Polytechnic is an responsive, education and student focused WordPress Theme. It’s beautiful, clean, and professional. We built this theme specifically for educational institutions and include easy to use live customizes and drag & drop builders. It’s capable of handling a ton – including a new faculty member role, extended user profiles and pages, customizable “white label” login, courses, catalogs, faculty grid, store, blogs, filterable post grid, and almost anything that you can think up! We pride ourselves on how well this theme works out of the box, so if you run into any issues, please don’t hesitate to let us know at our dedicated support forum. Check out our feature list below!

Version 1.1.0 Now Available – See update log below for full details

The Idea Behind This Theme

We believe that school is hard enough as it is, and wanted to build something awesome that helps schools, faculty members, and students. Something that would enhance the school experience for students, increase engagement and retention, decrease confusion, and that focused on the details of how this could work for that majority of educational institutions out there.

With all of that in mind, we built Polytechnic

Teachers can add/update their own courses and provide students with up to date information regarding homework, study guides, notes, and a tentative schedule based on a specific course section. Students can get course specific information if they missed class, check to see what time the pre-game rally is on Friday, get course catalog information online, and purchase required reading materials with a click of a button. And admins can oversee it all, monitor the flow of information, and have the ability to add, edit, assign, and delete course information and users.

The Best of the Features

Polytechnic comes with tons of features and the ability to support loads of different plugins that’ll make it just right for your project… here’s an overview of what’s included:

The New Faculty Role & Extended User Profiles

Polytechnic comes fully integrated with a new user role specifically built for educational institutions. We’re calling this new WordPress user/role “Faculty”. This Faculty role provides faculty members with the ability to add, edit, and update their own courses and course information. This role is similar to the “Author” role native to WordPress, with a few added tools and abilities to provide your faculty members with the right amount of rights. This role also allows users assigned to this role to edit their own personal information (ie. bio, photo, contact info, etc.).

Custom User Login

Because your faculty should feel proud to login to your schools site! Customize the login for your users to match your school with easy to use options. Go ahead, check it out. Choose or upload your login logo, position the login form location, add a background image, set a color fallback, and add custom html!

Courses & Catalogs

Adding a new course is easy, and can be assigned to any user. If that user has been assigned the role of Faculty, they will have their own login and dedicated WordPress dashboard. This dashboard will only include the necessary information for this user role (ie. courses). Next, this user can navigate to Courses to see all of the courses currently assigned to them. They can open any one of these to begin updating/editing the course information and course content (ie. homework, study guides, etc.)

Mega Menu

We’ve included a drag and drop mega menu to provide a compelling way of displaying menu items and additional content on your site. Now you can choose to use a flyout menu or mega menu for each parent item.

Sticky Header

We’ve built a sticky header right into the theme and gave it it’s own options panel. Setup is easy and will extend the usability of your site for your users. Add your own custom logo, menu, and customize away with our theme options.

Tophat Dropdown

This section is triggered with the (top left) tophat tagline trigger and reveals a new section of widgets. These widgets are easliy managed in Appearance > Widgets and we’ve even included a custom options panel to customize this section further.

Page Templates

We’ve built some powerful templates for you to use. These templates are customizable and can be used as many times as you like and include: Post Grid, Blog, Course Catalog, and Faculty Grid (yes, it actually filters users). Each of these templates offer custom options to help building with these templates a breeze. Oh, and did we mention that you can also use Visual Composer on any of these pages to add even more content. The combinations are endless.

Sensei Learning Management Support

Sensei is a Learning Management System that makes teaching coursework easier than it’s ever been, all within WordPress. With the Sensei plugin you can create courses, write lessons, and add quizzes. Set lesson and course pre-requisites, allow user registration and even charge for your course content if you want. Simply put, we’ve included “out of the box” support for the “Sensei” plugin by Woo Themes for extended features and functionality for schools that want to take their courses and lessons to the next level. This plugin is not included with the theme, and users who want to utilize these extended features will need to purchase a license through Woo Themes. This plugin is not associated with the Polytechnic Courses provided with the theme.

WooCommerce Ready

Yep. WooCommerce is enabled on this theme, which means you can use it to sell stuff like shirts, gift cards, or anything else you can dream up. This theme isn’t focused on custom shop design, but WooCommerce does a TON of amazing stuff out of the box and this theme will work seamlessly with it.

