VIA WORDPRESS ADMIN

• From your sites admin, go to Themes > Install Themes.
• In the search box, type ‘Giornalismo’ and press enter.
• Locate the entry for ‘Giornalismo’ (there should be only one) and click the ‘Install’ link.
• When installation is finished, click the ‘Activate’ link.

MANUAL INSTALL

• Download the file from the theme page.
• Unzip the file.
• Using an FTP client (I recommend FireZilla), upload the ‘giornalismo’ file to your WordPress theme folder. Make sure the file you upload simply says ‘Giornalismo’ with no numbers after it. Otherwise, it won’t work.
• Go into your WordPress Admin, navigate to ‘Appearance > Themes’.
• Find the Giornalismo listing on this page and click ‘Activate’.

MENUS

Giornalismo comes with up to two menus for your liking. The main menu is always displayed between the header section and the main body of each page. The top menu is optional and can be set to be shown in the WordPress Customizer under the “General Settings” tab.

CUSTOM HEADER

While the suggested practice is to let the header be the site title and description, there is the option to upload a custom header image. To upload the image, go to Appearance->Header in the WordPress admin area. For the best display, header images should be 530px by 150px.

FEATURED PHOTOS

This theme relies a lot on featured photos and it is recommended that each post comes with a featured photo. The optimal size for featured photos is 735px by 440px.

CUSTOMIZABLE HOMEPAGE

Giornalismo leaves a number of options open to users, including the homepage. Users can completely customize what posts show up in the homepage and where they show up. Each column can either display posts from a category or the latest posts in order and each column can show a different number of posts. Users can also select which category shows up in the top story slot at the top. All of these options can be found in the WordPress Customizer under the “Homepage Options” tab.

SIDEBARS

There are a couple of different options when it comes to the sidebars. There’s the generic right sidebar layout, then there’s the left sidebar layout and finally there’s the two sidebar layout. It is important to note that if the two sidebar layout is in use, the third column on the home page will not appear.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

One of the best features your readers will enjoy is the story highlights feature. Shown at the top of the post right underneath the post meta, you can enter up to three key points for each story. This will highlight the most important parts of the story so the reader knows what’s going on. To implement this feature, install the “Giornalismo Story Details” plugin (see the How To’s section).

POST DETAILS

In addition to the story highlights, Giornalismo also has spots for a photo credit and caption for featured photos and a spot to place an embedded video in place of a featured photo. Like the story highlights, you will need to install the “Giornalismo Story Details” plugin. To make the YouTube embed work, on the YouTube video you want to embed, click share, embed and copy the source link. Make sure the url has the “/embed/” in the middle of it.

RELATED STORIES/LATEST STORIES

Want the readers to be able to dig deeper into your content without adding another plugin? Giornalismo has that covered. The theme has the ability to show related stories and latest stories from a category on the single post view. To implement these features, select the respective checkboxes in the “General Settings” tab of the WordPress Customizer.

STAFF PAGE

Giornalismo also has a special staff page template to show off your staff of however many peope you have. To create this page, add a new page and select “Staff” in the template dropdown menu.

HEADER ADS

There is a spot in the upper right hand side of the header for a widget area. This spot is recommended for ads if you wish. To implement this feature, see the “Header Ads” How To section.

BREAKING NEWS

Giornalismo also comes with built-in support for the “JM Breaking News” plugin. Simply install the plugin (details in the How To’s section), and create a new breaking news post and set a time limit. The banner will show up without having to add any code.

BREADCRUMBS

Let your readers know where they are on your site with breadcrumbs at the top of the page. Click the checkbox in the “General Settings” tab of the WordPress Customizer to implement this feature.

SOCIAL LINKS

Social media is everything these days and Giornalismo makes it easy to display links to your social media pages. Just enter your links in the respective text boxes in the “Social Options” section in the WordPress Customizer and the links will automatically show in the header. The theme currently supports Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and RSS feed options with more social media sites to come down the road.

EDITOR STYLES

Also, with Giornalismo you’ll know exactly how your theme is going to look from the font to the link color to blockquotes and tables. Everything will be styled in the editor exactly as it will be on the page.

AUTHOR DETAILS

Lastly, allow your writers to talk about and promote themselves. Giornalismo has support for author bios, photos and social media links at the bottom of each post as well as on the staff page template. Install the “Extra User Details” and follow the directions in the “Author Details” part of the How To’s section.

