Oxygen eliminates the need for child themes.

Everything about the design of your website is stored in the WordPress database. You can safely update Oxygen without affecting your design and customizations.

Need to put some custom PHP functions somewhere, and using an Oxygen Code Block isn't appropriate?

Don't use functions.php. Instead, put your functionality in a plugin.

This way, you don't need to use a child theme, and updating Oxygen won't overwrite your custom PHP.

To copy an entire WordPress install, all content, plugins, Oxygen, etc. you can use a plugin like Duplicator.

If you just want to copy Oxygen settings or some page designs, use the methods below.

Copying Oxygen Settings

1. To copy Oxygen's settings (fonts, icon sets, stylesheets, classes) from one install to another, go to Oxygen > Export/Import on the original install.

2. Copy the text in the Export box.

3. Paste the text into the Import box on the new install.

Copying Individual Page Designs

After copying Oxygen's settings, you can move Views or individual page designs from one install to another.

1. To move a View, Page, Post, or any custom post type, go to the Edit screen for that post and click [+] Page Shortcodes.

2. Copy the shortcodes.

3. Create a new View, Page, Post, etc. on the new site, and paste the shortcodes into the same [+] Page Shortcodes box.

Moving All Views & Page Designs At One Time

1. On the original install, go to Tools -> Export and follow the process.

2. On the new install, go to Tools -> Import and follow the process.

Note: it is almost always necessary to copy your Oxygen settings to the new install, otherwise your page designs will be missing your global font settings, any custom icon sets you've uploaded, and all stylesheets and classes you may have created.

Note: Since the release of Oxygen 1.4 on March 17th, Views are now called Templates.

Views are a flexible way to apply the same design to multiple pieces of content.

For example, you may have a website with 100 blog posts and 200 WooCommerce products. You'll create a View that will apply to all of your blog posts, and another View that will apply to all of your products. You might want to display products that are on-sale a little bit differently, so you could create another View that only applies to products that are on sale.

You can create views from the Oxygen -> Views page in the WordPress admin panel.

Any time a user visits any page on your site, Oxygen does the following:

1. Check to see if a Custom View applies to that content. If so, render the page using that view.

2. Check to see if any Views have rules that match the requested content. If so, that View is used. If multiple Views could apply, the View with the highest priority order is used.

View Types

1. Single Views

There are many different types of content that can be stored in WordPress - blog posts, Pages, WooCommerce Products, and thousands of other post types. A Single view displays a single post - i.e. one WooCommerce Product, one page, one blog post, etc. Code blocks in single views behave the same way they would in the single.php

2. Archive Views

Archive views display multiple singles. An "Author" archive could display all blog posts by a particular author. A Shop archive could display all WooCommerce products. A "taxonomy" archive could display all content in the specified taxonomies, i.e. all real estate listings that are in the "Rental" taxonomy.

3. Re-Usable Parts

Re-usable parts are things like your site's header and footer that you want to re-use on many pages of your site. You can create a Re-Usable Part out of part of a design you've already created in the DOM Tree by clicking the menu icon for the element and clicking "Make Re-Usable".

4. Special: get_header/get_footer
Some plugins that output extremely customized content, i.e. forums, etc. mostly bypass WordPress themes. They call get_header to get the header of your site, then they do their own thing and output their own content, and then they call get_footer to display the footer of your site. Normally, your site's header and footer are in your theme template files - header.php and footer.php. In Oxygen, you just specify a header and a footer that will be returned by get_header and get_footer here.

Code Blocks

You can execute PHP code using a Code Block component. When using a Code Block in a View, it will behave (mostly) the same way they would if you put them in a template file like single.php, archive.php, etc.

For example, if you create an Archive view that applies to a certain taxonomy, a code block containing the WordPress loop would loop through all the posts inside that taxonomy.

Previewing

When a view applies to multiple pages or archives, you can preview each one from the Preview dropdown in the toolbar. The code in the Code Block will now behave as if an end-user was loading that page on the frontend.

Oxygen can import SVGs from a SVG set exported by IcoMoon.

Once you've uploaded and/or chosen your icons, click Generate SVG at the bottom. Then click "download". Unzip the file, open the folder, and then look for the symbol-defs.svg file.

This file can be imported to Oxygen from the Oxygen -> SVG Sets page. Enter a name for your SVG set and choose the symbol-defs.svg file.

You can then use your imported icons by adding an Icon to your page (Add+, Fundamentals, Icon) and choosing your SVG set from the dropdown in the toolbar.