Portfolio Magazine Theme Review

General Design

This Portfolio Magazine theme has a typical layout for a magazine theme in the first screen area. When scrolling down, you will see the design of a image-focused blog. Overall, you can make use of this design to display your portfolio in a magazine style.

Besides, this theme looks a bit classic thanks to the slim lines, curved borders as well as a lot of space between different area. This airy and simple style brings me a calming and still sense.

Review the lines in design

Other Elements

Color and Font

The use of color is really simple: just black and white without any highlight. If you love this simplicity and purity, that style is good. The simple and rounded typography is readable and matches with the general design.

Layouts

Together with the default layout that you find in the demo, I found several styles and layouts when reviewing and trying this free portfolio-magazine theme.

First, there is no other styles for the header and menu, but you can add a banner in the header. Remember to choose a proper size for your image. Secondly, the featured content have another layout instead of the default tiled design.

Review the header banner and featured content

In my opinion, the tiled design looks better and can show more images in this area. But the layout above isn't bad!

Thirdly, the area under the featured content make my images stretch out when I hide the sidebar. Therefore, I still prefer the default style with sidebar. But I think depending on your images frame, you should select the suitable one yourself.

Review the area under the featured content with the second style

Finally, the gallery section here can be hidden if you want. But that's not I want you to heed. In fact, each image here is put in a default fixed square frame. That will keep all images in similar sizes, looking more balanced and symmetrical. However, this free WordPress theme will also scale your images to fit with the gallery.

Review the gallery section

Responsive

I reviewed the design of this free theme on different devices any screens. It looks fine, but in tablets and mobiles, images seem to become a bit narrower than in PCs and laptops..

Responsive design

This theme need nearly no configuration to have a site like the demo. If your site has full necessary content like mine, it will look perfect like this right after installing with the latest post for homepage.

My website after activating the theme looks perfect

That's amazing because you can save a lot of time ad effort even when this theme doesn't support one-click demo import.

This is a simple and minimal free WordPress magazine-portfolio theme so there are just enough standard features for you.

If you want to have more like social linking, social sharing, Instagram feed, ... you have to look for plugins yourself because the author doesn't recommend any plugins.

Using Customizer can help you edit all customizable elements including basic stuff and some special elements from Portfolio Magazine.

Basic Options

Some basic options like Menu, Widget, Site Identity just follow the common methods of WordPress that allow you to customize theme simply.

However, there is no other common features of other theme's I've reviewed like background image, header image, typography. I think that it's a shortage of this free portfolio - magazine theme.

Review the Customizer's options

On the other hand, the footer widget area isn't divided to a certain number of column or notice users how many columns it has. Therefore, it's quite difficult to arrange widgets into the 3 default columns.

Review the footer widgets

Portfolio Magazine Layout

The major stuff you will spend most of the time with is the Portfolio Magazine Customize Layout panel.

That's not simple with the front page layout order. The layout sections here aren't arranged according to the order of the real display so it took me about 5 minutes to figure it out.

Review the Layout Customization

To compensate, these sections are really, really simple, and easy to deal with. It's very quick to turn on/off each section by choosing Yes or No and the sections will show up right away. However, it has an disadvantage when you can't select your custom posts/pages as you want for these sections. Moreover, I couldn't figure out how to select item to display.

Customizing the layout sections

Besides the layout options above, you will have many different color options to make your site much more colorful. The number of color is unlimited and all colors you choose can be applied properly except for the Read More button color:

Color customization

Lastly, the advertisement banner doesn't keep the original frame. It will be stretched out like this, so you should choose the right size before uploading.

Review the banner customization

It's easy to use this free WordPress theme everyday. However, some Gutenberg blocks seem not to work well.

First, galleries don't look good because it arranges insides images quite in an quite untidy way.

Review the gallery

Video display is quite small. I even chose the center alignment but it didn't work.

Review the video display

Both styles of block quote doesn't look different from normal texts like this:

Review the blockquote

If you want to have a SEO optimized free WordPress magazine theme, this theme may not meet your need. I checked this feature by some tools and found that it hasn't been SEO-friendly yet. I suggest that you should install a SEO plugin to make it better.

Luckily, speed is great in both mobiles and computers.

Theme's speed in computer

Theme's speed in mobiles

Right in the theme homepage is a short documentation. It's too brief and even lacks detailed instruction to use the Customizer.

Theme documentation provide by the author

Now, I can't find any official support section, just see that Zidithemes has their contact email public so you can use it to request support.