SETTING UP THE GIORNALISMO STORY DETAILS PLUGIN

• In the WordPress Dashboard, go to Plugins->Add New.
• Search for “Giornalismo Story Details” and install and activate the plugin.
• In the post editor screen, the write panel should show up below the editor.
• For the YouTube video field, the link must be from the URL bar at the top of the browser. Please note that this is different than what is said in the tutorial video above.

SETTING UP THE JM BREAKING NEWS PLUGIN

• In the WordPress Dashboard, go to Plugins->Add New.
• Search for “JM Breaking News” and install and activate the plugin.
• Add a new breaking news post. The title is the text that will be on the banner. Add the link if there is one, determine if the link should open in a new window and set a time length for the banner to show on the site.

SETTING UP THE SIMPLE ADS MANAGER

• In the WordPress Dashboard, go to Plugins->Add New.
• Search for “Simple Ads Manager” and install and activate the plugin.
• Create a new ad place and enter a custom height and width. The height and width needs to be 340px by 100px.
• After saving the place, click “Ad Places” on the left, then hover over the ad and click “New Ad”.
• Then either upload an image or input code and save.
• Then go to the “Widgets” section, add the “Ads Place” widget to the “Header Right” sidebar and select the ad place. The ad(s) should then show up in the header.

SETTING UP THE EXTRA USER DETAILS PLUGIN

• In the WordPress Dashboard, go to Plugins->Add New.
• Search for “Extra User Details” and install and activate the plugin.
• Go to Users->Extra User Details to add the extra fields.
• The field name can be anything you want it, but you must use the following meta keys for it to work: facebook, twitter-link, twitter-handle, google-plus and author-position.
• The fields will show up on the author’s profile page in the admin and the links will show up in the author bios on the front end once they are filled out.

SETTING UP THE CATEGORY COLOR PLUGIN

• In the WordPress Dashboard, go to Plugins->Add New.
• Search for “Category” and install and activate the plugin.
• Go to Posts->Categories and click on the category you want to edit.
• Select a color for the category. Be sure to have wp_debug set to “false” to avoid errors being printed on the site.
• The color currently only shows up on the home page.

SETTING UP A CHILD THEME

When customizing a theme, the best practice is to create a child theme. This way, when you update the parent theme, all of your changes will still remain intact. Creating a child theme is very simple if you use the steps below.

• Using your preferred FTP client, navigate to the “themes” directy inside the “wp-content” directory and create a directory titled “giornalismo-child”.
• Once there, create a style.css file and add the following lines of code in there and save.

  /*
  Theme Name: Giornalimso Child
  Description: Child theme for Giornalismo theme
  Author: Giornalismo
  Template: giornalismo
  */

• Then create a functions.php file and add the following code and save.

  <?php function giornalismo_child_theme_styles() {
  wp_enqueue_style( 'main_css', get_stylesheet_uri() );
  }
  add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'giornalismo_child_theme_styles', 10 ); ?>

• Any template files, such as header.php or single.php, in this directory will override the parent template files. Any style changes will also override the parent theme.

1.3.2

• Fixed: Issue with email button sending readers to a URL instead of opening up an email.

1.3.1

• Fixed: Issue with gravatars not showing up on single posts.

1.3

• Added red, blue, green and purple color schemes to be selected from the customizer.
• Added single post navigation that can be toggled on and off in the customizer.
• Made the body text of tables white to help with readability issues.
• Made the height of all images ‘auto’.
• Tested with WordPress 4.6.

1.2.2

• Added code to first column to let the user control whether the byline and number of comments are displayed.

1.2.1

• Fixed: Syntax error that caused the second column on the homepage to display incorrectly.

1.2

• Added theme options to allow the user to control whether the author’s byline and number of comments are shown.
• Made date translatable and allows the user to change the format of the date using the date_format option.
• Wrapped custom functions in ‘if (function_exists())’ to make it easier to customize with child theme.
• Tested with WordPress 4.5.

1.1

• Styled tags
• Added support for the Category Color plugin
• Tested with WordPress 4.4

1.0.4

• Fixed: Changed header_image() to get_header_image() in functions.php to fix issue with the header image URL incorrectly outputting to the screen instead of the image itself.

1.0.3

• Initial release to the WordPress Theme Directory

GNU General Public License
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

PHOTO LICENSE

Except where otherwise noted, all photos in the screenshot are also licensed under the GNU General Public License. Copyright 2015 Jacob Martella