Ready to get started?
Follow along with this guide to get Mission News installed and fully customized on your site. Every step is explained in detail, so you'll have no trouble even if you're new to WordPress.
Table of Contents
- Install Mission News
- Import Demo Data
- Customize Your Menu
- Add Your Logo
- Hide the Search Bar
- Add Your Social Icons
- Add Widgets
- Add Posts to the Sidebars
- Choose posts per page
- Add Featured Images
- Customize Your Post Excerpts
- Change Your Layout
- Customize the Post Byline
- Customize the Author Avatars
- Conclusion
Install Mission News
If you don't have Mission News installed on your site already, this is the first step before you can begin customizing.
Follow this tutorial to learn how to install & activate Mission News on your site:
Tutorial: Install & Activate Mission News
Import the demo site data
Are you launching a brand new site?
Importing the content from the Mission News demo site is a great way to jumpstart your customizations. It can be much easier to customize and tweak the design of the site after you've got some content to work with.
Follow this tutorial to access the demo data download and learn how to import it into your site:
Tutorial: Import the Demo Site Data
Customize Your Menu
By default, the primary menu will contain all of the published Pages on your site, listed in alphabetical order. Mission News has an optional secondary menu as well that will be empty by default.

As you publish new Pages, they will simply be added to the primary menu. However, you can create a custom menu to change this.
With a custom menu, you get full control over which Pages are included, and in what order. In fact, you can even add links to Categories, Posts, or anything else you'd like.
The tutorial below will show you how to:
- create a custom menu
- reorder menu items
- add submenus
- and more...
Tutorial: How to Customize Your Menu
Add Your Logo
When you installed WordPress, you were asked to provide a "site title". That same site title is displayed at the top of your site, in the header.

With Mission News, you can replace the site title with your logo instead. If you don't have a logo, you can skip to the next section. Otherwise, follow this tutorial to learn how to upload, position, and resize your logo:
Tutorial: How to Add Your Logo
Note: You can edit your site title any time from the General Settings menu, or in the "Site Identity" section in the Customizer
Hide the Search Bar
Mission News includes a search bar button left of the secondary menu in the header:

When the magnifying glass icon is clicked, a search bar will show up that visitors can use to search your site's content. This is handy for larger sites, but if you don't feel you need a search bar it can easily be hidden.
Follow this tutorial to learn how to hide the search bar:
Tutorial: How to Hide the Search Bar
Add Your Social Icons
There are two types of social icons:
- Icons that link to your profile
- Icons/buttons that share your content
Most themes, including Mission News, have a way to add social icons that link to your social profiles. This provides a stylish way to link to your profiles, so your visitors can find and follow you on your social networks. These icons are usually included in the header or in a widget.

Social sharing icons/buttons are added to make it easier to share your content. They are typically added with plugins, like Simple Share Buttons Adder . These icons are usually included before and/or after Post content.
As mentioned, Mission News provides a simple way to add icons in the header linking to your social profiles. Follow this tutorial to add yours:
Tutorial: How to Add Your Social Icons
Add Posts to the Sidebars
In the Mission News live demo site, you can see lists of posts added stylishly to the sidebars.

Mission News comes with a special widget called Recent Posts Extended. It's similar to the default Recent Posts widget, but with it, you can choose between multiple styles, included Featured Images and bylines, and more.
Learn all about the Recent Posts Extended widget in the following tutorial:
Tutorial: How to Use the Recent Posts Extended Widget
Add Widgets
Widgets can be used to add any type of content you want to your site. WordPress includes a handful of default widgets, such as categories, most recent posts, and tags. However, there are thousands of other widgets available.
You can add any type of content imaginable with widgets, like Youtube videos, weather forecasts, product reviews, tweets, and more.
Note: widgets are added to your site as "plugins". You can add new widgets through the Plugins menu in your dashboard.
In order to add a widget to your site, it has to be placed into a "widgetized" area. Mission News has seven of these widget areas:
- Left Sidebar
- Right Sidebar
- Ad Spot - Below Header
- Ad Spot - After First Post
- Ad Spot - Above Post
- Ad Spot - After Post Content
- Ad Spot - After Page Content

Follow this tutorial to learn how to add widgets to Mission News:
Tutorial: How to Customize Your Sidebar
Choose Posts Per Page
When customizing the blog, you may want to change how many posts are displayed per page on your blog. This option is set to 10 by default, but can be increased or decreased from the settings menu.
Follow this tutorial to learn how to change the post count per page on the blog:
Tutorial: How to Change the Number of Posts on Your Front Page
Add Featured Images
In WordPress, every Post and Page can have a Featured Image. It's simply a way of assigning one image as the primary image for the Post/Page.
Mission News places Featured Images neatly above the Post titles on the Blog and Post pages.

If you'd like to add Featured Images to your Posts, follow this tutorial:
Tutorial: How to Add Featured Images
Customize Your Post Excerpts
When you first install WordPress, all of your Posts will show on the homepage. The page with your Posts can also be referred to as the Blog or Posts Page.
With Mission News, each Post on the Blog will include a 30 word excerpt using the first 30 words in the Post.

Mission News gives you a lot of control over what text you want shown in the excerpts. To learn how to fully customize your Post excerpts, check out this tutorial:
Tutorial: How to Customize Post Excerpts
Change Your Layout
You can customize the layout of the posts on the blog page and also the layout on individual post pages.
To learn how to customize blog and post layouts, follow this tutorial:
Note: on mobile devices, Mission News uses a single-column layout, so the sidebar will always be included after the main content.
Tutorial: How to Change Layouts
Show/Hide Site Elements
Mission News has a lot of content and design elements included by default, but you can hide many of them via the Customizer. For instance, you can hide the post author name and dates, the category and tag links after posts, and more.
Tutorial: How to Show/Hide Elements
Customize the Author Avatars
Mission News displays avatars for the post authors along with their bios after every post.

If your authors are already using Gravatar, the images will display automatically. If not, you can signup for Gravatar or follow the tutorial below for additional options.
Tutorial: How to Customize Author Avatars
Conclusion
You're finished customizing Mission News!
If there's anything else you want to change about your site that wasn't covered, check for an article about it in the sidebar to the left.
Visit our WordPress Resources page to find awesome plugins and tools we recommend, and if you want to try using CSS to customize Mission News, we've got some pre-written snippets for you to get started with in the Mission News CSS Snippets Collection.