MH Newsdesk WordPress Theme is ideal for fresh and dynamic news websites and comes with great flexibility. After you have installed the theme to WordPress, you can follow a few simple steps to configure the theme. In case you are new to WordPress, we recommend you have a look at a few basic WordPress tutorials first. A good place to start is the WordPress Codex: Getting Started with WordPress. Now have fun creating amazing websites with MH Newsdesk.
Create a Static Front Page
In case you want to configure your site like the theme demo, you’ll need to create a static front page first and then place the widgets on the front page. To set a static front page with the widgetized layout, please create a new page with name “Home” (or anything else) and select “Homepage” as template. Then please navigate to “Settings => Reading” in your WordPress dashboard and set that page as static front page. If you need more help with creating a static front page in WordPress, please read and follow this tutorial: How to set a Static Front Page in WordPress.
Available Widget Locations of MH Newsdesk
MH Newsdesk WordPress Theme has in total 14 locations where you can place WordPress widgets, custom widgets or add any HTML code you like. When you have completed the setup of your static front page (as stated above), you can navigate to “Appearance => Widgets” in your WordPress dashboard and easily drag & drop widgets in the specific widget locations.
- Home 1: large widget area on “Homepage” template on top of page
- Home 2: first half column widget area on “Homepage” template below Home 1
- Home 3: second half column widget area on “Homepage” template below Home 1
- Home 4: large widget area on “Homepage” template on bottom of page
- Home 5: widget area for sidebar on “Homepage” template
- Global Sidebar: widget area / sidebar on posts and pages (not Homepage)
- Footer 1: first column widget area in the footer (premium)
- Footer 2: second column widget area in the footer (premium)
- Footer 3: third column widget area in the footer (premium)
- Contact: widget area on contact page template (premium)
- Header Advertisement: advertisement spot in the header (premium)
- Post Advertisement (Top): advertisement spot above your post text (premium)
- Post Advertisement (Bottom): advertisement spot underneath your post text (premium)
- Footer Advertisement: advertisement spot in the footer (premium)
You can simply drag & drop widgets in widget locations / sidebars when you navigate to “Appearance => Widgets” in your WordPress dashboard. There you will find an extensive collection of default WordPress widgets and custom widgets that are included in MH Newsdesk WordPress theme, like for example: MH Custom Posts, MH Custom Pages, MH Posts Grid, MH Recent Posts, MH YouTube, MH Authors, MH Facebook Likebox and more.
How to place the Widgets like in the Theme Demo
If you want to reproduce the same layout as used in the theme demo, please place the widgets under “Appearance => Widgets” in your WordPress dashboard as stated here:
- Home 1: MH Posts Large (Homepage)
- Home 1: MH Posts Grid (Homepage)
- Home 1: Default WordPress Textwidget with Ad
- Home 1: MH Posts List (Homepage)
- Home 2: 2 x MH Custom Posts
- Home 3: 2 x MH Custom Posts
- Home 5: Default WordPress Textwidget with Ad
- Home 5: MH Custom Posts
- Home 5: MH Recent Posts
- Home 5: Default WordPress Textwidget with Ad
- Home 5: MH Custom Posts
- Home 5: Tag Cloud Widget
- Global Sidebar: Default WordPress Textwidget with Ad
- Global Sidebar: MH Facebook Likebox
- Global Sidebar: MH YouTube
- Global Sidebar: MH Custom Posts
- Footer 1: Custom Menu Widget
- Footer 2: MH Recent Posts
- Footer 3: Custom Menu Widget
- Contact: MH Facebook Likebox
- Header Advertisement: Default WordPress Textwidget with Ad
- Post Advertisement (Top): Default WordPress Textwidget with Ad
- Post Advertisement (Bottom): Default WordPress Textwidget with Ad
- Footer Advertisement: Default WordPress Textwidget with Ad
Map of Widget Locations on the “Homepage” Template
Here you can see the locations of the widget areas on the fully widgetized “Homepage” template of MH Newsdesk WordPress Theme:
Images in MH Newsdesk WordPress Theme
Usually WordPress themes have defined their own image dimensions and thumbnail sizes. These thumbnails are automatically generated by WordPress when you upload an image. When you change your WordPress theme, it can happen that the thumbnail requirements of your new theme do not match the sizes of the available thumbnails in your media folder. If that’s the case, your thumbnails won’t look consistent in size and you’ll need to regenerate your thumbnails.
