Building a News Site With the JekCMS Trends Theme

After installing the Trends theme, set up your category taxonomy before creating any posts. Trending posts are ranked by fixed view-count thresholds rather than a decaying time curve — a post that crosses the configured "hot" or "viral" threshold gets promoted regardless of exactly how old it is, as long as it's still accumulating views. Posts created before their category has any traffic baseline start at a disadvantage; create all categories first, then import or publish content.

Author Profiles as a First-Class Feature

Author profiles are a first-class feature in Trends. Each author record includes a bio, avatar, specialty tags, and social links, and author pages aggregate all of that author's published content in one place. For news content, readers expect attributed bylines — configure all author profiles before publishing any public content.

How the Trending Algorithm Actually Works

The trending logic lives in get_trending_posts() and is threshold-based, not a mathematical decay curve. Three tunable thresholds decide which tier a post falls into:

• theme_setting('trending.fire_threshold', 500) — the view count that marks a post as gaining momentum
• theme_setting('trending.hot_threshold', 100) — a lower bar for the "hot" tier, useful for smaller sites or new categories that haven't built up traffic yet
• theme_setting('trending.viral_threshold', 1000) — the top tier, reserved for posts that are clearly breaking out

Because these are configurable theme settings rather than hardcoded numbers, you adjust them per site to match your actual traffic volume — a site doing a couple thousand monthly visits and a site doing millions need very different thresholds for "viral" to mean anything.

Setting Up Your Category Taxonomy

News sites require a well-planned category hierarchy before any content is published. A typical news site structure looks like this:

// Category hierarchy example
Politics
 ├── Domestic
 ├── International
 └── Opinion
Technology
 ├── AI & Machine Learning
 ├── Startups
 └── Reviews
Business
 ├── Markets
 ├── Companies
 └── Economy

Create all categories before importing content, and give each category time to accumulate real traffic before you expect its trending tiers to mean much — a threshold-based system needs actual view volume to sort posts meaningfully, the same way a decay-based one would.

Homepage Layout and Content Blocks

The Trends theme homepage is composed of content blocks that pull posts from specific categories:

• Hero block: Displays the top-tier trending post. Uses a full-width featured image with an overlaid headline.
• Category strip: A horizontal row showing recent posts from one category. Multiple strips can be stacked vertically for different categories.
• Sidebar trending: A numbered list of trending posts site-wide, shown in a sidebar widget.
• Latest ticker: A chronological feed of the most recent posts, regardless of trending tier. This keeps fresh content visible even before it crosses a trending threshold.

Google News Submission: What Actually Matters

JekCMS doesn't ship a dedicated per-category RSS feed generator with special query parameters — if you want to submit to Google News or another news aggregator, you build a feed from your posts using standard PHP against the posts table, or point aggregators at your existing XML sitemap where applicable. What actually determines whether Google News accepts your site has little to do with feed format and everything to do with editorial substance:

• Original reporting with clear attribution and sourcing
• A consistent publishing schedule
• Unique, descriptive headlines that accurately represent the article content
• Proper use of article dates — no backdating or future-dating content
• Transparent authorship: real author names with bio pages, not generic bylines

The Trends theme's author profile pages, covered above, directly support that last requirement.

Performance Considerations for High-Volume Publishing

News sites typically publish several articles per day, which creates specific performance demands. A few things that help:

• Keep JekCMS's page cache (PAGE_CACHE_ENABLED) turned on for category and homepage views — it absorbs the bulk of read traffic without touching PHP on every request.
• Featured images go through JekCMS's built-in AVIF→WebP→original fallback pipeline automatically at upload time, so there's no runtime image processing to slow down a traffic spike.
• Trending tier calculations run against view counts already tracked by the platform — there's no separate heavy aggregation step you need to manage.

Together, these mean that even during a spike from breaking coverage, the server stays responsive without manual intervention.