Newspaper by tagDiv is one of the current most popular WordPress themes. Like the name suggests, this theme is aimed at WordPress-based sites with the news concept. However, this theme has an extensive use because it is flexible enough. The developer of this theme provides users a components called tagDiv Composer which you can use to build a page. Mastering TagDiv Composer is the key to use Newspaper theme.
Newspaper itself is a premium theme. You can get this theme by $59. There are some crucial things you need to know first before buying this theme.
The way Newspaper works is a bit different to other WordPress themes. Once you have installed it, you will have a new additional panel inside your WordPress dashboard. This panel hosts all settings you can apply to the theme itself. Here are two crucial things you need to know before you buy the Newspaper theme on ThemeForest.
1. Newspaper requires larger RAM to work
The first crucial thing you need to know before buying the Newspaper theme by tagDiv is reading the system requirements. You need to read it to make sure that the system configurations on your server meet the requirements of this theme. The developer of this theme has provided an informative enough page to figure out the system requirements, yet not all users might have read it.
One of the crucial requirements is regarding the memory limit. Newspaper requires larger memory than the vast majority of WordPress themes to work. You might won’t be able to install this theme via the WordPress dashboard with the default WordPress configuration. Even if you install this theme manually via FTP, you would still face a problem once you activated it. You won’t be able to login to your WordPress dashboard. To fix this problem, you can increase the memory limit of WordPress by editing the wp-config.php file.
The recommended memory limit by Newspaper is 96MB, while WordPress allocates only 64MB. Therefore, you need to increase the memory limit before installing Newspaper theme.
2. You need to change your homepage display
As mentioned earlier, the way Newspaper works is a bit different to other WordPress themes you might ever used. Most WordPress themes don’t require you to change the homepage display. They will display your latest posts on the homepage according to the layout they offer.
It takes a little efforts before you get a beautiful interface as you expected before buying the Newspaper theme. You can use the tagDiv Composer to set the layout of your homepage. tagDiv offers great video tutorials on how to use tagDiv Composer, yet no one tells you to change your homepage display once you are done creating a page using tagDiv Composer.
To access the tagDiv Composer, you can create a new page (once again, page not post) on your WordPress dashboard. You will see a tagDiv Composer button on the WordPress editor.
Simply click this button and you will be taken to the tagDiv Composer dashboard where you can add the elements you want.
Here is the crucial thing. Once you are done working with tagDiv Composer to set the layout of your homepage, you need to go to the WordPress Settings menu to set the homepage display. You need to set the homepage display from “Your latest posts” to “A static page”.
To do so, click the Settings menu and select Reading.
On the Your homepage displays section, change the default setting (Your latest posts) to “A static page” and select a page you have created using tagDiv Composer. Don’t forget to save the changes.
While you can set the homepage layout yourself, Newspaper offers ready-to-use layouts (called demo) which you can install via the theme panel. However, you might will have the precisely the same homepage layout with someone else who use Newspaper as well. Something you definitely don’t want to to happen.