It’s a learning adventure ! Don’t get discouraged, just take your time and read through all the different things. WordPress is pretty easy to use, and luckily most of the “common” things don’t change; so if you launched a new site with different theme, or setup a free blog on wordpress.com – it all works in much the same way. 🙂

You can upgrade from one version to another, you don’t need to do so in order. E.g., you can jump from 3.1 to 3.4 — simply do a manual update as noted here:
https://forum.tagdiv.com/how-to-update-the-theme/

See the pagespeed topic for more information on optimizing your site. This is not specifically unique to this theme – it’s an issue with *all* websites and WordPress.

Start here
https://forum.tagdiv.com/how-to-make-the-site-faster/

https://forum.tagdiv.com/topic/pagespeed/

You might need to do some custom work, such as found in the theme documentation:
https://forum.tagdiv.com/topic/can-i-add-plugins-css-to-footer/#post-6348

• This reply was modified 12 years by simchris.

Hi,
you might want to
1) review the theme documentation (note link top of this forum)
https://forum.tagdiv.com/newspaper-documentation/

How to manually update theme:
https://forum.tagdiv.com/how-to-update-the-theme/

2) if you’re new to WordPress – perhaps read some of the “how to” information on WordPress.org which has 10+ years of useful help information on basic functionality of things like updating themes, where they go, etc.
Using themes: http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Themes

Hopefully that will not be too difficult.

Yes! Image optimization is only ONE part of the process. You need to ideally optimize your images prior to upload for smallest size, and then set the default compression.

The htaccess file stuff for expires and also making sure that gzip/deflate are enabled on your server are also hyper critical.

Read back through some of my long winded posts for some great tips 🙂

And, you are very welcome !

zokolus
look at the standard sizes found in the theme docs, here:
https://forum.tagdiv.com/modules-and-blocks/

I think we did
sm = 100×65
md = 326×159
lg = 700×357

NOTE: I highly recommend adding a custom compression amount to photos for WP as I’ve found that some of the pix created by theme with default WP compression level are waaaay to big.

For example on our site which is not yet optimized,
original article image 700×406 I uploaded is 31.14kb
http://publishersnewswire.com/META/PNW-Feb14-loudest.jpg
the theme/and WP created a 700×357 version, 63kb (!).

The hack to add the compression amount down to something like “50” is someplace in my prior posts. Recommended!!!

—updated——–
the code:

add the following code to your functions.php file in the theme root at the end –or– in your child theme (TIP: stop using a child theme)

add_filter( ‘jpeg_quality’, create_function( ”, ‘return 50;’ ) );

– then run the regenerate thumbnails plugin under wp admin > tools

EDIT (( AND REMEMBER TO BACKUP YOUR ORIGINAL PIX FIRST – !! ))

And one more FYI:
ga-ga is our test/optimization site
PNW is our “stock” site being used for comparison
(I have been called to other projects the past month and not working on either … hence why I was not around here for couple of weeks … and I will disappear again next week… sigh….deadlines!)

• This reply was modified 12 years by simchris.
• This reply was modified 12 years by simchris.
• This reply was modified 12 years by simchris.

Hi, the Yoast XML sitemap works great with Google – we use it every day for that 🙂

Trick is submitting the location of the sitemap to Google for scanning, and then it takes them a day or two to scan; and then will tell you of any errors scanning the content.

You do NOT need to put a link to the sitemap in your page info as you don’t want search engines to “spider” the sitemap, only READ it (meaning you don’t want sitemap showing up in search results).

To get the right link to the actual sitemap, click the LINK on the Yoast SEO sitemap setup panel tab/menu. And then submit THAT link to Google in your webmaster tools account.

Bascially it’s: http://yoursiteurl.xyz/sitemap_index.xml

obviously, helpful to look at your sitemap in a web browser (IE actually works better for this …), which will be an index if you have lots of pages, and then multiple files per 1000 pages.

