The Ideal Magazine-style Theme

I’ll keep this one simple: What do you look for in a magazine-style theme design?

Thus far, I’ve released four themes, three of which are specifically targeted at start-up news/magazine sites. Based on the demand, I’d think it’s fair to say that we are making things that you like. Tubular blogs always seemed boring to me, which is one of the reasons that GPP puts all this effort into magazine themes. Our next theme design, which is currently being worked on in the shop, is looking pretty cool. It includes a minimal five-post column display below the four main AJAXed posts with room at the right for ads. Here is a peek:
demo screenshot

10 responses to “The Ideal Magazine-style Theme”

  1. Essie Webber Avatar

    I love it! Any ideas on a release date yet?

    Essie

  2. Essie Webber Avatar

    I love it! Any ideas on a release date yet?

    Essie

  3. Jeff Namnum Avatar

    This looks great so far. I’m glad to see you’re incorporating advertising.

    The main thing I’d suggest adding is a spot for Video posts, it’s certainly something I’m looking for as I put together my new site.

    btw, in looking at your gridline themes, wow. Just a nice use of the photos to pop the eye from place to place. Good luck and I hope demand stays strong for them.

  4. Steven Eng Avatar

    Tubular blogs does have one distinct advantage though – you don’t have to use custom fields to come up with a thumbnail of the image you posted in the article. Can your theme auto-generate a thumbnail for the main page using a find/replace line of code, something along:

    “”

    notice that wordpress automatically creates a thumbnail version of an image.jpg with thumbnail.image.jpg, that’s what line of code can do.

    I was also told that CSS can be used to downsize the full-sized image to 100% width of the container image instead.

    Any of this built into your themes would be extremely helpful and would pull me away from tubuluar themes and into Gridline immediately!

  5. Steven Eng Avatar

    Tubular blogs does have one distinct advantage though – you don’t have to use custom fields to come up with a thumbnail of the image you posted in the article. Can your theme auto-generate a thumbnail for the main page using a find/replace line of code, something along:

    “”

    notice that wordpress automatically creates a thumbnail version of an image.jpg with thumbnail.image.jpg, that’s what line of code can do.

    I was also told that CSS can be used to downsize the full-sized image to 100% width of the container image instead.

    Any of this built into your themes would be extremely helpful and would pull me away from tubuluar themes and into Gridline immediately!

  6. admin Avatar
    admin

    It all comes down to values:

    Do you value having all media in separate database tables?
    You can do some really fun things if you put your images/thumbnails in custom fields. If all your images are in the post, than your photos and text cannot be separated for design requirements.

    Do you want computers automatically cropping your images?
    I work with a CMS that automatically crops images into thumbnails. It is terrible for presentation and for photographers. Computer don’t know the difference from a belt to a face. The most horrific crops show up on our site.

    Do you want fast page load times?
    Using CSS to downsize images is a solution, but, it can dramatically increase page load time.

  7. dolies Avatar

    I love it…sure its very nice

  8. dolies Avatar

    I love it…sure its very nice

  9. trimi Avatar

    I did a magazine style wordpress theme by my self. I did it for my custome needs and i think it came up vew well. You can preview spiun.com

  10. trimi Avatar

    I did a magazine style wordpress theme by my self. I did it for my custome needs and i think it came up vew well. You can preview spiun.com

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