Get started

Open JormunTL → Get Started in your WordPress admin. It tracks these steps for you and ticks them off as you go. This page is the same list with the reasoning attached.

1. Install the companion plugins

The theme ships with its plugins inside it, so there is nothing to download. Go to JormunTL → Install Plugins and install them from there.

Core is not optional. It is what registers novels, chapters and genres as content types. Until it is active the theme has nothing to show, and a fresh site looks broken rather than empty. Commerce, Transfer and the EPUB Importer can wait until you need them.

2. Turn on pretty permalinks

Settings → Permalinks, and choose anything other than Plain. Novels and chapters need real URLs; on Plain they do not resolve at all.

3. Set up email delivery

Do this before you open the site to readers, not after. WordPress sends mail straight from your web server, which has no sending reputation, so Gmail and Outlook routinely bin it. That silently breaks two things that matter: a reader who pays and never gets a receipt, and a reader who cannot reset their password and is locked out for good.

Install an SMTP plugin (FluentSMTP or WP Mail SMTP), point it at a real sending service rather than a personal mailbox, then confirm it with the Send test email button in Theme Options → Accounts & Readers → Email Delivery. The full version of this, including which services have usable free tiers and why SPF and DKIM matter, is in Email delivery.

One trap worth naming: on a local setup such as Laragon, XAMPP or LocalWP, outgoing mail is usually caught by a local trap. The test will report success and nothing will ever leave your machine. Test on the real host.

4. Activate your licence

JormunTL → License. This is what gets you automatic updates and support. The theme keeps working either way, so this does not block you, but an unactivated site stops receiving fixes.

5. Check the two pages that were created for you

Activating the theme creates a Dashboard page, where readers find their library, history and notifications, and a Wallet page, where they buy coins. Both should already exist. If either is missing, re-activate the theme under Appearance → Themes and it will be recreated.

6. If you are selling chapters

Two more steps, both under Monetization: name your currency, and configure at least one payment gateway. Leave both until the rest of the site works. Set the gateway to test mode and buy something yourself before you let a reader anywhere near it.

If you are not charging for anything yet, skip this entirely. Nothing else on the site depends on it.

Once it runs

The checklist above gets you a working install. Turning it into a site is the next job, roughly in this order:

• Set your logo, site title and container width.
• Add your genres and statuses before adding novels, so you are not retrofitting them onto fifty titles later.
• Add a few novels and chapters, with cover art. Tall portrait covers work best.
• Build the homepage from sections, then look at a novel page and a chapter page on both a desktop and a phone.

Usage and customization covers all of that in detail, and there is a full launch checklist at the end of it.

Before you go live

One thing that is easy to get wrong and expensive to discover late: JormunTL decides chapter access per reader, at the moment the page is rendered. Put a full-page cache in front of that and it stores whatever the first visitor saw and serves it to everyone, so a chapter one reader paid to unlock is handed free to the next logged-out visitor. It looks like the theme working normally, and you find out from your revenue.

Hosting recommendations explains what to exclude, and is worth reading before you choose a host rather than after.