• This reply was modified 12 years by simchris.

For those wanting custom post count features we’ve been using something by the famous Lester Chan for many years:
http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-postviews/

And my suggestion is to make the normal support area more usable for those implementing the theme and updates for magazine sites since suggestions for features could be in separate area.

Not trying to make more work for y’all 😉

To add additional data entry fields in the post page (where you create articles), you need to basically “hack” the admin directives to add two new data entry fields. You would need to add new functions in the functions.php file for your two new fields, which write to post-meta, and then you would need to call those two new data fields in your theme layout.

This is easier to do with a plug in if you’re not used to creating new post-meta fields or editing the master functions.php file.

This is not as easy as simply cloning two elements in the theme.

I suggest you look at something like the plugin I suggested to create the two new data entry fields for post-meta, and then you would need to clone the existing two items in the theme but change the post-meta field names to the two new fields you create for data entry.

If that maskes NO sense you will want to Google how to add additional post-meta boxes.

SIMPLER METHOD: If you don’t need separate data entry boxes….
Alternately, you *could* just create two new user data fields from the drop down on the post page, and then use those for the two new post-meta fields. Then clone the source/via links, but with the two new data fields you create from the meta drop-downs on post page.

Not sure that helps. For the location of the source and via links you might simply do a “search” in a text editor/programmer tool for the word “via” in the page templates, but not sure if that is easy or not. Marius can likely specify what module or whatever that happens to be in now.

This may or may be related:
General note, some Java based stuff works better on Chrome than IE, and some java stuff sucks on Firefox. Many folks forget to check what plugins they may have running inside their web browser and which also use java … this is why Chrome and Firefox are starting to quash many of the plugins/add-ons for browsers. This is something to check also and possibly deactivate any Adobe, social media, custom menu bar, or other stuff installed as an “addon” to the actual web browser.

This drove me nuts with my ecom solution last year and my syndication module in WordPress; switched to different browser worked right, went back to orig and turned off all the stupid add-ins for browser I had at the time. Cleared my cache completely, added a little more disk space to browser cache default size. Really helped.

Your mileage may vary.

I think this is good idea and I almost made this very same suggestion yesterday, but then held off as I started to suggest something like Github, but since this is *not* an open source product, the whole element of downloading beta versions, etc., isn’t appropriate.

Still some kind of “developer blog” or forum based on the github/bugtrac-tracwiki (http://trac.edgewall.org/) and similar sites, might be useful containing:
1) current roadmap: to do, in progress, benchmark goals [locked]
e.g.,
3.4 : fix to blah blah, fix to bug track #33, new feature
3.5 : magic bunnies
2) known bugs in “current” version [locked]
3) feature requests – and delete dupes [unlocked]
4) custom code elements (if built for one person put that code someplace if not needed for core) [locked]

where [locked] means only admin can post (the 2 Radu’s and Marius, etc)

This would likely save a lot of repetitive and unrelated to support elements in the “support” forum. Like, oh the request for 1/2 stars. Not really necessary but some people “want” that, even though NOT part of the advertised product.

• This reply was modified 12 years by simchris.

Note – you should use a sitemap plugin, like Yoast SEO, or XML sitemaps. These create proper XML compliant sitemaps for Google.

The “old style” sitemap “pages” with list of all site content are no longer needed for search spiders as they are not easily or quickly readable and don’t contain modern elements like publish time, update time, or priority.

SEE: http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/ (we use this on most of our sites)
OR: http://wordpress.org/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/ (we still use this on some sites)

Both of the above do exactly what is needed to submit proper sitemap to both Google and Bing/Yahoo. 🙂

Hi, Coodude!
Not sure this helps or not:
Not all minification “plugins” do so correctly and is a known problem with ALL themes depending on the level of minification and/or breaking some code elements – not a ‘bug’ in the theme. If you wish the best possible result it’s best to manually minify the main CSS and JS files only. (See the PageSpeed sticky for my recommendations on how to do that, as I did. Downside, you need to do it each time theme updated, but only takes couple of minutes.)

