GP Newsdesk — how to use your theme

This guide shows where every part of the site is changed. Links open the right screen in your dashboard.

1. Getting started

1. Licence — Newsdesk → Licence: paste the key from your purchase e-mail and press Activate.
2. Setup, step 1 — Newsdesk → Setup → Install and activate. GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks come from WordPress.org, GP Newsdesk from our server.
3. GP Premium — it is sold by GeneratePress, so you install it with your own licence: download gp-premium.zip from your generatepress.com account and use the upload box in step 1.
4. Setup, step 2 — choose Full demo (new site, 15 demo articles) or Layout only (site that already has articles).

Everything the setup creates stays editable. Your previous settings are backed up first, and Remove demo restores them.

2. Logo, site name and icon

Appearance → Customize → Site Identity (open)

• Logo: a light/white logo works best — the header bar is dark. Recommended height 40–60 px, SVG or PNG.
• Site title / tagline: shown when there is no logo, and used by search engines.
• Site icon: the browser tab icon, square 512×512 px.

3. Colours and dark mode

Appearance → Customize → Site Colors (open)

Fonts, font sizes and spacing are GeneratePress settings: Customize → Typography and Customize → Layout.

4. Header, menus and social icons

Category bar (menu)

Appearance → Menus (open). The demo creates these menus:

If the mobile menu opens empty, tick Off Canvas Menu for your main menu.

Social icons, dark-mode button and search

The icons in the header use the same links as the footer Newsdesk: Social links widget: Appearance → Widgets → Footer 4 (open). Leave a field empty to hide that icon. The dark-mode button and search are always shown. The whole row is the Header Social Row Element (Appearance → Elements) — delete it to remove the row.

5. Home page

The home page is a normal page: Pages → Newsdesk Home (open), built with GenerateBlocks. Open it in the block editor and use the List View (≡ icon at the top) — every section has a name (Hero, Section: Growth…).

Made a mess? Insert a fresh copy: block inserter (+) → Patterns → GP Newsdesk → Newsdesk Home.

Which page is the home page: Settings → Reading (open) — Homepage = Newsdesk Home, Posts page = News.

6. Writing an article

1. Featured image (right sidebar): 16:9, at least 1280×720 px. Without one, a neutral cover is used so no layout breaks.
2. Category: the first category is shown as the badge above the title.
3. Article summary (box under the editor): one or two sentences shown under the headline. It is also the excerpt and the meta description.
4. Write the body. Special blocks:
   • Key points box — add a Group block → Styles → Key points, or [nd_keypoints] one point per line [/nd_keypoints].
   • Callout — Group block → Styles → Callout, or [nd_callout]…[/nd_callout].
   • Quote — the normal Quote block is styled automatically.
   • FAQ — [nd_faq]Question | Answer[/nd_faq]; it also adds FAQ markup for search engines.
5. Reading time, dates, share buttons, author box and related stories appear automatically.

7. Article layout (Elements)

What surrounds the article body is built from two GeneratePress Elements: Appearance → Elements (open). Each piece is its own block — click it, delete it, press Update.

• Ad above the title and ad after the second paragraph come from the Leaderboard and In-article ad slots (see Ads).
• Summarize with AI button (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Perplexity) appears above each article.
• Continuous reading: when a reader reaches the end, the next 5 articles load one after another.

8. Authors and the verified badge

Users → Profile (open)

• Display name — the byline.
• Biographical Info — shown in the author box under each article (empty = only the name).
• Profile picture — from Gravatar (gravatar.com) for the user's e-mail.
• Verified author — tick it in the Newsdesk section to show the blue check next to the name.

9. Sidebar

Appearance → Widgets → Right Sidebar (open) — shown on articles and archives.

• Newsdesk: Ad slot — shows the Sidebar ad slot (choose the height).
• Newsdesk: Popular posts — most-commented articles.
• Newsdesk: Latest posts — newest articles.

The last widget in the sidebar stays in view while the reader scrolls — put an ad slot there for a sticky ad.

10. Footer

Copyright line and secondary line: Customize → Layout → Footer (open). The legal links in the bottom strip are the Footer Legal menu.

11. Ads

All ad code is entered in one place: Customize → Ad Slots (open). An empty slot keeps its space with an “Advertisement” placeholder, so adding code later moves nothing.

• Untick Show ad slots to hide every slot and placeholder at once.
• [nd_ad slot="inline"] places a slot anywhere — in a post, a page or an Element.
• Applying for AdSense? Keep the slots empty until you are approved, then paste the code.

12. Pages and legal texts

The demo adds About, Contact, Masthead, Privacy Policy, Terms of Use, Citation & Reuse and Content Complaints (Pages).

These pages contain placeholders such as [Company Name], [Street Address] and example.com. They are public — replace them with your details before launch. The texts are templates, not legal advice.

13. Categories and archives

• Create and rename categories in Posts → Categories. The category Description appears on its archive page.
• Archives show 12 articles per page in two columns. Change the number of columns in Customize → Layout → Blog.
• If you rename a category's slug, update the home page section that uses it (see Home page).

14. SEO and AI search

The theme already prints one H1 per page, meta descriptions, Open Graph tags, canonical URLs and structured data (NewsArticle, BreadcrumbList, FAQ, speakable). If you install Rank Math, Yoast SEO, SEOPress or All in One SEO, the theme's own SEO output steps aside automatically — no duplicates.

15. Language

Settings → General → Site Language. In Turkish the theme's texts switch automatically. For a Turkish home page, insert Patterns → GP Newsdesk → Newsdesk Home (TR). Other languages: translate languages/gp-newsdesk.pot with a tool such as Poedit or Loco Translate.

16. Licence and updates

• Updates for the theme and this plugin appear in Dashboard → Updates while the licence is active.
• Moving to a new domain: on the old site press Deactivate on this site (Newsdesk → Licence), then activate on the new one.
• Local and staging copies (localhost, .local, .test, staging.…) can use the same key without using up your site.
• Without an active licence the site does not open to visitors: they see a “licence required” screen, and an administrator can type the key right there. Setup, settings and updates are paused too. If the licence server cannot be reached, a licensed site keeps working for 7 days.

17. Starting over

Newsdesk → Setup → Remove demo moves the demo pages and articles to the Trash, deletes the demo images and menus, and restores the settings you had before the setup. Then you can run the setup again.

18. Shortcode reference

19. Speed and security tips

• Use your host's page cache (LiteSpeed Cache, WP Super Cache or similar). The theme updates its file versions itself, so caches never serve old styles.
• Upload images at sensible sizes (about 1600 px wide is plenty); WordPress makes the smaller versions.
• In wp-config.php add define( 'DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT', true ); and define( 'GENERATE_HOOKS_DISALLOW_PHP', true ); — the theme needs neither.

20. Troubleshooting

↑ Back to top