After installing the Trends theme, set up your category taxonomy before creating any posts. The trending algorithm weights content within categories by relative recency — a post published three hours ago ranks higher than one published yesterday within the same category, adjusted for view velocity. 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, social links, and an automatically calculated trending score based on their recent posts' performance. Author pages aggregate their content and display their trending score relative to other authors on the site. For news content, readers expect attributed bylines — configure all author profiles before publishing any public content.

Per-Category RSS Feeds

RSS feeds are generated per-category automatically. The URL pattern is /feed.xml?category=[slug]. These feeds are suitable for submission to news aggregators. To qualify for Google News inclusion, your site must meet additional editorial standards (original reporting, clear authorship, publication schedule) documented in Google's publisher guidelines. Configure feed metadata — site name, language, rights statement — in Settings › RSS before submission.

Trending Score Decay Rate

The trending score decays on a time curve defined in config/trending.php. The default half-life is 24 hours, meaning a post that scores 100 at its peak will score approximately 50 after one day and 25 after two days, assuming no new traffic. You can adjust the decay rate per-category — breaking news categories typically use a faster decay, while evergreen reference content uses a slower one.

Setting Up Your Category Taxonomy

News sites require a well-planned category hierarchy before any content is published. The Trends theme supports up to three levels of nesting. 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

Each top-level category gets its own section on the homepage with a trending sidebar. Create all categories before importing content — the trending algorithm needs at least 5 posts per category to calculate meaningful scores. Categories with fewer posts show raw chronological order instead of trending order.

Category-Specific Trending Configuration

Different content types decay at different rates. Configure this per-category in the admin panel under Settings > Trending:

  • Breaking news (half-life: 6 hours): Content loses relevance quickly. Yesterday's breaking story should not compete with today's.
  • Analysis and opinion (half-life: 48 hours): Thoughtful pieces remain relevant longer and accumulate reads over several days.
  • Guides and evergreen content (half-life: 168 hours): Reference material should persist in trending sections for a full week if it maintains reader interest.

Homepage Layout and Content Blocks

The Trends theme homepage is composed of configurable content blocks. Each block pulls posts from a specific category with its own display style:

  • Hero block: Displays the single highest-trending post across all categories. Uses a full-width featured image with overlaid headline. Refreshes every 15 minutes based on trending score recalculation.
  • Category strip: A horizontal row showing the top 4 posts from one category. Multiple strips can be stacked vertically for different categories.
  • Sidebar trending: A numbered list of the top 10 trending posts site-wide, shown in a sticky sidebar widget that follows the reader as they scroll.
  • Latest ticker: A chronological feed of the most recent 20 posts, regardless of trending score. This ensures fresh content is always visible even if it has not yet accumulated enough views to trend.

RSS Feeds and Google News Submission

Feed Configuration

Configure feed metadata in Settings > RSS before submitting to any aggregator. Required fields include site name, language code, copyright statement, and managing editor email. The feed outputs Atom 1.0 format by default, with optional RSS 2.0 available at /feed.xml?format=rss2. Each feed includes the full post content (not just excerpts) and properly formatted author attribution — both requirements for Google News acceptance.

Google News Publisher Requirements

  • Original reporting with clear attribution and sourcing
  • Consistent publishing schedule (at least 3 articles per day for news sites)
  • 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

Performance Considerations for High-Volume Publishing

News sites typically publish 10-50 articles per day, which creates specific performance demands. The Trends theme addresses these with several built-in optimisations:

  • Trending scores are recalculated in batch every 15 minutes via a background process, not on every page load
  • Homepage content blocks are cached independently — updating one category does not invalidate the entire page cache
  • RSS feeds are cached for 5 minutes to prevent excessive database queries from feed readers polling every minute
  • Author pages use query-level caching to avoid expensive JOIN operations on high-traffic author profiles
  • Image thumbnails are pre-generated at upload time in three sizes (400px, 800px, 1600px) to eliminate runtime image processing

These optimisations together ensure that even during traffic spikes from breaking news coverage, the server remains responsive without requiring manual intervention.