WhiteNews

Documentation
  • Author: xscoder
  • Created: May 22, 2019
Thank you for purchasing my theme. If you have any questions that are beyond the scope of this help file, please feel free to visit themes support center here or contact us via e-mail. Thanks so much!

Install the Theme

  1. Make sure that you have the latest version of Wordpress installed.
  2. You can upload this theme to WordPress in one of two different ways:
    1. Extract the whitenews.zip and upload the extracted whitenews folder to the /wp-content/themes/ directory on your FTP server with FileZilla.
    2. Go to Appearance -> Themes and click on the Add New link at the top. Then click Upload Theme, click Choose file, select whitenews.zip and click Install Now.
  3. After you upload the theme, activate it by going to Appearance -> Themes and place your mouse over WhiteNews and click the Activate button.
  4. After activating the theme, you'll be given the option to install a few plugins that are recommended for some functionalities of this theme. Click on Begin installing plugins and install of of them with the Bulk selection. Once they are installed, you have to Activate them all.

Update the theme

Once in a while, a theme update will be released that either fixes a bug and/or adds new features to the theme. You can update the theme in either one of two ways:

  1. Upload the new whitenews folder from the whitenews.zip file via FTP and overwrite the old files.
  2. Remove the old version of the theme by going to Appearance -> Themes and activating another theme (you may choose one of the three Wordpress default themes, it's just a temporary activation).
    Then, hover your mouse over the WhiteNews theme image and click Theme Details.
    Click the Delete button in the bottom-right corner of the window that appears.
    Latsly, follow the installation instructions above to install the new version of the theme.

NOTE: Updating the theme will overwrite any changes you made to any of the core theme files (index.php, style.css, header.php, etc), but you will not lose any changes you made to the Customizer, Menus, Widgets, etc.

Setup the theme

The theme doesn't need any special setup after installation, you just need to create Menus and Widgets:
  1. The Main menu on the top - Header Menu
  2. The Bottom menu - Footer Menu
  3. The Social icons menu - Social Menu
  4. The Sidebar for widgets on the footer


Demo Video

You may watch the this video to see how to install the Theme, create Pages, Posts, Categories and Menus in WordPress:





Install Demo Content files (optional)

The package you've downloaded after the purchase includes a folder called Demo content, which contains the demo-content.xml and widgets.wie files. You are free to import those contents in order to get your website look like the demo website of WhiteNews.

In order for you to import the demo content, enter Tools -> Import from your WordPress Dashboard, click the WordPress Importer, click the Choose file button and choose the demo-content.xml file. Then click the Upload file and Import button.





Now you can import the demo Widgets by entering Tools -> Widget Importer & Exporter and clicking the Choose file buytton, select the widgets.wie file and click the Imort Widgets button:

Navigation menu

To use the theme menu function firstly you have to create a menu, then you can add menu items to it as well as inserting submenus.

Click here for more informations about Menus.

Create a Menu

You must create a Menu before you can add items to it.

Add a Menu to the website

To make your menu show up on your website, you have to select the position of the menu:


Adding items to the menu

You can add different link types into your menu, these are split between panes left of the menu you’re currently editing.


Multi level menus

When planning the structure of your menu, it helps to think of each menu item as a heading in a formal report document. In a formal report, main section headings (level 1 headings) are the nearest to the left of the page; sub-section headings (level 2 headings) are indented slightly further to the right; any other subordinate headings (level 3, 4, etc within the same section are indented even further to the right.

The WordPress menu editor allows you to create multi-level menus using a simple “drag and drop” interface. Drag menu items up or down to change their order of appearance in the menu. Drag menu items left or right in order to create sub-levels within your menu.

To make one menu item a subordinate of another, you need to position the child underneath its parent and then drag it slightly to the right.

  1. Position the mouse over the child menu item.
  2. Whilst holding the left mouse button, drag it to the right.
  3. Release the mouse button.
  4. Repeat these steps for each sub-menu item.
  5. Click the Save Menu button in the Menu Editor to save your changes.

Social Icons Menu

To make a Social Menu just create a new menu, and set its location to Social Menu.

