Elegant Themes eNews

The ad you sold gets changed by whoever has time

A local business buys a spot on your site. It sends you its banner and a link, and a few weeks later it sends you another one. If every change means opening templates or asking whoever built the site, that income starts to cost more attention than it seems, and the old banner stays up.

On a small publication, selling ads is also a maintenance job, and it pays for anyone to be able to do it from the dashboard. In eNews, the Elegant Themes theme, ad images and their links are managed from option pages inside wp-admin. You change the image, change the address and save, without touching code.

It is a classic theme with a defined scope: logo, featured articles, advertising, page templates and shortcuts for the editor. The rest of this page helps you see whether that scope fits what you publish.

The eNews pieces you will use every day

• Ads: image and target address are edited in the theme options.
• Featured articles: they come from a category you pick in an ePanel dropdown.
• Your own logo: you paste the image address into the Logo field or upload it with the button below.
• Featured images: each post carries its own, assigned at full size.
• Shortcodes: a broad collection, with new buttons in the text editor to insert them.
• Page templates: chosen in the templates dropdown and adjusted in the ET Page Templates Settings box.

Featured items come from a single category

Featured items depend on a single category. This simplifies daily work: to feature an article, you add it to that category, and to remove it, you take the category away. There is nothing else to touch.

The practical decision comes when you create that category. If you use one of your normal sections, for example News, everything you publish there will enter the featured items. A dedicated category, reserved for that role, lets you choose piece by piece what fills that space.

Images come in here too. Upload each photo at a sufficient size and assign it at full size, because WordPress generates the thumbnails from it for the active theme.

Material to adapt the theme to your site

Inside the theme package there are several aids to get started:

• Editable logo: the /psd/ folder brings logo.psd and logo_blank.png as a starting point for yours.
• Translation: the .mo and .po files are in the /lang folder, ready to adapt the theme's text to your language.
• Sample content: sampledata/sample.xml loads dummy content and can also import the ePanel settings.

That content is only filler text, useful to see how the sections are arranged. If you import the sample into a site with real content, you will have to delete it later, so do it on a test install.

Installing eNews and getting the home page ready

It installs like any theme, by uploading the ZIP from the dashboard. From there, this order avoids repeated work:

1. Upload the ZIP in Appearance, Themes, and activate it.
2. If you are coming from another theme, run the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin so your images are cropped to the new sizes.
3. Create the featured category and pick it in the ePanel.
4. Add your logo and load the first ads in the theme options.
5. Check the site on a phone and with your current WordPress version before publishing, because this is a theme from another generation and some menus may have a different name.

Themes for a bigger outlet or free-form design

If you publish a lot every day and need several income streams, JNews is built for digital newspapers, with speed, AMP and monetization options. If your main concern is the article page, Fabula is a magazine theme worth a look. And if you would rather design each template yourself, Divi, from the same house, is theme and builder at once.

Four common questions about eNews

Can I change an ad without touching code?

Yes. The image and its link are edited from the theme's option pages.

Where do the featured articles come from?

From a category you pick under General, Featured Articles, inside the ePanel.

Can I translate the theme?

Yes, with the .mo and .po files in the /lang folder.

Why do my images look wrong after switching themes?

WordPress crops thumbnails for the active theme. Regenerate Thumbnails rebuilds them at the new sizes.