Magazina Theme Review

General Design

Magazina stands out in the crowd thanks to its polish and unique design, which can be seen in the creative animation, dynamic color, and diverse featured post layouts. Especially, mainly made of curved lines and borders, this free magazine theme looks delicate and soft.

Review the lines and elements

Everything when mixed became a fresh and novel song of art.

Other Elements

Color, Font and Animation

Having black and light grey as the primary tone, this free WordPress magazine theme brings a cool and elegant look to users. When combined with colorful tags and buttons scattering on the theme, you will have a creative and dynamic appearance for your website.

Typography is also carefully selected to fit with the delicate style because Lato Regular and OpenSan Regular look slim and fragile. More brilliant, it's possible to change the typography in the Customizer.

The animation makes every image become a mirror. That's why I say that this free magazine theme is so "polish" and creative.

Review the animation

Layout

The layout is mainly based on box style. Each section lies in a separate box and the boxes are made to look harmonious with the content inside and help your magazine easier to read.

Review the box style

Overall, all the widgets on the homepage are arranged logically and orderly so that readers can scan and skim articles quickly. You can change the order of the widgets in the Customizer but I think the demo layout is the most perfect design. It can highlight the most important news and feature beautiful images in a stunning way.

Header, Footer and Menu

Header, footer, and sidebar don't have other styles or layouts but you can change some elements of them.

For example, disable the top bar menu and the sticky menu will make the header cleaner to me. I also tried placing another ad banner and found that it worked best with a horizontal image. Moreover, your image shouldn't as large as mine, otherwise, it will overwhelm other elements in your first screen area. That's also true with other ad widgets in Magazina, so, choose a banner wisely to have a perfect fit.

Review the header

The footer is outstanding because it lies in a large separate black area. It's also well-balanced with a 3-column design and beautiful social menu in the center. Moreover, each widget in a column is decorated with thin lines, thus making this area less messy and more engaging.

Review the footer

Archive Page and Single Post Page

The archive pages look good with grid design and sidebar. The content boxes are highlighted with orange lines at the top, helping them look more prominent. Besides, the title and meta are displayed wisely to give each box a symmetrical design.

The archive pages

Finally, the single post pages are designed to help readers feel comfortable and easy to follow. I bet that you will have the same thought as me after visiting these pages.

Responsive

This free WordPress magazine theme has no problem when being displayed in different viewports or devices. It still owns a good look and reasonable layout everywhere.

Responsive design

After you install the theme, your site hasn't looked like the demo yet so you have to spend time setting up it. You can use the instant demo import feature to import the demo. Notably, with just one click, it automatically installs the recommended plugin and then imports the data in just a few seconds without uploading a dummy file. But remember that after you import the demo, you will have to set up the slider separately. Anyway, it's still quick and convenient if you choose this way.

If you choose manual setup, it's a bit more complicated as you have to set up page attributes, static front page, and then go to the Customizer to enable and customize the featured content area. Most importantly, Magazina requires you to install Blogwings Companion to activate homepage customization options. Or you can activate this plugin in the One-click Homepage Setup section. However, it confused me after doing this action because my homepage will still blank as nothing happens.

Homepage activated in Customizer

Then, I figured out that the Customizer had more options. This is the Customizer before activating homepage section above:

The Customizer before enabling One-click Homepage Setup

And this is after that.

You will have more options for the homepage and the whole site. That also happens after I installed Blogwings Companion. I think that the author should note it more clearly so that beginners like me don't have to experience this confusion.

Eventually, it may take your time to continue the setup, so follow the guide step by step and set up each section carefully.

With Magazina, your magazine site becomes so feature-rich, especially with various beautiful custom widgets, colors, and fonts. It also helps you socialize more with social sharing and social linking menu in mind.

After reviewing Magazina, I found that although there are a lot of options, the Customizer was quite sophisticated to use so you need to spend more time on the Customizer.

The most complicated section is the magazine template.

That's quite confusing to me to deal with many sections like this. I don't even know which pannel I should use to customize a specific content section. So I think the author should explain each panel more clearly.

Review the magazine template section

Also in Magazine Template section, the choices are different for inner pages.

Magazine Template section, the choices are different for inner pages.

And then, you have to choose and organize the widgets inside each panel. There is a tone of widgets from Magazina so it's difficult for me to choose which and where to use them.

Review the widgets of free WordPress

The color sections are distributed in different panels so it's not easy to control all of them. On the other hand, it's quite convenient if you customize each element like header first, then footer, widgets, ... because each one has its own color section. You can choose any color for each section and they can be rendered properly. And so do the typography and background option. They are all easy to deal with.

However, the header image seems not to work properly.

The header image can't show up

Using this free magazine theme day by day, I can control and use it smoothly. But I found some mistakes with some blocks.

Here is my review for some post formats that are most often used.

There is no mistake with blockquote.

But there is a problem with the gallery. It sticks to the upper paragraph.

In the meanwhile, there is a large empty space upper an embedded video.

After reviewing and verifying SEO optimization by some technique, I discovered that this free magazine theme hadn't been completely ready for SEO yet. I recommend that you should find and install a plugin for SEO. Because the author doesn't suggest one, you can refer to this list and find one suitable SEO plugin.

I tested speed with Google PageSpeed Insights. The result is not bad, but if you want to reach an excellent score, you can use other methods to increase your website speed.

I visit the documentation link in my Dashboard but it's not available now.

The documentation is not available now

This time, I don't see any support from the author in WordPress support forum. I can't find the support system in the theme homepage, either.