01_09_2008

7879 New Magazine Theme in Development

Scrawled by Ian | Design News

A question that’s be on my mind recently is why is the content of some excellently designed offline magazines (you know the one’s you actually have to hold in your hands) so very boring in their online versions?

It’s never designed, it’s typography is non-existent, it just sits in a narrow column, squeezed by screen clutter, broken up by the occasional image (that never fits the column). Online content is no longer king. It’s be dethroned by usability and findability, by adverts and chicklets.

So I’ve been looking at ways to present online content in a creative and interesting format.

Ways to break out of such a restrictive grid layout and into something that allows designers and publishers more freedom.

And most importantly, ways that put the content back at the heart of a WordPress site.

With this in mind, over the next few weeks I’ll be completing the development of a new “magazine” style WordPress Theme.

The Theme will have some support for multi-column layout (OK, Mozilla, IE6 and IE7 only) and have built in CSS hooks to enable users to quickly and easily change the way content is laid out on screen.

SiFR will be built in to produce more attractive screen typography whilst maintaining flexibility and accessibilty.

The Theme will also support custom style sheet uploads to individual Posts and Pages giving publishers even more control over how Posts and Pages are displayed on screen.

And the Theme will, in addition to a standard blog chronological publishing model, support an “Edition” model of publishing - enabling you to organize Posts into a single edition of your magazine, published when you choose to publish it.

Most importantly, this Theme will be released under the Creative Commons licence for free.

It’s something I’m passionate about and this Theme is something that I’m getting quite excited about so please check back in a few weeks when the Theme will be ready to downlaod.

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Number of Comments: 3 Comments so far.

  1. Samuel Diamond wrote on the 26_09_2008

    I am hoping that your theme comes out good. If I can add a couple of things that I feel would make your theme great.

    1. If you can make a widget-free theme. The best magazine themes aren’t widget free, and the ones with the most freedom, are really empty.

    2. If there is a slideshow/ headline feature, that it can rotate, can be randomized, and easily be posted ( like the Options theme ). Other magazine themes have to be polished with code to change categories, instead of just using tags. Using tags to showcase things on the front page are amazing ( such as “main headline”, “side headline” etc.). Using categories may interrupt with the total navigation of the site.

    3. If the theme uses photos, that the parameter isn’t set in stone. Some themes are rigid with images. I used one where if it wasn’t measured exactly at 310X67 that it wasn’t going to work. This hurts because I use images a lot and change my page a lot, and have to go re-size in photoshop for an hour. If there is a way that it just cuts out the rest of the image, or crops it, that would make a killer theme. Also, if it can snatch an image from a post or use a key in the custom field, that’d be nice.

    4. The custom style sheets: I was wondering if it could be added to categories and tags as well. I write articles weekly ( such as the “Weekly rant” ) and I would like all of my weekly rant posts ( which is in the category weekly rant as well as the tag ) to be using a custom sheet.

    5. Custom navigation. Is it possible you can make a sequence where you can pick your own navigation? Where I can choose a drop-down method, or I can choose a horizontal method ( where the category is highlighted and the sub-categories are shown horizontally ).

    I know this was asking a lot. I’m not expecting anything. Just seeing if these ideas would show the struggles of finding the best magazine cms module. I have even used revolution and mimbo pro, and they seem to fall a little in one are or another.

  2. Samuel Diamond wrote on the 26_09_2008

    I will say I am psyched to see your customization of posts. That is something that is missing that can give flavor to a lot of sites. Wordpress becoming a true CMS is getting closer everyday.

  3. admin wrote on the 26_09_2008

    Hi Samual,

    Thanks for the comments and the suggestions.

    I’ll try to integrate as much as I can into the Theme but the most important feature - in my mind at least - is that the content (I’m a little old fashioned and still mostly think of content as text and images rather than podcast/video etc) is at the heart of the theme.

    I don’t think that it will be quite as flexible as the Options theme but I should offer a canvas for those with some CSS knowledge to create some nice looking pages.

    I hope :)

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