News WordPress theme

News is a theme that was designed to answer many of the problems that other "news" themes have in the WordPress community. Rather than simply slapping a big featured slider above a list of posts and calling it a news theme, we spent time looking at what makes news sites work and translated those features into a WordPress theme.

The theme has multiple sidebars, extra custom templates, theme-specific widgets, slideshows, and many other awesome features. It was built to actually handle the presentational aspects of a real-world news site.

Child themes

Since News is a parent theme, you'll want to create a child theme if you plan on making any customizations. Don't know how to make a child theme? It's relatively simple. Just follow the below steps.

Create a theme folder in your /wp-content/themes directory called news-child.
Then, create a style.css file within your theme folder.
At the top of your style.css file, add the below information.

/**
 * Theme Name: News Child
 * Theme URI: http://link-to-your-site.com
 * Description: Describe what your theme should be like.
 * Version: 0.1
 * Author: Your Name
 * Author URI: http://link-to-your-site.com
 * Tags: Add, Whatever, Tags, You, Want
 * Template: news
 */

This will give you a blank design. If you want to import the News parent theme style, simply append this code after the above information:

@import url( '../news/style.css' );

/* Custom code goes below here. */

Note that child themes are now the officially-supported way of modifying themes in WordPress.

Notes

Upgrading from version 0.1 or 0.2?

When this theme was originally developed, some code was added to it that I didn't think belonged in a WordPress theme. Unfortunately, I was overruled by the rest of the development team. However, I now control the development of this theme, which means some things have changed.

Slideshow and Video post types: These things are no longer a supported part of this theme. I have included a plugin called "News Post Types" for those of you who wish to continue using these features. To use this plugin, follow these steps:

Open your news theme folder.
Copy the news-post-types folder (and its contents) from the plugins folder within your theme.
Place the news-post-types folder within your wp-content/plugins directory. From that point, you'll treat it just like a regular plugin.
Now, copy the slideshow.php, video.php, sidebar-slideshow.php, and sidebar-video.php files into your child theme folder. Not using a child theme? Follow the steps outlined above.

Note that these features will be removed from a future version of this theme. If you want to use them, you definitely need to follow the above steps.

Theme support

Support for the News theme is not offered on the WordPress support forums. There is a community called Theme Hybrid where support is offered for this theme. You are encouraged to sign up to the site to use its support forums and become a part of the community.

Fonts and JavaScript

Several fonts and scripts were used in this theme and have additional, GPL-compatible licenses.

Each font is licensed under the OFL:

Each script is licensed under the GPL and MIT license:

Copyright & license

News is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 (GPL).