Newspaper is the fourteenth theme in the package: a breaking bar, a market and weather strip, and video, photo gallery, infographic and columnist sections. The same releases changed the update pipeline: the site probes itself after an update and restores the backup if a server error persists.
Two things shipped in September: the Newspaper theme for news sites, and a version of the update pipeline that verifies its own work. Both arrived with fixes found while running on real customer installations. Below is what changed and where to look for it in the panel.
The Newspaper theme
Newspaper is the fourteenth theme in the package. It differs from the blog themes in one way: the homepage is built around a news feed.
Under the header there is a breaking bar with timestamps. It is fed by the stories you mark as breaking and ends with a link to everything else. The info strip below it shows currency, gold, silver and crypto rates, the weather for the visitor's location and prayer times. Rates come from free sources that need no key, and prayer times are calculated on your own server, so nothing depends on a paid service. Rates that do not fit the screen are hidden from the end rather than cut in half.
The homepage sections are a slider hero with a numbered strip, social video, category blocks, most-read, a dual-category list, a dark photo-focus panel, an infographic strip, a columnist carousel and a daily horoscope strip. Each one is turned on and off in Appearance → Customize, where you also set its order, its source and how many stories it shows.
The header was built for sites with many categories. The logo sits on its own row, the menu takes the full page width, and categories that do not fit move into a More dropdown. The article page carries an editor bar with the author, their job title, the publish and update times, reading time, share buttons and A-/A+ text sizing.
Choosing a story's section from the editor
The video, photo gallery and infographic sections are fed by tags. Remembering tag names takes time, so the editor now has a Story type box: Standard, Video story, Photo gallery, Infographic, Breaking. The tag for the type you pick is added on save and the other type tags are removed.
The Themes screen and the dashboard also carry a short guide: where the active theme pulls each section's content from.
The Astrology plugin
The plugin publishes a daily horoscope for all twelve signs and builds the /burc and /burc/{sign} pages plus the homepage strip. Entries come from a free source, are translated with your site's AI key on Turkish sites, and can be edited day by day in the panel. On a day with no entry, the most recent one is shown with its date.
Post-update self-check and automatic rollback
A customer got a server error in the panel after updating. Four things changed in the update pipeline after that case.
A lock is placed on the site while files are copied. Visitors get a short self-refreshing notice instead of a half-updated page, and the administrator who started the update keeps working in their own session.
Once the files are in place the site probes itself over HTTP. It fetches the admin login page and the homepage, and waits out the period in which a server can still run an older compiled copy of a file.
If a server error persists, the backup taken before the update is restored. The site keeps running on the previous version, that release is held back, and the nightly auto-update does not retry it. The last line of the error log is shown in the panel and reported to the update server.
An Error log page was added under Updates. You copy the last lines of the application, PHP and update logs with one click, so diagnosing a server error or handing it to support no longer requires a hosting file manager. The licence heartbeat now also carries the last logged exception, the error count for the last twenty-four hours and the OPcache configuration.
Corporate and legal links in the footer
Themes printed the About, Contact, Privacy Policy and Terms links at fixed English addresses. On a Turkish site those addresses only worked through a redirect, and a concept without a page stayed a dead link. In all fourteen themes those links now point at the page your site actually publishes, with the page's own title and address; a concept without a page is not printed. A check was added to the release gate: every footer link in every theme is fetched, and a 404 or a redirect chain blocks the release.
The Newspaper footer no longer prints the same address twice. If you assign a menu to the Footer position in Menus, the pages column comes from that menu. The footer customizer preselects the theme's own template and offers a Restore theme default button.
Three fixes for shared hosting
On Plesk and cPanel servers with an open_basedir restriction, the Themes page looked for a shared theme folder two levels above the installation. The restricted server warned about that lookup, the warning became an exception and the page closed with a server error. The lookup now only runs in the multi-site layout; a customer installation never looks above its own folder.
Password hashing failed on PHP builds that use libsodium for Argon2. Hashing was reduced to a single thread, security comes from the memory and time cost, and bcrypt is used where Argon2 is unavailable.
The Themes page opened its own database connection without the configured port and broke on servers that do not listen on 3306. The page now uses the core connection.
A check that runs the whole admin panel under an open_basedir restriction was added to the release gate.
The itemised list is in the release notes. If you run a news site, Newspaper is already in your package: preview and activate it from Appearance → Themes. The customizer keeps the settings of the theme you leave.
