearance → Themes → Add New → Upload Theme, choose rheostat.zip and click Install Now, then Activate.
2. A notice asks you to install the plugins. Click Begin installing plugins, select all and install, then activate. Rheostat Core and Elementor are required for the demo pages; Contact Form 7, Mailchimp for WordPress and One Click Demo Import are recommended.
3. Optional: install rheostat-child.zip the same way and activate it, so your changes survive theme updates.

Demo import

1. Install and activate Elementor, Contact Form 7 and Mailchimp for WordPress first.
2. Go to Appearance → Import Demo Data and click Import on “Rheostat — full demo”.
3. Wait for the import to finish (usually under a minute), then visit your site.

The import adds the ten home pages and the inner pages (all built with Elementor), seven blog posts, two customer stories, the menus, the contact and newsletter forms and the theme options. Afterwards it sets Home — Voltage as the front page, Blog as the posts page, assigns the menus to their locations and applies the Rheostat colours and fonts to your Elementor Kit.

Each home page is its own page. To use a different one as your front page, go to Settings → Reading and choose it as the static front page.

Theme options

All options are in Appearance → Customize → Rheostat Options, with a live preview. Colour mode, frame and header style can also be set for a single page (see Page settings).

The header and footer sections also let you choose an Elementor header or footer template (see Header & footer templates).

Page settings

Every page, post and customer story has a Rheostat page settings box (in the sidebar of the editor, and in Elementor under the ⚙ page settings). Leave a setting on “Site default” to use the theme option.

Building pages

Rheostat pages are Elementor containers stacked in the frame. Each top-level container is a panel; Rheostat adds three settings to every container, under Layout → Rheostat:

Tips

• Start from a demo page: open it with Elementor, right-click a section and choose Copy, then paste it on your page.
• Use the Rheostat category in the widget panel. Most widgets have a Motion section to turn the scroll reveal on or off.
• Use the page template Elementor Full Width for normal pages, and Elementor Canvas for pages without header and footer (the sign-in pages use it).

Widgets

Rheostat Core adds 67 widgets to Elementor, in the Rheostat category. Every widget uses the theme's colours, type and spacing, works on light and dark panels, and has tablet and phone layouts.

Post types

Rheostat Core adds these content types to the admin menu. Each has a details box with the fields listed below.

After adding content, choose Source: … posts in the matching widget (Integrations Directory, Jobs List, Team Grid, Changelog, Case Study Cards).

Header & footer templates

The theme's header and footer are set up in the Customizer. If you want to design your own with Elementor:

1. Go to Rheostat → Site Templates → Add New, give it a name and click Edit with Elementor.
2. Build the header (or footer) and publish.
3. Go to Customize → Rheostat Options → Header (or Footer) and choose it in Elementor header template.

Choose “Theme default” to go back. Site templates cannot be opened on their own by visitors.

Forms

Contact forms

The Contact Form widget wraps any Contact Form 7 form in the Rheostat card. Create or edit forms under Contact → Contact Forms; the demo includes “Contact” and “Contact sales”.

Newsletter

The blog's newsletter band (Customize → Rheostat Options → Newsletter Band) and the Newsletter widget show a form plugin's shortcode, for example [mc4wp_form id="12"] from Mailchimp for WordPress. Mailchimp for WordPress only shows its form after you connect your Mailchimp API key; until then, or if you use another service, enter a form URL in “Or send the email field to” and a plain email form (field name EMAIL) is shown.

Sign in, sign up and password reset

The Auth Form widget posts to WordPress itself by default: sign in uses the WordPress login, reset sends the WordPress password email and returns to your page, and sign up uses WordPress registration (turn on Settings → General → Anyone can register). To use your own application, enter its URL in Send the form to.

Blog, menus & 404

• Blog. The newest post on each blog page is shown large, followed by cards. Seven posts per page (Settings → Reading) gives one featured post and two rows of three. An optional “reading_time” custom field (a number of minutes) overrides the estimated reading time.
• Admin menu. Customer Stories, Integrations, Jobs, Team, Changelog and Site Templates are grouped under Rheostat in the admin menu, with an overview page.
• Menus. Locations: Primary (supports one dropdown level), Footer column 1–4, Footer legal and 404 suggestions. Items in “404 suggestions” appear as cards on the 404 page; their description (enable Descriptions in Screen Options) becomes the line under the title.
• 404. Heading, text and a second button are in Customize → Rheostat Options → 404 Page.
• 500 page. WordPress cannot show a page when PHP has failed; the “Server error” demo page is meant to be set as a custom error page in your host's or CDN's settings.

Colours, CSS & child theme

All colours, fonts, radii and spacing are CSS custom properties in assets/css/tokens.css. Override them in the child theme's style.css or in Customize → Additional CSS:

:root {
	--rh-surface-brand: #0f6bff;  /* the frame and brand panels */
	--rh-surface-accent: #ffd400; /* buttons and highlights */
}

The four colour modes set these variables for you. The Elementor Kit holds the same colours as global colours, so Elementor's colour pickers offer the Rheostat palette.

Source files and the bundle

The theme loads one minified stylesheet (assets/css/rheostat.min.css) and script (assets/js/theme.min.js). The readable sources are next to them; with define( 'SCRIPT_DEBUG', true ); in wp-config.php the theme loads the sources instead, which is the easiest way to experiment. Child themes should depend on the rheostat style handle.

Responsive & motion

Layouts change at Elementor's breakpoints: laptop (1280 px), tablet (1024 px) and phone (767 px). Rows stack on tablets and phones, grids go from four or three columns to two and then one, and tables scroll inside their card. Page sections carry their own tablet and phone padding — open Elementor's Responsive mode to adjust them.

Headings reveal line by line and panels fade in as they scroll into view. Turn this off site-wide in Customize → Rheostat Options → Colour & Frame. Visitors who ask their system for reduced motion never see it.

Translation

The theme (text domain rheostat) and the plugin (rheostat-core) are translation-ready. Templates are in rheostat/languages/rheostat.pot and rheostat-core/languages/rheostat-core.pot; translate them with Loco Translate or Poedit and save the files in wp-content/languages/themes and wp-content/languages/plugins.

Credits

Icons, illustrations, the dial mark and the placeholder images are original work included under the theme's licence. The theme and plugin are released under the GPL v2 or later.

Photos in the live preview (not included)

Photos in the live preview are from Pexels under the Pexels License and are replaced by placeholders in the download.

Changelog

1.0.0

• Initial release.

Support

Questions or a bug? Use the Support tab on the item page. Please include your WordPress, PHP, Elementor and Rheostat versions, and a link to the page if you can. Support covers help with the theme's features and fixes for bugs; it does not cover custom development or third-party plugins.