Are you in the quest of an excellent WordPress theme to create a magazine site for free? If yes, then you’ve come to the right place as I am going to show you how to create a simple magazine theme under 15 minutes by using CPMmagz theme. The reason I’ve chosen the CPMmagz theme is that in spite of being free it gives users to customize various section of the homepage, choose theme color and much more which is a huge thing by a free theme to offer.

The first thing to do is install the theme. To do so open WordPress admin panel (navigate through a web browser to the folder where you have installed the WordPress e.g. www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/ ) and go Appearance > Themes on admin sidebar. Now click on add new which will take you to the theme install page where you can search for “CPMmagz” and install it or upload the downloaded zip file of the theme. You can download it from wordpress.org or from Code Themes. Once the theme is done uploading it will automatically install.

Now let’s setup the homepage. Navigate to the dashboard and hover over the page and click add new. Here we will add a page called “Homepage” which will be the front page of our site and “blog” which will be the blog page of our site. We will assign the “Homepage” to the “homepage” template so that the theme’s main front page will come to light. After doing so, hover over settings and click on reading. Here we will select “static page” where “homepage” will be our front page and “blog” will be our blog page.

The third step is to create some posts, categories, and tags. For a magazine site, categories are the most important for there will be numerous sections of news like entertainment, sports, lifestyle, movies etc. While creating a post assign it to post type as well, say, image, video, gallery, audio etc.

Now let’s move into customizer (appearance > customize) and set up our homepage. The first setting is “site identity” where you can add site title, tagline, logo and site icon for the site. Next is “theme options”. You can choose theme color, adjust sidebar position, show or hide search icon in the header. Hero section lets you choose a category which will show three latest posts from that category. Similarly, the second, third and fourth sections, highlights, what’s hot and category section respectively, also show posts from the category that you choose from the customizer. You can add social media icons from social media settings, site copyright from footer settings, add map source from contact settings and show/hide author description from author settings.

After adjusting all the settings from customizer, now it is required to create a menu and add widgets in the pre-footer section.There are two menus, “Primary Navigation” and “Top Navigation” where you can assign menu.

Please go Appearance > Menus on admin sidebar.
Click create a new menu or select a menu.

You can check pages, categories, posts and click add to menu and then save the menu. Finally, in the footer section, you can assign widgets to four widgets from admin dashboard, add copyright text and link from customizer.

And there you have it! a simple magazine theme is ready.

Article By Author

Author Archives