They are closed weekends.

Hm. Not sure; I’d likely use the page builder to make a “page” then set that as your home page, as that also allows you to create custom sidebar for homepage, but keep “blog timeline” layout, but also to add “sections” where you want like a custom box top of page above the new posts where you can put something custom with h1 tag; or even a section below latest posts where you put something with h2 tags. That would be simpler than hacking the home page template where you’d need to drop stuff in above and below the page loops, which are kind of complex due to the various theme options.

Note with twitter that once they cache a certain page, they don’t recache it once updated typically. I have this issue on couple of sites where we did some major updates and wanted to re share some pages, but both FB and twitter keep the OLD info, old photo, etc. and won’t update the NEW info, since they already have been “shared” the “old/bad” version. This may not apply to you, but keep in mind FB and Twitter have so much traffic and frequent technical issues, that sometimes there is simply nothing you can do about it as it has nothing to do with your site whatsoever.

Basically if you look at your page source and see all the properly formatted og:tags and twitter tags, description and title tags, then the issue is NOT with your site.

For example, I was sharing some stories from CNN to my G+ account, and all that was showing in the share was the photo and the page URL, no headline, and no description. Issue not with CNN, but with Google.

Likely doesn’t help, but it’s an on/off/on problem with sharing stuff to FB in particular, and sometimes G+. Twitter has been mostly stable, but they do have problems but they do at least have a developer page to SHOW what systems in their network are/are not working in realtinme.

Twitter status alert: http://status.twitter.com/

Twitter network/API status: https://dev.twitter.com/status

Facebook: Platform Live Status: https://developers.facebook.com/status/

example on Facebook Aug 1:
August 1 at 8:59am

Increased errors/latency on all Platform surfaces
Facebook is currently experiencing an issue that is affecting all API and web surfaces. Our engineers detected the issue quickly and are working to resolve it ASAP. We’ll update shortly.

• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.

Hi, the theme layout would have to change for most of those social media options. You could certainly hack this theme, but in one example, you’d have to redesign the layout to have a wide layout for post top, for image and headline, then a skinny column on left for that, and then that would end up going above the story box for mobile devices.

For breaking news, you can obviously add a text box on your home page and use CSS to style a breaking news box – you have that ability right now. It would not be on ALL pages site wide, but you could easily add that to the single post template by calling a “breaking” file, and leave that empty if no breaking news, or populate when you have something earth shattering if your site actually breaks news in realtime. Simple to do. I think this might be on the list of 150+ “requests” for the theme, but not a hot topic for most, and so doubtful you’d see this anytime soon, unfortunately. But easy to add yourself within a few minutes of work.

For the social media stuff, you could create a php file with the social media elements you want, then add that in a float left div with right margin in the single post template at start of the post text, for example, or put a widget on top right of your post custom sidebar – you could hardcode by making a custom sidebar to load for the posts where the social media stuff is hard coded to query current post meta, and then still have the widget areas below that.

But don’t assume I’m being contrarian or negative in any way. Many “custom” things are pretty easy to do with existing plugins, or a couple of quick hacks to the single post template.

• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.

Hi, you may wish to use the search function in this forum as the topic has been covered many times.

Normally you don’t make story titles h1 or h2 as they normally change regularly on a newspaper, meaning, the h1 today for a story would not be there tomorrow, and so has no value for long-tail SEO.

So, typically if you have a phrase such as “All the best southwest tacos.” and you want that on your home page for SEO of southwest tacos, provided it’s also in your title and description tags, you would simply create a text box and put that text at top or wherever you want it on your home page layout.

h2 tags are for sub-heads, and not technically needed, but can be done the same way, for example you could remove the h4 tag for a news section like “book news” and create text area above it, and use h2 for Book News.

Hope that helped 🙂

If you’ve properly setup Disqus it will send you an email saying “importing” comments, and also when done. You also need to make sure comments are enabled for your posts in the main WP settings, and also double check the settings for the Disqus plugin on your site (tricky to find somwetimes, I usually go to plugins > disqus > theme settings …. meaning, the settings on your site, not on their site.

If you have a NEW account with Disqus there is a delay for them to approve your site, although they don’t say it that way. Once your site is “in their system” — comments appear immediately and once the first sync is done all your old comments show up bottom of old posts.

All fonts loaded externally add load time; best bet is to use “web safe fonts” (I’m using the Gill Sans stack for our sites, for instance).