With themes that are highly complex like this one, only “page cache” is recommended with the caching plugins. This is noted in the theme docs, also:
https://forum.tagdiv.com/w3-total-cache-configuration/

Nadia
I think there are plugins that allow you to more easily build an “all authors on one page” loop if you’re trying to do that.
http://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/how-to-show-all-your-authors-on-one-wordpress-page/

I think you’re a bit off in presuming that folks here are going to help you develop something outside what the theme is designed to do, and then have an attitude about it. Learning to code and customize WordPress is often trial and error, based on research and feedback. Insulting the theme support folk for not having the time to develop code for you is a bit rude. Theme works awesome based on the demo found on themeforest, and all the folks using it – custom hacks are not included in the price — hiring a developer for one hour can cost more than the total cost of this theme, so expecting the theme developers to do MORE and MORE and MORE free customizations at some point is unrealistic. And there are a lot of folks here who *do* try to share expertise and experiences. Hopefully you’ll fare better elsewhere.

(This is only my opinion. I do not work for, nor have any financial involvement with tagDiv.)

• This reply was modified 12 years by simchris.
• This reply was modified 12 years by simchris.

Yikes! Well, I guess the search is still on for that. Still, most people wanting to build an app for iTunes, etc., are doing so for commercial reasons and not a blog. So, it would cost more than that to pay somebody to build the code. Sooo….. I guess not awful. $199 I could see for something … $849, I’d have to really have a commercial thing happening where I was expecting to sell stuff.

Note that SOME folks will do conversions, but will take a “cut’ of each sale.

I think it’s simpler to use Adobe’s commercial tools? They also charge a fee but take care of the whole process. I only skimmed that so not sure all the specifics.

Seems a hot topic right now online …
http://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/5-plugins-to-turn-wordpress-into-a-mobile-app/

• This reply was modified 12 years by simchris.

I was looking to do something similar to a classroom type site; found this (Google great for searching by the way), have not yet tried it:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/mobiloud-mobile-app-plugin/

You might look at the custom fields plugin which lets you add additional fields to your post page and then insert the custom meta fields into your layouts.
http://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-custom-fields/

It’s in just the right place for our sites. We’d rather have folks continue to read related content, and see the author bio, than add comments. Most people by now know how to scroll in a web browser or “swipe up” on a tablet.

FYI: this is why theme developers make “demo sites” so you can look at how the elements appear on the pages.

eg
http://themeforest.net/item/newspaper/full_screen_preview/5489609

• This reply was modified 12 years by simchris.

(sorry – I have removed my reply as not actually applicable to your issue)

• This reply was modified 12 years by simchris.

@maqabyah
in looking at that plugin (bwp-minify), it seems there are some minor gremlins as recently as 2 days ago. (Always look at the support topic for each plugin to see current “issues”).

You might “try” using it and see if it works for you or breaks things. You can always turn it off — seems it “should’ work for most people.

I’d likely avoid “WP Minify” which hasn’t been updated since 2012 and lots of bug reports.

@mehedi
yes, I use BBedit on Mac and TextPad on PC, as my text editors, but basically you can also use notepad (not wordpad), or whatever the plain text editor on Mac is these days (I always want to say simpletext).

SO: create new blank text document with same name as the file you plan to minify (filenameXYZ.js), put into a folder or wherever you store stuff on your computer, and leave it open …

THEN, open the file from Newspaper theme folder you want to minify in text editor, select all (CTRL+A) and copy and paste into the minifier site, apply – then copy the minified text into your blank document then save. FTP up the minified version to over-write the original in the theme folder (you should have backup, or your themeforest install as backup obviously).

So, you’re replacing the original *.js file in the theme folder with your minified version.

Easy. Certainly there are plugins that might work for you, too, but I’ve not used one lately so can’t suggest best one beyond the discussion in the pagespeed topic.

