Most of the free WordPress themes out there are geared toward single-author blogs. It’s rare to find a decent option for magazines, because these types of themes take a little more effort to design and build, given the massive amount of content typically included on the homepage.
JustWrite is a new magazine theme on WordPress.org that presents posts in an elegant way. Designed by Alexandru Cosmin, JustWrite nicely displays featured posts, categories and widgets without making your eyes bleed. Many publications are afflicted with a claustrophobia-inducing layout that causes readers to abandon the page after it loads. The JustWrite theme, however, achieves that coveted balance between space and content.
Customizing JustWrite
This theme packs an impressive number of options into WordPress’ native customizer, including the following:
- Custom Header – Specify logo image/font color, background image/color, and header border color
- Top Menu – Enable/disable fixed positioning, customize border and background colors
- Top Menu Colors – Specify link and hover colors
- Global – Customize global background, border, link and font colors
- Typography – Select from four font families
- Mini Sidebar Configuration – Set featured menus
- Site Text – Customize footer, site title, tagline text
With a few changes in the customizer, you can easily alter the theme to have a dark design, if you choose:
In addition to all the options built into the customizer, JustWrite has its own options page for configuring the slider, adding a favicon, adding social buttons, setting up advertising and enabling the author box.
One particularly awesome thing about the JustWrite demo is that it contains a live example for virtually every permutation of the options, i.e. examples with mini-sidebar disabled, header background image enabled, dark colors, all available font styles, fixed menu disabled, etc.
JustWrite includes support for Font Awesome icons, multiple sidebars and page templates, as well as a host of widgets tailored for magazines: featured, popular and recent posts, latest tweets, and advertising. Check out the theme’s homepage for more information and a live demo. You can download JustWrite for free from WordPress.org via your site’s theme administration page.
Nice share sarah! This theme has one new feature for me. In sidebar there is an extra “featured post” tab but it helped sidebar to become fat :D I liked the new tab as my existing theme doesn’t have. Overall theme is good enough but I didn’t like the pre-installed fonts anyway. I’ll recommend the theme with font change. -Best :)