“Magazeen”: Free Magazine-Look Theme

Smashing Magazine is releasing Magazeen, a free advanced Wordpress-theme with a magazine-look created by the talented WeFunction Design Agency. This bold magazine 2-col-theme was designed with the main focus being on typography, grids and magazine-look. It was created especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

The theme is released under GPL. That means it can be used for any project for free and without any restrictions. You may modify the theme as you wish.
Please link to this article if you would like to spread the word.

• live demo
• release post on WeFunction.com

Inspiration behind the design

As usual, here are some insights from the designers themselves:

“We’ve created the Magazeen theme to try and pump as much style and functionality into a WordPress theme to give people something they might not expect from their standard Wordpress theme. There really is very few limits to what WordPress handle, so we’ve built in a lot of custom features and options to give people a little taste of what is possible, and how some small functionality tweaks can make a huge difference to the overall experience of browsing a blog. On top of that we’ve wrapped all that functionality up in a really cool and modern theme, with nice big title fonts, and a stylish colour scheme."

Drop-Down Menu
The other cool and fully automated feature is the related posts drop down effect. It’s a simple idea, if you click the category of the full posts a drop down will appear with some related posts from that category. And if you don’t see a post you like you can always view the full category by clicking view more.


Sidebar
The sidebar area’s have been created to give you a lot of control over the featured posts, and recent posts. Once you’ve installed the theme, you need to go to your Widgets area, and simply activate the “Magazeen Latest Posts”, and “Magazeen Featured Posts” widgets. You can easily control how many posts each feature displays, and using this widget will ensure the area is styled correctly with the post image showing correctly.”




There's also a Blogger implementation of the “Magazeen” Template that you can get at http://btemplates.com

You can view my personal Blogger adaptation of the “Magazeen” Template at:
http://rafael-minuesa.blogspot.com/

Among other differences there is a row with Social Media Buttons on top, substituting the original  jQuery image showcase, which displayed the image from the latest post, and the title above it.

• Feed Burner
• Blogger
• Digg
• Facebook
• Linked in
• MySpace
• Picasa
• Twitter
• YouTube

It goes without saying that this version is also released under GPL.
Visit my blog if you want to grab the code at:
http://rafael-minuesa.blogspot.com/2009/02/blogger-template.html

You should change some of the links that link to other sites of mine, but you should leave the links at the footer linking to all the contributors, those are Smashing Magazine, We Function, Zona Cerebral and Rafael Minuesa,

Drop me a line if you need any help.