DWS Extra

Seriously, running a site like DanceWithShadows without a proper CMS is a pain. It has been bothering me for a long time. I have been exploring how to integrate the site into a CMS for a while – and that quest still goes on! But occasionally, looking at Magazine -style themes for the WordPress blogging platform, I feel I should blindly go for one of them, customise a bit, and have a super-easy life.

Yea, I know that’s not so easy. Wordpress, with or without a magazine theme, offers a lot of conveniences and some challenges. Convenience? Every blogger knows what they are, considering the number of mature bloggers who have had it with Blogger and have moved over to WordPress.

Problem 1: The WordPress Magazine themes available are still not as flexible as I want them to be, and this is likely to be so – they are meant for structured blogging, and my site is a pretty wild beast. It will not be tamed easily to fit into the WordPress cage. Not that this would be a problem for 99 % of you who will be more than thrilled with WP and its millions of themes.

Problem 2: Internal linking. I don’t know where I read this, but WordPress’ internal linking structure slowly hits older, archived pages which tend to lose PR transferred through internal linking. This is pretty insurmountable, without some serious hacking of the WP code, adding nofollows and suchlike. Not for the faint of heart.

Now that we have got those two issues out of the way, here are my favourite WordPress magazines themes that have almost broken my heart.

Revolution News Wordpress magazine theme

Da best. It can’t get better than this, an that’s why its a premium, paid theme. It will set you back by $ 59.95.

Revolution is a widget-ready, customizable theme that is an ideal solution for online magazines, online newspapers, and other websites that wish to use WordPress as a content management system.

Extremely well designed, this one will fit the needs of most publishers who have a magazine of news website. Like every theme, you will need to do a bit of customisation, add your own logo and change the colours to suit your liking and all that, but for most purposes, this is all you need.

Revolution News magazine theme

Can you beat the Revolution theme? You can, perhaps, with the Revolution News theme. For one, it looks better. Two, if you have a news outlet of some sort, this will fit you like a glove. Costs a bit more – we are talking $ 99.95 here for this magazine theme.

So if you are a normal blogger and want a cool theme, the first one is for you – and if you are a professional blogger willing to invest, the News theme would serve you better.

Moving on, what else do we have?

Darren Hoyt’s Mimbo Magazine theme for WP

If you do not have the bucks to shell out for the Revolution themes, here is one that comes real close. The Mimbo magazine theme is a clean, good looking magazine theme, and most of you would be happy with it. The right sidebar is still a big blog-like, but customise it a bit, and you have something that is pretty much in the same territory as the Revolution theme.

For me, if the problem was entirely about choosing a magazine style theme, I would have definitely gone for one of these.

But as of now, I have the little problem of internal linking to solve. Once that is fixed, I would probably take another look at them.