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Sahifa

Last updated on August 1, 2017

Sahifa is a premium news, blog and magazine theme developed by TieLabs, an Egyptian Envato power elite author. Specialized in WordPress, the developers have enhanced Sahifa with a variety of homepage sliders and post features, specially designed for a news website. Being the sixth theme of TieLabs, Sahifa is their best selling product.

Design

The theme’s design is very flexible. Your entire website can have a stylish look using the masonry layout, and patterned backgrounds. You can use the default page layouts choosing from boxed, framed or wide template, and you can also add a light/dark skin to it.

Sahifa WordPress News Theme comes with retina ready, SEO optimization, and six different skins for the Image lightbox effect. This news template is highly customizable allowing you create lovely home pages with the TieLabs Page Builder. Using predefined blocks, you can quickly build the page structure and promote exclusive content in a custom-made Post slider grid.

Functionality

Sahifa comes with a Theme Settings center and you can control the most important aspects of the theme from a single place. From this panel, you can manage various options like general settings, header & footer templates, archives, typography, translations, posts, sidebars, ads, social networking and rating status.

This template brings an ad system that helps to display advertisements in the desired areas of your website. Also, a custom widget will make ads visible on your footer area using ten predefined dimensions.

Sahifa News Theme is also social friendly. With a custom built Social Counter, Arqam Lite, you can synchronize the website using  API keys, or Token Keys, directly with your social network accounts. It is available for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Youtube, Vimeo, Dribble, Soundcloud, Behance, Github, and Instagram.

In addition, the theme is also compatible with the WooCommerce plugin.

GENERAL
Item name Sahifa
Category News / Blog / Magazine / Editorial
Type Premium
Author TieLabs
Envato elite author Yes
Tested version 5.6.5
COMPATIBILITY
Content width 1045px
Browser compatibility IE8+ / Chrome / FF / Opera / Safari / Edge
WooCommerce Yes
bbPress Yes
BuddyPress Yes
WPML Yes
FONTS AND TRANSLATION
Integrated translation -
Google fonts Yes
Custom fonts -
Typekit fonts -
RTL support Yes
POST FEATURES
Video posts Yes
Audio posts Yes
Post templates 9
Review system Yes
Post view counter Yes
Smart lists -
Social share Yes
Custom image lightbox Yes
Custom image galery -
PAGE FEATURES
Page templates 10
Blocks 15
Widgets 27
Header styles 1
Footer styles 8
Category layouts 5
Masonry layout Yes
Mega menus Yes
Sticky menu Yes
Sticky sidebars Yes
Social networks Yes
Social counter Yes
Video playlists -
Instagram widget Yes
Currency widget -
Pinterest widget -
Weather widget Yes
OTHER FEATURES
Mobile theme -
Demos included 1
SEO optimized Yes
ADS
Ad system Yes
Adsense support Yes
Background image ad Yes
Custom ads Yes
PERFORMANCE
CSS file size 204kb
Overall speed Very high
Performance documentation Yes
USER EXPERIENCE
Total ratings 3644
User rating
Learnability Easy
DESIGN
Responsive design Yes
Retina ready Yes
DOCUMENTATION
Difficulty Beginner
Explanations Explicit
Explicit screen shots Yes
Video tutorials Yes
Search option -
Extra documentation Yes
PREMIUM PLUGINS
Plugins Taqyeem, Taqyeem Buttons Addon, Taqyeem Predefined Criteria Addon
VALUE
Price $59
Value for the money Excellent

Performance

We have tested the Sahifa theme’s default demo on different page speed tests, and it loads the content at medium speed.

Sahifa - Page Speed

The theme documentation provides a page speed guide to help the users optimize their websites and achieve optimal performance.

Downsides

Sahifa theme can be a bit confusing for a WordPress beginner due to the relatively high number of options and settings available. Its documentation is not as consistent as expected, has no ‘Search’ button, it has no child theme support for now, and the theme’s design needs a facelift as the last major update was released in February 2015.

Sahifa Theme Review
Category: News
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Price: $59
Poor
Excellent
Features
User experience
Documentation quality
Flexibility
Performance
Stability
SEO Friendly
Monetization
Code quality
Value
Conclusion
Sahifa is a highly customizable and versatile theme designed for news and magazine websites. A mature and stable theme, Sahifa is one of the most popular news theme, maintained and supported for years. The multitude of features makes Sahifa a worthy template to consider when looking for a beautiful and high performance WordPress Theme for news and magazine websites.
Good for
  • Flexible design
  • Loading speed is high
  • 6 skins for Image Lightbox Effect
  • Ads Widget
  • Pagespeed guide in documentation
Not so good for
  • High number of settings
  • No child theme included in package
  • No major updates within past year
  • No custom, typekit fonts
  • No search button in documentation
  • Few video tutorials in documentation
Overall score:
84%
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Lisa Jones
Editor-in-chief of WPion. 100% passionate about WordPress, Lisa is part time web developer and part time front-end designer. With a master's degree in computer science, she is specialized in CSS, HTML, JavaScript, MySQL and PHP. Lisa uses her knowledge and experience to offer you a complete analysis of WordPress most popular themes and plugins.

2 COMMENTS

  1. Hello! Thanks for the review. I’m a beginner and I think this theme is a little too complicated for me. Could you recommend another one without me having to search through all the inventory?
    Thanks in advance.

    • Hi! We are very happy that you appreciate our work.
      Considering you didn’t provide me with all the details about the type of website you want to create, I can’t tell you which one is the most suitable for your needs. I would recommend that once you have decided the purpose of your future website, you check out that certain category of themes, and read about them all. You also have the possibility to compare the themes among them. Good luck in choosing the best for you!
      Good day!

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