Another option to speed up loading is to download the CSS from the above link, and embed that at the end of your style.css, and erase that line from the functions.php (or comment it out). This way you’re loading the css locally and loading the fonts directly without that intermediate delay. I do this for our business site which doesn’t use WordPress. Really helped.

Not part of the theme, but likely a developer could help you hack it; for example create another widgetized area at nth spot, then use plugin or query to pull in related content. Trickier to do “inside the post” since it’s the result of the query for the page. Often this is done on other magazine sites with skinny column left of main article so that the query is in its own section. Tricky but not impossible. There isn’t a built in function to do this, obviously.

You could likely comment that button out of the theme template (search forum as there are numerous threads on adding or removing buttons; as many people were wanting to add Pinterest for example).

For SEO you might want to keep it, simply for Google “good will….” …. and as far as low numbers, I’ve actually noticed a lack of shares for G+ on almost every major news portal I go to … 376 shares on twitter, 0 for G+ and I feel like a nutbag for sharing to my G+ page. So, I hear ya, man! We’re keeping G+ on all our sites until Google kills it.

Most sites got rid of font zooms — basically style sheet switching via javascript — since it’s built into all the web browsers now and became a nightmare for responsive design — meaning, you have to make zooms for each break point. We did the same on our business site. You’ll notice MOST major newspaper and magazine sites no longer have this function on the page. 🙂

However, you can easily create an alternate style sheet and simply enlarge all the font sizes in the .css then put the javascript to switch between style sheets into a box, such as top of sidebar. Simple.

• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.

Disqus comments show up quickly, unless you have it setup to hold for approval; but the comment counts rarely are accurate. I just disable them in the templates. They do NOT work on the author template page for example and always show “0 comments” … not that most people really care how many comments a story happens to have.

Sync with comments has nothing to do with the theme, but with WordPress. So, once you install DisQus you use the tools for the plugin to sync existing comments to their server so they’ll show up at bottom of posts. It can take a couple of hours, depending on how many comments your site has.

Hope that helped 🙂

Also don’t forget closing bracket, missing in your example code …

.td-page-title span {
 color: #353535;
 text-decoration: none !important;
 font-family: ‘Roboto Condensed’, sans-serif;
 font-size: 45px;
 line-height: 60px;
 font-weight: bold;

You may find it useful to review the WordPress docs on using comments to review all the options beyond just on/off in the WordPress settings > discussion …

http://codex.wordpress.org/Comments_in_WordPress

I’m using the plugin on both our sites running Newspaper, but we use the paid version (recommend using the paid version!). It’s cheap enough and we use it all the time.

Note it won’t grab “first image from post” if you already set featured image and are having theme load the featured image above/outside the post block. It will work when you have a local or external image PLACED into the body text of the actual post box.

We had to do regenerate thumbnails to have it build the images for pre-existing posts, and then it works on FUTURE posts just fine.

Actually, we’re using three plugins to solve image issues:
1) Auto Post Thumbnail PRO
2) Regenerate Thumbnails
3) Thumbnail Upscale

for us these 3 plugins solved all the issues we were having in trying to replicate the old way that thumbs were generated (e.g., with the deprecated “TimThumb”).

@anastasios
thanks for kind words. Happy to help. As I’ve noted in past, I’m sort of “paying it forward” from all the help I got over the years in sorting things out when I could not solve something and others pointed me in the right direction. Also, I’ve been doing some work lately where I have little snippets of time where I’m basically waiting for something to process for 5-9 minutes and need to watch it but can’t do much else while waiting, so I pop in here. Also we’re getting ready to retrofit some of our working sites with Newspaper, so have been keeping an eye on any weird voodoo issues I should be on top of before switching from Woo Canvas to Newspaper for those production sites. 🙂

You can see the default fonts in the style.css file which comes with all WordPress themes. I just posted the info in another post a little bit ago, also.

You can find them by looking at the style.css file which is what is used to define basic styles for websites, and themes. It’s the “style sheet” for the site (css = cascading style sheet).

eg.

.td-page-title a,
.td-page-title span {
  color: #444444;
  text-decoration: none !important;
  font-family: 'Roboto Condensed', sans-serif;
  font-size: 30px;
  line-height: 37px;
  font-weight: normal;
  -ms-word-wrap: break-word;
  word-wrap: break-word;
.entry-crumbs {
  position: absolute;
  top: -25px;
  left: 0px;
  font-family: 'Ubuntu', sans-serif;
  font-size: 12px;
  line-height: 14px;
  color: #d0d0d0;
  /* responsive phone */
}

Glad we could help 🙂

About the only way to get a separator line with boostrap 3 grid is to end up using one of the grid columns simply for spacing and having a border element on right side. It’s a pain.

[ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ] {|} [ ][ ][ ]

We use the auto post thumbnail pro, because we have a news network where we have this exact issue with content being syndicated from the MAIN website to satellite sites with localized content – local news has local images, national news images load from the main server. The low-cost Auto Post Thumbnail Pro works perfectly to grab image and make featured so that images appear site wide where we want them to even if the main image loading from mothership. Highly recommended!

You can find them by looking at the style.css file which is what is used to define basic styles for websites, and themes. It’s the “style sheet” for the site (css = cascading style sheet).

eg.

.td-page-title a,
.td-page-title span {
  color: #444444;
  text-decoration: none !important;
  font-family: 'Roboto Condensed', sans-serif;
  font-size: 30px;
  line-height: 37px;
  font-weight: normal;
  -ms-word-wrap: break-word;
  word-wrap: break-word;

.entry-crumbs {
  position: absolute;
  top: -25px;
  left: 0px;
  font-family: 'Ubuntu', sans-serif;
  font-size: 12px;
  line-height: 14px;
  color: #d0d0d0;
  /* responsive phone */
}

Ideally you’d post a new article into a single category like “food” but not “clothing” and so when building modules on the home page you’d select one block to show the food content, and another to show clothing content. Similarly to highlight content from a single category, across more than one you can use the “featured” category for a big slider, etc.

Still, this is a common issue … for example visit nbcnews.com as they’re having similar issue with their new site design 🙂

I ran into this with a music category, books category, and then when I had a “music book” that ran in both I ended up with story in two places on home page. But not end of the world if that happens.

Trick is to pick and choose categories and not put stories in all of them.
Not sure that helped, but my two cents anyway. 🙂

This issue is typically due to
1) theme not installed properly
2) Using Internet Explorer which doesn’t always handle the Ajax properly
3) running plugin with errors, or you have leftover theme code from prior theme running, either as plugin, or using OLD version of Visual Composer that did not come with this theme
4) caching not turned off prior to theme setup, so you are loading elements of old theme in browser

Good places to start.

@Steven pretty much said what I had on my mind in very diplomatic way.

@cherry = Seems it might make sense to try to optimize your server/CDN/ etc. with the default theme for WordPress while you’re learning how to do this, then switch to the big theme once you have your foundation set in stone, as it were. There are many many sites out there which detail how to optimize a WordPress site, server, caching, CDN, PageSpeed, etc. – before you even get to the theme features.

We use last modified on our sites, but your case may be different; we’re running Apache vs Nginx which is a tad different.

I guess your problem is if you’re seeing a page saying last modified 1970 vs “yesterday” that could simply be its way of saying “not updated – ignore me for recrawl” – which is likely the case you’re seeing.

It could be the cookies your site is sending on page load, where the cookie has the 1970 expiration, and the page has yesterday.

This page might be more helpful in checking your headers, dunno:
http://www.microsoft.com/search/Tools/default.aspx

I use a plugin for this, which works perfectly
http://codecanyon.net/item/auto-post-thumbnail-pro/4322624

*NOT an affiliate link- that is the link. Cheap. I use it on multiple websites and works awesome.

check with your hosting provider … if the clock is off or something. I may be missing what your issue is.

You can check your headers for pages with various online tools like http://web-sniffer.net/

HTTP Response Header

Name

Value

Delim

Status: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 20:49:28 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: close
Set-Cookie: __cfduid=d2376a9f44b520530e88bf3049c2796811407962968768; expires=Mon, 23-Dec-2019 23:50:00 GMT; path=/; domain=.cherrykoks.de; HttpOnly
Expires: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 21:49:28 GMT
Pragma: public
Cache-Control: max-age=3600, public
X-Powered-By: W3 Total Cache/0.9.4
Last-Modified: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT
Cache-Control: private, must-revalidate
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Server: cloudflare-nginx
CF-RAY: 1597c78ace8e064a-FRA
Content-Encoding: gzip

Note if having issues with your setup it’s best to check with your CDN provider to debug any issues between hosted content on server and on the CDN and how they sync.