Scouting Challenge Theme for WordPress

Welcome to the website for the Scouting Challenge theme for WordPress (previously known as the Beverley Hall theme), a highly configurable on-brand theme aimed for Groups and other organisational units under the auspices of The Scout Association (TSA). Key to the design of the theme is the ability to customise and configure the theme to your requirements without needing to edit any of the theme files (thanks to the Easy Theme Options plugin). There are over one hundred and thirty options you can set but it will work just fine without you changing any of them. If you do want to edit the theme that's fine and child themes are supported (this site is using one).

The theme was primarily designed for use by Groups consisting of Beaver, Cub and Scout sections and optionally an associated Explorer unit. However the only visual indication of this in the theme itself is an optional row of logos on the index page and the Network logo can also be included. So there is not any particular reason why it could not be used at District or County level or indeed for other units. Only the TSA logo in the header stops it immediately being useful as a general purpose theme (albeit one that adopts TSA branding conventions in its choice of colours and fonts) and it is pretty simple to change that.

The theme was developed from a base of Scouts 4 WordPress and some of the visual design ideas of that theme are still being used. This influence is freely acknowledged. However hundreds of hours of work have gone into developing the Scouting Challenge theme and there is really nothing of note left from the original theme apart from some of the look. While it should be possible to use it as a drop-in replacement for that theme, it is far, far more than that.

This site is itself using a child theme of the Scouting Challenge theme. All the child theme has are some minor CSS tweaks, mostly to style tables inherited from the previous static HTML site, and a new 'favicon' placed where it will be picked up automatically by the parent theme. That is it, everything else you see uses functionality already built in to the Scouting Challenge theme. This site uses a 'static front page' using a version of the page template that doesn't have sidebars and displays the theme's 'slider'. You can get an idea of what the front page looks like on the default theme by viewing the Sample Front Page (this isn't quite the same as the actual theme because it picks up the options used on this site such as the logo and the colours).