Built on the Mythology Engine

Mythology Engine has been developed with the sole purpose of creating an efficient method of publishing themes with a streamlined development process… Key features include white-label options panels, “in-dashboard” documentation, and a no-nonsense approach to content management & theme options.

Visual Composer 4

Create your own custom layouts using over 30 different content modules ranging from image-sliders to text blocks to videos and maps. Visual Composer is the most popular visual editor available to WordPress and it’s bundled in the theme. Updates are be included for free with each theme-version update.

Visual Composer Extension (Polytechnic Exclusive): Custom Hover Images

User interaction has many benefits. One is that it can create focus and increase audience retention. Use Visual Composer to add these exclusive custom hover modules to your content. Don’t forget to add links and calls to action with these Custom Hover Modules to increase internal traffic and interactions. Choose a custom image, background color, add custom content, and select a start height and end height for the modules on that page.

Visual Composer Parallax Rows

We’ve extended this plugin to handle parallax backgrounds for full-width rows. This makes it even easier to add in your content and break it up visually with this custom feature.

Live Front-End Customizer: Unlimited Colors and 1,000’s of Fonts

Customize your theme’s typography easily with instant Live-Previews as you select your options and see how your site looks with any font, color, or size before you hit “Publish”. Integrated with color pickers and the Google Fonts library, so you’ll have 1,000s of fonts to choose from. If Google Fonts aren’t enough, we integrate seamlessly with Typekit, Fonts.com, and other popular services.

Revolution Slider 4

The most popular & easy to use “mega slider” plugin to ever exist!!! OK, that’s hyperbole, but it’s honestly pretty great and we’re thrilled to announce that we are now including Revolution Slider 4. This latest version includes: brand new admin interface, more options, more conveniences, custom caption animation builder, full slider import/export, and much more! You can also include Revolution Slider as your ad space slider, pre-content slider, sidebar slider and within individual posts/pages. Sweet!

Contact Forms

We are fully including Contact Form 7 to provide users with a quick and easy way to build and manage contact forms. It can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

Ajax Live Search

Try typing in the search-bar (in the sidebar or on the “tophat”). The Live Search feature allows users to instantly skim your site for relevant material without every loading another page.

HTML5 Fueled SEO

We re-wrote our entire theme-base from scratch to include the latest, most relevant HTML elements and tags to allow for the best possible search engine results.

Multi-Language Support

The entire theme has been fully internationalized and prepped for your language translation. Just follow the usual translation process and the theme will do the rest.

Custom CSS & Script Injection

Got something custom that you want to drop in? Simple. Just drop them into our theme control panel and the theme will do the rest of the work for you.

Built with Ordinary People in Mind

Our goal is to deliver a theme that anyone can use & customize, without any need for 24/7 customer support or long-winded documentation manuals. We recommend uploading the theme demo if you want a head start, but the theme has truly been designed to be answer any of your questions as you use it, so don’t fret if you don’t know how to code.

Helpful Support

If you need some more information on something included with the theme, we’ve put together a dedicated information site for this theme. If you still need some help or have a question, feel free to ask us at our dedicated support forum. Just make sure to include your endgoal to help us understand how we can help.

Built with Developers in Mind, too!

Our code is clean, organized, and well commented. Everything has it’s rightful place in this theme, and making advanced customizations to templates, stylesheets, and functions has never been easier.

Beyond Responsive

We were one of the first theme crews to dabble in ‘responsive design’ way back in the day, so we know a thing or two about how to do this properly. Fluid grids are used at larger breakpoints, and fixed widths are used on smaller devices to ensure ideal spacing. The type size shifts on smaller devices to be larger and easier to read, and images and other media are sandboxed to prevent anything from breaking the layout.

REM Typography & Layouts

The problem with Pixels are, they absolutely do-not-scale in Internet Explorer. Furthermore, with the onset of Responsive Web Design, having fonts that scale (in relation to the screen width) has become paramount. Percentages (%) and EM’s are better, but they’re tricky and compound. Still not an answer. A real solution? Use the REM. (Source – Greg Rickaby)

JetPack Share, Comments, Carousel, and Extra Widgets

Nearly all of JetPack should work well with this theme (the Tiled Galleries are the only exception since those aren’t responsive); if you want to start using the next level of WordPress functionality, you’ll get it here.

