Intended work flow with Newspaper Theme

Is there a beginning “how-to” for this theme? I clearly don’t know what I’m doing. For example: For the main menu, I use a specific page to display the most recent blog entries, but when I go to a specific blog entry, I have no idea where it’s getting the template to display that actual blog. Maybe a category template? I dunno. The same hold true for the Featured articles menu item. I display a custom page for the featured articles page, then have no idea what template is being used to display an article when one is selected.

I guess the question is, could someone (who has nothing better to do) describe their process? What templates are used to display posts? To display the menu pages? i started using WordPress with a different theme, and ended up using custom hand built pages and a plugin with lots of short codes to get things displayed, but I’m getting the feeling that Newspaper is not intended to used in that fashion.

My site can be viewed at: http://www.hiddenmesa.com

Thanks in advance, and be kind. Oh, and to be clear, I’m not asking for someone to do a lot of hnd holding. I would be very happy if someone could just point me in the right direction in terms of finding the proper, starting documentation. A “how to begin” paper would be great..

Thanks for your reply,

The thing is, I am reading the documentation. And I’ve watched nearly all of your videos. I think my problem is that I seem to lack a basic understanding of how a WordPress site is supposed to be used. With my last theme, I created various pages to get the look I wanted in terms of which content to display, then added shortcodes from a plugin to control the loop the way I wanted. With your theme, I believe I’m supposed to use it like WordPress was probably intended, which I never learned.

I’m getting it squared away now though. I made some major breakthroughs over the last couple of days by trial and error, and I’m confident that the decision to buy the most complicated theme I could find was the right one. It’s coming along quite well.

I would like to mention that I am not a fan of your documentation. Most of it reads like a sales ad to me with very little substance. And what substance there is assumes that I know far more than I actually do. The videos are even worse. They’re slick and well produced, but there seems to be very little substance to any of it that I can use.

Please understand that my criticism of the documentation is meant to be constructive. I am using it, as far as it goes, but I think there’s room for improvement in terms of explaining some of the basic concepts used in the theme. It’s possible that what I’m critical about is beyond the scope of what you’re trying to accomplish with the documentation, and I should have entered into this with a better working knowledge WordPress in general, but that’s my view.

As it is, I’m still excited about the kind of site I’m going to end up with because of this great theme.

Thanks,

Don Fink

Thanks Bogdan,

Actually, it does help. The Newspaper Theme has forced me into using WordPress in a different way than I had before, and to tell you the truth, it’s working quite nicely. I learn more every day. I was under the impression that I had to use static pages for pretty much everything, probably because of the limitations of the previous theme I was using. I’m switching the entire site over to using categories and category templates, and it’s really starting to come together.

I’m a long way from being a beginner with WordPress, but I think I learned it in the wrong way, which is in many ways far worse than being a beginner. As I’m re-learning to do this in the way that Newspaper seems to want to work, it’s starting to look pretty good.

I have quite a bit of work to do, but here’s what it looks like so far:

http://www.hiddenmesa.com

It’s already way better than the look of my previous theme, and I’m still learning. By the time I get around to writing a review on this theme, it’ll be pretty close to 5 stars.

Thanks for the help,

Don Fink