WooThemes

Getting Started

Installing Premium News

To install Premium News, is not much different to installing any other (free) WordPress theme. There are however a few unique steps you will need to follow before jumping into the fun times using our themes. Follow these steps to get it up and running:

1. Unzip the the template file (premiumnews.zip) that you have downloaded.
2. Via FTP, upload the whole folder (premiumnews) to your server and place it in the /wp-content/themes/ folder. The template files should thus be here now: /wp-content/themes/premiumnews/.
3. You will then also need to CHMOD the “cache folder” in the themes folder i.e. /wp-content/themes/premiumnews/cache/ to 777 (details here).
4. Log into your WP admin panel and click on the Design tab. Now click on the Premium News theme to activate it (see the first screenshot below).
5. Note: When first clicking the theme to activate it, the preview pane will show that the theme contains “errors”, but this is only because you haven’t set up the Theme Options yet.
6. Complete all of the required inputs on the Premium News Options page (in the WP admin panel) and click “Save Changes”. Section 2 below details this process (See the second screenshot below).

Screenshot 1: Activating the theme.

Screenshot 2: Set up the theme on the Premium News Options tab.

Explaining the Theme Options

Below is a screenshot of the theme option’s panel packaged with this theme. Click on the image to enable a larger view.

How To

Adding Images To Posts (Using the Image Resizer)

Background Information

Many of the different template pages within Premium News, uses an embedded image within a post when displaying the post to the user. This means that you need to add a custom image to a post should you wish to display the image with the post. If you decline to add an image to a post, it will not be displayed and won’t disrupt the theme in any way. Note: Images do need to be added to Featured Posts as specified below in section #4.

Our themes use a custom image resizing script (thumb.php) which will dynamically resize, crop & create an image in the appropriate size needed for the template.

Instructions:

View video demonstration. To add images to your posts, please reference the screenshot below and follow the subsequent instructions:

Screenshot 3: Premium News Custom Settings.

1. On your Write > Post tab, complete all of the standard fields when adding a new post.
2. Then, click on the “Add Media” icon and upload an image of your choice.
3. Once uploaded, copy the complete “Link URL” field.
4. Now scroll down to the Premium News Custom Settings panel (just below your Categories) and paste the “Link URL” into the “Image URL” field.

Adding Featured Posts (Homepage Only)

Setting up the featured section

1. First you need to create or identify a specific post category that you would like to use as your featured category. You can create a category by going to Manage > Categories in the WP admin panel.
2. Now go to Premium News Options and select the appropriate category as the “Featured Category”. Then save those options.

Adding the post (basics)

1. Go to Write > Post.
2. Type a title for the post and complete all of the post’s body content.
3. Make sure to select the appropriate category (as you have specified on the theme options page – see above).
4. Once you have completed the post’s body content, copy a section of that body content, which you will use as the shortened summary of the post on the homepage. Now paste that section of content into the “Excerpt” field further down the page.

Adding an featured image

Please follow the exact instructions as specified above in section #3 for adding an image to the featured post.

Adding Videos (Sidebar)

Setting up the video section

1. First you need to create or identify a specific post category that you would like to use as your video category. You can create a category by going to Manage > Categories in the WP admin panel.
2. Now go to Premium News Options and select the appropriate category as the “Video”. Then save those options.

Adding a new video

1. Go to Write > Write Post in your WordPress admin panel.
2. Select the category for your videos (the same category as the category you specified in Premium News Options).
3. Now you should have the YouTube page open to copy the complete URL i.e. “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdllbXv4uEI”.
4. You will now need to enter this code into the content area in the following format: [youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdllbXv4uEI 350 292]. The 350 refers to the width of the video, whilst the 292 is the height of the video.
5. Click Publish.

Using Other Video Services

You can use any other video services (eg. Google Video, Vimeo, Revver etc.) if you’re not a fan of YouTube. You would simply need to revise their embed code (to alter the size of the video according to the dimensions mentioend above) and then include the full embed code (not in the format specified above) in the post content area.

Setting up Custom Page Templates

1. Go to Write > Page in the WP admin panel.
2. Simply fill in the page title, which can be anything, and then ignore the page body content.
3. Scroll down to the “Page Templates” box and select the page template you’d like to use (see the screenshot below).
4. And publish!

Screenshot 4: Selecting your page template.

Note: You may also need to follow this tutorial on how to set up some of the pages (i.e. the “Archives” page) for our themes.

Page Templates

Custom Premium News Theme Page Templates

Premium News comes bundled with the following additional page templates for some added functionality to your WooThemes experience:

• Archives (archives.php) - Displays all categories, monthly archives, popular tags and the 30 latest posts;
• Image Gallery (imagegallery.php) - Displays the images you have associated with your posts in an image gallery, linking back to the original article; and
• Sitemap (sitemap.php) - An alternative to some WordPress plugins out there, this page template will create a sitemap, which you can use for SEO & user-usability purposes.

Changelog

The Original Premium News Changelog

2009.06.16 - version 1.2.3

• header.php - Removed WP's automatic include of jQuery and replaced with manual inclusion of latest version of jQuery
• includes/js/jQuery-1.3.2.js - Added

2009.06.15 - version 1.2.2

• header.php - Removed old jQuery include

2009.06.11 - version 1.2.1

• footer.php - removed scripts
• header.php - added scripts
• functions.php - get_categories fix
• /includes/js/jquery.bgiframe.min.js - added
• /includes/js/superfish.js - update
• /includes/js/tabs.js - update

2008.10.22 - version 1.2.0

• thumb.php - new version

2008.10.09 - version 1.1.6

• functions/custom.php - Fixed bug with update of custom fields

2008.10.02 - version 1.1.5

• functions.php - Changed post_title to post_name

2008.09.04 - version 1.1.4 (only updated to svn)

• sitemap.php - fixed wp_list_pages
• header.php - fixed wp_list_pages
• style.css - fixed .nav-left, .nav-right

2008.09.04 - version 1.1.3

• style.css - Fixed flickr badge style error

2008.09.02 - Version 1.1.2

• functions.php - Fixed archives variable name
• includes/version.php - Archive variable with page ID
• layouts/default.php - Archive variable with page ID

2008.08.21 - Version 1.1.1

• functions.php - Changed default value on options

2008.08.08 - Version 1.1

• changelog.txt - Added changelog and revised version number
• includes/test.php - Added phpinfo() file for debugging resizer on buggy hosts
• includes/popular.php - Display popular posts in sidebar.php
• includes/comments.php - Display recent comments in sidebarh.php
• functions/custom.php - Custom settings panel in WP post window
• sidebar.php - Changed tabs to use popular.php and comments.php
• sidebar.php - Changed flickr script
• sidebar.php - fixed <ul> to <span> to validate on tag cloud
• header.php - fixed <? to <?php
• footer.php - Stripslashes on google analytics
• footer.php - WooThemes credit logo
• screenshot.png - New screenshot
• functions.php - .mainrow border-bottom: 1px solid #D4E9FA !important;
• functions.php - Added flickr options
• functions.php - Added pages dropdown to archive
• functions.php - Fixed google analytics slashes when saving
• functions.php - No <br/> before description of checkboxes
• style.css - Fix float on .flickr img