Mimbo - Wordpress magazine theme
I’ve spent most of my blog energy over the past week or two switching to a ‘magazine’ style wordpress theme. For my needs, the magazine style category based structure is a better fit, than the date-based “most recent post always most prominent” format.
The most time-consuming part of the switch has been settling on a tag/category structure to facilitate surfing through the site. Settled on a “if you liked this, try this” grid, so I’m going through the old posts tagging and categorizing, finessing the “related posts” add-on, and configuring a bunch of page-specific sidebar widgets. Should be finished this week.
The theme I’ve used - Mimbo - has been around for a couple of years and has tens of thousands of users. It is well designed and built with robust, well commented code. If you have a smattering of CSS, XHTML/PHP it is simple to customize and enhance. If you don’t want to code there are hundreds of premium themes with customization interfaces and support. Revolution is a popular set.
Looks nice!
thanks Angela - it is an interesting shift, inhibiting initailly, but ultimately more rewarding I think/hope.
I have been wanting to create a blog using a magazine style theme. Is it much more time consuming or difficult than a regular list style blog? I dont know any CSS or scripting at all. Is there one you would recommend for a beginner?
Take your pick - there are hundreds out there. The only one I ever installed is this one. If you don’t want to deal with script then some of the premium themes provide configuration interfaces.
Once installed and configure to taste it doesn’t really take any longer to post. The whole category/tag thing requires some thought though, because that’s how people will find the posts. The blog becomes more of a resource and less of a log/diary.
We are setting up a blog/website for a small local paper, and have been advised to use Drupal. Do you think we could get the same results using one of the advanced wordpress themes?
The functionality is provided by wordpress, rather than the theme. The “advanced” functionality comes from upgrading wp. All the themes do is change the appearance of the front page - the magazine themes allow you to feature articles on the front page according to tag/category rather than date.
Both wp and drupal are moving targets.Currently WP is easier to set-up, but drupal accomodates more user classes and can be customized without PHP scripting. I would go with WP and then switch to Drupal if you hit too many roadblocks. Posts can be easily migrated from one to the other.
You’ve done a nice job using Mimbo. We’ve downloaded it, too, and found it really suits us. I like your customizations—I’m glad we’ve each tailored it to our respective tastes.