I’ve added this theme to four blogs including this blog. It’s a nice looking theme and here’s what I’ve noticed.
The Good
- You can see lots of articles on the front page and it isn’t cluttered.
- Front page automatically adds a picture from each post.
- It has many different formats for each post (Standard, Aside, Audio, Gallery, Image, Link, Video). This has bearing on how the individual post looks as well as the front page excerpt.
- The custom menus allows you to micromanage pages and categories. Even sub pages and sub categories.
The Bad
- There’s an extra step when adding a category or page to the navigation in the header. You have to keep pages and categories in a custom menu which must be updated separately. This isn’t all that bad because the flexibility is quite a strong point. You can still list your pages or categories with a widget in the sidebar of course. This is barely a bad point by the way.
The Ugly
- When you view a post, the Categories and Tags are not always shown. They show for this blog but not for Siteware, EndlessLift or Mambohead.
- Pagination (paging) doesn’t work properly. Off the main page you can can click the “next” button (at the bottom). It works the first time but if you use it again you’re returned to the home page. This blocks access to the older posts. You can observe this issue at EndlessLift (until I either fix it or find another them). You can also observe the issue at this site but there aren’t as many articles to require much pagination. Same issue occurs when you are doing next within a category.
- Paging issues will damage SEO (Search Engine Optimization) since the crawlers are going to get stuck in a loop and may not see all your content. I didn’t study it too deeply but it might create some bogus duplicate URLs leading to the same content.
Magazine Basic Verdict
In this case the ugly wins. The problems are too serious for me to recommend the theme.
I went into the forum and found other people are having the same problem. One said they paid 35.00 hoping for better support but nothing happened. I sent a note to the maker through Twitter. Hopefully they get back to me. I found their Twitter address an an article on pagination they wrote. I noticed some more chatter about it. A mention of a paging plugin but it didn’t work when I installed it.
Magazine Basic Theme Pagination Problems
I found this fix. I’m just trying it and will report back.
Small bug fix in functions.php. Go to this line and delete it:
$pagination['add_args'] = array( ‘pw_post_layout’ => get_query_var( ‘pw_post_layout’ )
This may be working. I’m puzzled why the template ships with this bug. It’s the template author who posted the bug fix so why isn’t it in the template?
Magazine Basic Categories and Tags Display in Posts
I have not been able to get this to work. In the four installations I tried Tags are displayed at the bottom of each post but Categories are not.
generalsocial.com: Does not work. Shows tags but not categories. Plugins: akismet, Google+, Google Analytics for WordPress, Share and Follow, Youtube Brackets
siteware.com: Does not work. Shows tags but not categories. Plugins: akismet, Google Analytics for WordPress, Share and Follow, Syntax Highlighter Evolved
mambhhead.com: Does not work. Shows tags but not categories. Plugins: akismet, faster Image Insert, Google+, Google Analytics for WordPress, Google News, Share and Follow, Syntax Highlighter Evolved, Watemark RELOADED
endlesslift.com: Does not work. Shows tags but not categories. Plugins: akismet, faster Image Insert, Google Analytics for WordPress, Google Analytics Popular Posts, Share and Follow
