Getting started

Requirements, installing the theme and News. Core, and the child theme.

1 min read · Updated October 3, 2026

Requirements#

WordPress 6.5 or newer (tested up to 7.1)
PHP 8.0 or newer, with the json, mbstring and zip extensions; sodium is recommended
Memory limit of at least 128 MB (256 MB for the demo import)
Optional: WooCommerce (selling Premium), Elementor, an SEO plugin, a slider plugin

Installation#

Unzip the download. Inside you’ll find news.zip (the theme), news-child.zip, plugins/news-core.zip, this documentation and the licensing files.
Go to Appearance → Themes → Add New → Upload Theme, choose news.zip, install and activate it.
WordPress asks you to install News. Core (required) and a few recommended free plugins. Click Begin installing plugins, or go to News. → Install Plugins.
Register your licence key under News. → Licence, then import a demo under News. → Demo Import (optional).
Work through the setup checklist on News. → Dashboard.

The theme works without News. Core — design, menus, widgets and settings stay — but the newsroom features (story settings, blocks, Premium, WooCommerce, newsletter, accounts, live blog, polls, reviews, podcast, ads server, push, demo import, updates) live in the plugin.

Child theme#

To change templates or add PHP, install and activate news-child.zip after the parent theme. Copy any file from template-parts/ into the child theme (same path) to override it. Settings are shared between parent and child.