Image dimensions in MH Newsdesk:
- 777 x 437px (Thumbnails for single posts and widgets)
- 180 x 101px (Thumbnails for posts in grid)
- 260 x 146px (Thumbnails for posts list on archives)
- 373 x 210px (Thumbnails for highlighted posts in “MH Custom Posts” widget)
- 120 x 67px (Thumbnails for small posts in “MH Custom Posts” widget)
MH Newsdesk WordPress Theme will use featured images for the thumbnails on archives and in the custom widgets. If you have already uploaded images to your site or added images manually to your posts and if these images don’t appear as thumbnails, please read and follow this: How to use featured images in WordPress.
Additional Features/Options
If you have followed the above mentioned steps of this documenation, you have completed the basic theme setup of MH Newsdesk WordPress Theme. Now you can start creating amazing content or have a look at the other available theme options and use additional theme features as you like. You can access the theme options panel through your WordPress dashboard at “Appearance => Customize => Theme Options”, there you will find these sections:
- General
- Layout (premium)
- Typography (premium)
- Ticker (premium)
General Options
In the “General” options section you’ll find some basic options to upload a favicon, manage excerpts and modify the copyright notice in the footer:
- Modify custom excerpt length in words
- Change custom excerpt more-text
- Change copyright text in footer
Layout Options (premium)
In the “Layout” options section you can easily change the look of your theme and enable/disable several elements with only a few simple clicks. In the layout options section you can find the following options:
- Enable/Disable breadcrumb navigation
- Enable/Disable tags on posts
- Enable/Disable featured image on posts
- Enable/Disable sharing buttons on posts
- Enable/Disable post navigation
- Enable/Disable author box below post content
- Enable/Disable related articles below post content
- Change position of sidebar (left/right)
- Change layout of archives
- Enable/Disable meta data like date, categories and author byline
Typography & Color Options (premium)
You can not only select your favourite font from a collection of most popular Google webfonts in the theme options panel under “Typography”, but you can also easily change the color scheme of your theme with a few simple clicks by using some awesome colorpickers. We have extended the basic color options of WordPress under “Appearance => Customize => Colors” in your WordPress dashboard with some new options to change the colors of your theme. Just check it out and create your favourite color scheme.
Ticker Options (premium)
This dynamic news WordPress theme has included a nice and useful news ticker located below the main navigation where you can display articles from any category or tag. You can manage the news ticker with the following options:
- Enable/Disable news ticker
- Change ticker title
- Set number of posts on ticker
- Filter posts by categories (use category ID)
- Filter posts by tags (use tag slug)
- Skip posts (Offset)
- Ignore sticky posts
Related Articles (premium)
MH Newsdesk WordPress theme has already a built-in box with related articles below the content on posts. These recommendations are based on tags. So if you want to use this feature, please ensure that you have tagged your posts. As soon as tags match, articles will be recommended in the “Related Articles” box.
Social Icons in Header (premium)
To display social icons in the header, you’ll just need to create a custom menu with custom links to your social media channels in your WordPress dashboard under “Appearance => Menus” and assign this menu to the “Social Icons” menu slot. The theme will automatically recognize the social networks based on their URLs and display the specific icons. Currently the following networks are supported: Behance, Dribbble, Facebook, Flickr, Google, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, Soundcloud, Tumblr, Twitter, Vimeo, Xing and YouTube.
Contact Page (premium)
The theme has included a “Contact” page template with an additional sidebar to display a different sidebar on your contact page than on other posts and pages. If you use this template for your contact page, you could for example place the “MH Facebook Likebox” widget and a text widget with your contact details in the “Contact” widget location under “Appearance => Widgets”. MH Newsdesk WordPress Theme also supports the popular “Contact Form 7” plugin to easily create working contact forms with only a few clicks. Please read this to learn more: How to create a working contact page in WordPress.
Font Awesome Icons
MH Newsdesk WordPress Theme has included a collection of over 400 amazing icons by Font Awesome. You can view these icons in detail on the Font Awesome website and use them as you like on your own website to give your content a personal or professional touch. You can easily display the icons by adding the small HTML snippet of the specific icon in the WordPress text editor (not visual), for example a cloud icon:
<i class="fa fa-cloud"></i>
Shortcodes
In case you want to use shortcodes to easily add styled elements like tabs, columns, boxes, accordions or else to your website, we recommend the “Shortcodes Ultimate” plugin. This plugin has included tons of useful shortcodes to easily customize your website. You can find more information and the documentation on the plugin site.
If you want to learn more about WordPress, MH Newsdesk WordPress Theme or want to read additional tutorials, please have a look at our support center.