The Theme Control Panels

This theme has been built on the Mythology Engine, a foundation theme from MDNW that has the primary goal of creating the fastest site launch process possible. It does this in a few ways:

Back-End Theme Options, Re-envisioned

Functionality meets organization. We’ve re-done all skinning options from our primary theme control panel in order to create a swift, responsive, uncluttered way to manage the key aspects of the theme. This is what the admin panel looks like:

In addition to the Theme Options panel (which manages the global theme options), this theme also integrates Page & Post options that allow you to override any global rules for that one page or post. These panels will show up on any Page or Post editor, underneath the basic content editor. In the event that they do not appear, make sure that you have enabled them from the top-right “Screen Options” panel. These panels will allow you to override theme-level options on individual pages and posts.
To take this even further, we added custom options that show up depending on the page template used. This includes page template specific options for theBlog Page & Post Grid (Portfolio) page templates. These panels will show up on any page with the Blog Page template or Post Grid template selected.
Front End Theme Skinning with Live-Preview Eliminate the guesswork from customizing the theme. Built on the WP Theme Customizer API with some special tricks blended in, you can change just about every typographic or color across the entire theme; there’s no need to reload the page on the front-end though; the Theme Customizer will show you an instant preview of what your changes look like right there on the same screen. Here’s what the panel looks like: The full library of Google Fonts is included in the Theme Customizer (and yes, live-preview works on the font-faces too). Just open up the customize panel and start playing!

Quick Links

Standard Troubleshooting Steps

Support Policy | Articles | File a Support Request

How to UPDATE The Theme | How to UPDATE Premium Plugins

Change Log

/* ========== - UPDATE LOG : Polytechnic - ==========*/
Version 1.1.0
05/15/2015
- FIXED: Markup and fallback styles for Tophat Search option

Version 1.0.9
05/12/2015
- FIXED - Theme Options > Skin Builder - Tophat BG option
- FIXED: polytechnic-styles plugin - Tophat Section expanded and patched
- ADDED: polytechnic-styles plugin - Tophat Dropdown Section now included
- UPDAETD: Demo-Content.xml
- UPDATED: Optiontree-loader.php updated
- UPDATED: OptionTree import panel(s) - candy-admin-simple.css
- UPDATED: Event widget .duration adjustment
- UPDATED: Mythology Core 1.1.3
    - UPDATED: WPBakery Visual Composer 4.5.1
    - UPDATED: Revolution Slider 4.6.93
    - UPDATED: OptionTree 2.5.5

Version 1.0.8
04/28/2015
- ADDED: Pagination for Course Catalog page template (template-course-catalog.php and mythology-functions.php)
- ADDED: Fallback menu list item styles for sticky menu
- ADDED: Feature Request - Tophat Login Links option (On/Off) - even when WooCommerce is active
- ADDED: Feature Request - Tophat Search option (On/Off) - uses ajaxy if active
- ADDED: Feature Request - Tophat Custom Text/HTML option
- UPDATED: Resouces > Widgets.wie 
- UPDATED: Resouces > Demo-Content.xml 
- UPDATED: Hover-grid cross browser support - vc_extend css lines 16-32 added
- UPDATED: Styles for rpwe menu widgets updated to use widget image sizes
- UPDATED: Recommended plugin source(s) updated to use "latest-stable" 
- UPDATED: Small style tweeks to maintain consistency
- FIXED - XSS Vulnerability:
    - UPDATED: Mythology Core 1.1.2: 
        - WPBakery Visual Composer 4.5
        - Revolution Slider 4.6.9
        - OptionTree 2.5.4
        - TGM-Plugin-Activation 2.4.1
        - Plugin-loader.php sources updated from http to https
        - Plugin-loader.php sources updated to use "latest-stable" 

Version 1.0.7
03/11/2015
- UPDATED: Polytechnic-courses plugin updated to 1.1
- ADDED: Polytechnic-courses plugin text domain declaration
- FIXED: Padding for featured image when Meta section is off
- FIXED: Content-fullwidth template (used in Blog template and Single)
- FIXED: Post Options > Show Post Footer, when off now turn all sub-options off
- ADDED: Post Options > Post Comments On/Off
- ADDED: New scrolling table function for overflow content on mobile devices for course catalog page template (http://polytechnic.themeisland.net/colleges-schools/course-catalog/)
- FIXED: Remove hardcoded link in plugins.css
- FIXED: Sub-footer on/off toggle
- UPDATED: Conditionals added/updated for Footer Options (show_footer)