Reload your page. If you’re caching the js files obviously you need to clear cache. Both on site if using cache plugin and in your web browser to see changes.

Remember you would need to do this each time you update the theme. But it really takes under a minute to do, for those who need it done. Try it.

====== OTHER OPTION =========
if you’re using my pals in Canada at Gossamer Threads, aka “GTMetrix” — a great tip many people entirely miss is that you can run a page score on your site, and it will tell you if CSS or JS need to be optimized BUT THEN IT WILL GIVE YOU LINK TO DOWNLOAD OPTIMIZED VERSIONS!!

Go here: http://gtmetrix.com/
put in your site URL, or a “post” URL – then under stuff to fix it will have section on JS optimization, open little sub box, and it will show you files which “should be optimized” and will have little text link next to each one. Download/save the optimized version, upload via FTP, and done.

• This reply was modified 12 years by simchris.

It’s really “wicked cool” ! I had seen this on couple of websites and was thinking “how did they do THAT” … then ran across mention of it from Smashing mag (good place to follow on Twitter, btw). Checked it. Went, “hey!” and bookmarked for future review.

How to implement – it’s really a CSS like Bootstrap, along with the calls to the post permalink from the WP post, dropped into bottom of page hook. So:
Well…. likely a php file to include with calls to the post permalink, or a function. Not sure. Something RADU could look at for 3.5 perhaps 😉

• This reply was modified 12 years by simchris.

Hey everybody …
mr fixit here … 😉

The plugin we’ve been using for several years (seems like 7 years?) in one form or another by the world famous WP guru Lester Chan, is this one
http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-postviews/

It’s compatible with caching plugins. (See docs obviously … or “RTFM”).
It also writes to its own meta field, so it makes it easy to either use concurrently with any theme counter, or set the theme to pull from its data-field.

This may or may not work for your particular install, and it won’t solve any issues with “printing” items on pages or posts, likely, but if you want to keep view counts it works great for us.

@enemyborat
glad all my little rantings are helping somebody 🙂

“fonts and FOUT” Subject is top of mind for me at the moment as I’ve been toying with the difference between loading Open Sans off the Amazon CDN (where was able to compress the stylesheet more than the Google version is, for those who’ve run into that item on GTMetrix for scoring; meaning I basically am loading a minified and optimized version of the Open Sans font stack off the Amazon CDN for better performance/rating), vs just loading from Google directly. I get FOUT on my page right now with the CDN, and sometimes IE won’t load Font Awesome off the CDN at all (even with proper CORS rules) – whole ‘nother topic of pain there. Gave up and am loading Font Awesome 4x off our own server since IE 11 just randomly doesn’t load it and then all my icons are blank spots.

Anyway… “right now” if I go to a test page for site redesign (NOT using WordPress btw), I see moment of “italic” font then regular font. IE will load the italic font first for some reason so I see FOUT from italic to normal font. Stupid stuff (damn IE!!!).

I’m actually hoping to use the Google font CDN, and then the upcoming stable version of mod_pagespeed has a nifty feature where it will inline only the needed CSS for the browser being used.

So, for example this page …
http://www.send2press.com/clients/testimonials_2008-2012.shtml

I see a FOUT in IE11 on Win7/64 with a 32GB RAM machine on a 85mbps FIOS fibre connection. Page loading on dedicated server in Class A datacenter (Softlayer/IBM) with common elements like logo and main CSS coming off the CDN. Blah blah. Meaning, it’s not loading off anything with slow load times.

Starting to just “live with it.” Annoying as hell, though.

(argh)

Browser “should” cache the CSS on second page view. I have my cache in browser set to clear on close so I can re-suffer the view of a first time visitor EVERY time. Hence the annoyance can really annoying. Google “FOUT” to see the couple of years of whining by others, if one cares to. 😉

• This reply was modified 12 years by simchris.
• This reply was modified 12 years by simchris.