I’m reading the posts, but I can’t tell if this is going to be a problem for me. I’m planning to migrate a copy of my existing site down to a test server so I can do some radical design changes.

What I can’t figure out is, will the Newspaper theme actually work on the test site? I suppose that technically I would not be in strict compliance with the license agreement, but I don’t really want to buy a second license for a test site that’s temporary.

The changes, by the way, don’t involve moving to a new theme. I’m generally happy with the Newspaper theme because it provides all the capability I could want in terms of design flexibility, and the major new look I’m seeking should work fine within the Newspaper structure. It’s just that I need to do it on a test machine since I’m sure to break it a few times in the design process.

Anyway, any thoughts someone more knowledgeable than I am about whether the theme will work on a test server would be appreciated.

So let me answer my own question in case someone else has this problem in the future.

The mysterious appearance of unwanted shortcodes in my new posts was because I had Visual Composer set to run in both pages and posts. By default, Visual Composer is supposed to work only on pages, which makes sense. that’s the place where you’re most likely to build complex layouts.

Anyway, I set Visual Composer back to its default and the posts are coming up like you would expect a well-behaved new post to do.

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

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

And one more addendum. This is just in case someone else has this problem in the future and runs across this thread. When you’re editing a page or post, you can control the boxes that appear on the page for editing by clicking on a tab in the upper right corner of the page called “Screen Options.” From there, you get a list that shows all the boxes you ca edit on a page or post. Simply check the ones you want to appear on the edit page. Easy Peasy. Too bad it took be the better part of a day to find it..

And as an addendum, I notice that when I go to edit or create a new page, I have the option to add a Featured Image to the page, but I’ve still not found a way to add a Featured Image to a post.