Version 1.0.6
02/26/2015
- UPDATED: OptionTree Loader - this fixes the ot-meta-boxes.php error WPML users were seeing
- UPDATED: OptionTree 2.5.0
- UPDATED: NiceScroll 3.6.0
- UPDATED: Polytechnic-courses plugin updated to 1.1
- UPDATED: Table data titles internationalized in polytechnic-courses plugin
- UPDATED: Styles-polytechnic plugin updated
- UPDATED: Events Calendar styles for mobile devices
- FIXED: Appearance > Customize > Header Menu Options
- FIXED: Scrolling on touch devices
- FIXED: Breadcrumbs for custom page tempaltes
- FIXED: List styles for Sensei Quizes
- ADDED: Base list styles for bbPress
- FIXED: Dropdown menu v. Tribe events z-index issue
- FIXED: Sticky header menu list spacing for non-mega-menu

Version 1.0.5
02/05/2015
- UPDATED: WPBakery Visual Composer - Version 4.3.5 - 4.4.2
- UPDATED: OptionTree - Version 2.4.3 - 2.4.6
- FIXED: Display of menu list item hover and sub-mega-menu.
- ADDED: Default Styles for WooCommerce & The Events Calendar Tickets
- ADDED: Menu Hover Color option in Skin Builder
- ADDED: Sub Menu Highlight Color option in Skin Builder
- ADDED: Sub Menu BG Color option in Skin Builder
- ADDED: Sub Menu BG Image option in Skin Builder
- ADDED: Header BG Grayscale On/Off toggle in Skin Builder
- ADDED: Header BG Color Opacity numeric slider in Skin Builder

Version 1.0.4
01/15/2015
- FIXED: Display of Faculty Directory for Safari and mobile users
- FIXED: Author page course query now supports usernames with underscores
- FIXED: Now supporting The Events Calendar 3.9 - this fixes the new events saving issue
- UPDATED: Mythology-core/optiontree files updated to 2.4.6
- UPDATED: Documentation now covers hover grid, helper class, and demo-homepage.xml file (12.2.1)
- UPDATED: Small tweaks to styles for author sidebar

Version 1.0.3
01/05/2015
- FIXED: Custom faculty profile image uploader
- FIXED: Blog template v. sidbar when posts have meta turned off
- FIXED: Revolution Slider added back into plugin installation prompt
- UPDATED: WPBakery Visual Composer - Version 4.3.4 - 4.3.5
- UPDATED: Theme-plugin.css stylesheet update for Sensei login
- UPDATED: Mythology-key updated for Sensei sidebar
- UPDATED: Styles for Visual Composer Teaser Grid/Post Grid module

Version 1.0.2
12/22/2014
- FIXED: Android device scrolling
- FIXED: Sticky header on desktop viewport sizes
- FIXED: Course & faculty meta widths/spacing/borders
- FIXED: Widgets.WIE footer widgets updated for new Custom Menu Wizard version
- FIXED: Responsive Menu plugin now included in prompt
- ADDED: Option toggles (On/Off) for Faculty Meta
- ADDED: Option toggles (On/Off) for Faculty Sidebar
- ADDED: Faculty meta alignment/adjustment for overflow & removal
- ADDED: Responsive Mode Toggle (On/Off)
- ADDED: Check function for handheld devices.
- FIXED: Dropdown Header on handheld devices. 

VERSION 1.0.1
12.15.2014
General Changes/Fixes Done:
- Mythology Core Updated - VERSION 1.1.1 (By ThemeIsland)
    - Plugin Update: WPBakery Visual Composer - Version 4.3.3 - 4.3.4
    - Plugin Update: WP Revolution Slider - Version 4.6.0 - 4.6.5
- Documentation Updated
- Removed blank author description fallback
- FIXED: Generation of vc_custom_ now isolated to rows.
- FIXED: Jquery no conflict for skeleton-key.js
- FIXED: Custom CSS and Custom Script panels in Theme Options
- FIXED: Remove Required/Forced Activation of Non-Essential Plugins
- ADDED: Option toggle (On/Off) for NiceScroll custom scrolling.
- ADDED: Option toggles (On/Off) for Course Meta
- ADDED: Option toggles (On/Off) for Course Listings
- ADDED: Course meta alignment/adjustment for overflow & removal

VERSION 1.0 --
- First Release

/* ========== - Feature Requests & Roadmap - ==========*/

** Have a feature request? Let us know!
 - Revolution Slider included with demo example