  1. Click the Custom Links tab
  2. Add the URL to your social profile like: https://www.facebook.com/yourid/
  3. Add link text the social platform name like: facebook, or twitter, or instagram... etc. See the full list of supported social network names below.
  4. Save the menu


These are the social icon names you can use for your Social Menu:

Footer and Post Widgets (Sidebars)

The theme has Sidebar support, which includes the Footer and Posts Sidebars.
Sidebars play an important role in designing the layout of a WordPress website to display content other than the main articles of a website. For example, a short list of recent articles, recent comments, a list of pages, or popular articles on a website can easily be displayed across the entire site.
It can also be used to display advertisements from third-party websites. Users can drag and drop items into sidebars from Appearance -> Widgets in the admin panel.

Customize the theme

Use the WordPress Theme Live Customizer to personalize the theme's look in real time.

Click the Appearance -> Customize link.
After you have done your customizationz, click the Publish button on the top, and refresh your website.



The Customizer options are the following:

Theme Features

The theme has some opportunities to make your post and your site more interesting.

Create post styles

The Home and the Archive pages have several different post list styles. They differ in the width of the block, the font size and the background color.

The default look is 25% width of full width, but if you want another style, just add some of the tags listed below into the Post's editor page.

NOTE: You can combine Tags with with each others, like: xxl and black).

After choosing your tags, don’t forget to click the Update or Publish button to save your Post.

Contact Page & Form

An important page to create is the Contact page, in order to make the Contact Form 7 plugin do its job and offer a valid form for users to get in touch with you.
So, in case you haven't imported the demo content, click Pages -> Add New

and give a title to your contact page - like Contact.
Use the Gutenberg editor to create some content, I would suggest you to create a 2-column content, which looks like this:



In order to use the [shortcode] of the Contact Form for your page, enter Contact -> Contact Forms and simply copy the [shortcode] in the Contact form 1 row, then paste it into your Contact page:

The Post Excerpt

To create a lead text in WordPress you simply have to put some text in the Excerpt box in the post's editor page.
The Excerpt is important to show some text in the list of posts in the Home and Archive pages.

Scroll down the Excerpt section and type your post summary text:

Again, just remember to Update or Publish your post.

Featured image for the posts

The theme supports the Featured image function, this means you can able to display images on the home screen and the archive pages.

In the post edit mode scroll down to the “Featured image” section on the right.

To add a featured image in a WordPress post, simply click on “Set Featured Image” link inside the featured image meta box shown in the screenshot above.

This will open the WordPress Media Uploader. You can use that to upload an image from your computer or use an existing image from your media library. Once you select the image, simply click on Set Featured Image button.

Lastly don’t forget Update or Publish the post.

Mailchimp Widget

After installing the recommended plugins, you'll find a new options in the left-side menu of your Dashboard called Mailchimp for WP

Enter the Mailchimp for WP section from the left menu and paste your Mailchimp API Key in its relative text box, then click the Save Changes button:



The page refreshes, and you should see the name of the newsletter's list of users that you should have already created in your Mailchimp account. If you haven't created a List of emails yet, just do it and then go back to your Wordpress Dashboard, refresh the page and you should see your List in the Your Mailchimp Account section.

Now enter the Form section, type a name for your form, mark the Mailchimp list option and click the Add new form button:



On the next page you'll get, you may just click the Save Changes button or customize the HTML code of your subscription form (in case you know how to handle HTML).

In this way you'll enable the Mailchimp form for users to subscribe to your newsletter:

Privacy Policy page

Because of EU GDPR and Internet Privacy terms, you need to have a Privacy Policy page on your website, so you can edit that default page as you wish, you can find it into the Pages section of your Wordpress Dashboard. Please note that it's just a sample, so you need to edit with your own policy descriptions.

Theme folders and files

Here's a list of folders, files and credits of this theme.

Folders structure

Sources and Credits

WhiteNews

Theme Documentation

xscoder.com

Once again, thank you so much for purchasing this theme. As I said in the beginning of this guide, I'd be glad to help you if you have any questions relating to this theme. No guarantees, but I'll do my best to assist.
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