SmartMag is an elegant premium WordPress theme developed in February 2014 by Themesphere, an Envato Elite author. The template is built with care for details to suit any news, blog, or magazine website. SmartMag comes with a well-structured settings hierarchy and brings all the necessary tools to help you create a beautiful site. This theme has some dedicated features like different skins, custom blocks, predefined layouts, multiple menus and post styles.
Design
With modern and minimal lines, SmartMag is a beautiful WordPress product, which catches your eye. The Themesphere author made the theme’s layout to be responsive and retina ready so that the website content will be nicely displayed on all types of devices. SmartMag is also retina ready for logos, and the navigation logo can be sticky if you enable this option. You can choose to apply a full width or boxed general layout style for your site.
Before setting up the content, you can test your website with one of the included demos: Default, Tech, Lifestyle (Trendy) or TheZine. These pre-defined layouts are sample data, and it allows you to import random images and theme’s settings.
SmartMag comes with the additional configuration option for individual posts and pages. You can apply a Modern, Classic or Default layout and setup a right sidebar. If you want to receive instantly post feedback, you can enable ‘Review settings’. This way the visitors can rate your content with points, stars or percentages.
If you want to design creative pages, you’ll be glad to know that Smartmag comes with a custom Page Builder that allows you to clone a page’s layout and insert it into the same page or another. Also, over ten widgets can be used as Page Builder’s elements.
In ‘Header and Navigation’ you can choose one of the five predefined header styles for your beautiful website: Default, Centered logo, Tech, Trendy or Dark. You can add a text as your logo or upload a picture.
Every website has menus, but the beauty of SmartMag is that links and categories can have the mega menu option enabled: ‘Mega Menu for Links,’ and ‘Category Mega Menu’. With custom lightbox, image galleries and a review system, all your users will be delighted to engage your wonderful posts. Also, with SmartMag the menus and sidebars can be sticky.
SmartMag has a nice typography system and gives you the possibility to choose from custom, Typekit and Google Fonts to style your content. If you want to see how the desired font looks like, you can preview it from the Google Fonts Directory.
Functionality
The theme comes with the SmartMag Settings panel, which allows you to change global options for header & navigation, listing layouts, homepage & blocks, page/post settings, typography, skins & styling, sliders, and more. Also, importing demos is easy, right from the theme panel. If you want to create a new page, you can assemble elements with the custom Bunyad Page Builder. There are also multiple page templates and layouts to choose from.
SmartMag can accommodate column blocks to highlight the latest posts, news focus blocks to list various trending information and a gallery carousel that displays the latest videos and images in a slider.
The sidebar manager allows you to manage widgets and areas. You can define where you want a specific sidebar to appear. You can collocate the sidebars to a unique post or page for different areas.
The author has integrated three custom plugins in the SmartMag theme: Bunyad Page Builder, Bunyad Shortcodes, and Bunyad Widgets. One of the most interesting widgets is the Bunyad Advertisement which allows you to quickly add your ad code in any location on your website and start monetizing it.
If you want to run a multilingual setup on your website, the SmartMag theme is compatible with WPML (WordPress Multilingual Plugin). Also compatible with bbPress, Slider Revolution, SEO by Yoast plugins, and is RightToLeft ready too.
Your news website can quickly become an eShop, and your virtual friends can share your stories using the beautiful social sharing buttons (Vimeo, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram).
| GENERAL | |
|---|---|
| Item name | SmartMag |
| Category | News |
| Type | Premium |
| Author | ThemeSphere |
| Envato elite author | Yes |
| Tested version | 3.0.2 |
| COMPATIBILITY | |
| Content width | 1128px |
| Browser compatibility | IE8+ / Chrome / FF / Safari / Edge |
| WooCommerce | Yes |
| bbPress | Yes |
| BuddyPress | Yes |
| WPML | Yes |
| FONTS AND TRANSLATION | |
| Integrated translation | - |
| Google fonts | Yes |
| Custom fonts | Yes |
| Typekit fonts | Yes |
| RTL support | Yes |
| POST FEATURES | |
| Video posts | Yes |
| Audio posts | Yes |
| Post templates | 6 |
| Review system | Yes |
| Post view counter | - |
| Smart lists | Yes |
| Social share | Yes |
| Custom image lightbox | Yes |
| Custom image galery | Yes |
| PAGE FEATURES | |
| Page templates | 5 |
| Blocks | 12 |
| Widgets | 9 |
| Header styles | 5 |
| Footer styles | 1 |
| Category layouts | 8 |
| Masonry layout | - |
| Mega menus | Yes |
| Sticky menu | Yes |
| Sticky sidebars | Yes |
| Social networks | Yes |
| Social counter | - |
| Video playlists | Yes |
| Instagram widget | - |
| Currency widget | - |
| Pinterest widget | - |
| Weather widget | - |
| OTHER FEATURES | |
| Mobile theme | - |
| Demos included | 4 |
| SEO optimized | Yes |
| ADS | |
| Ad system | Yes |
| Adsense support | Yes |
| Background image ad | - |
| Custom ads | Yes |
| PERFORMANCE | |
| CSS file size | 104 kb |
| Overall speed | Very high |
| Performance documentation | - |
| USER EXPERIENCE | |
| Total ratings | 688 |
| User rating | |
| Learnability | Easy |
| DESIGN | |
| Responsive design | Yes |
| Retina ready | Yes |
| DOCUMENTATION | |
| Difficulty | Beginner |
| Explanations | Less Detailed |
| Explicit screen shots | Yes |
| Video tutorials | - |
| Search option | - |
| Extra documentation | - |
| PREMIUM PLUGINS | |
| Plugins | Bunyad Page Builder, Bunyad Shortcodes, Bunyad Widgets, Slider Revolution, Sphere Core |
| VALUE | |
| Price | $52 |
| Value for the money | Very good |
Performance
In our era, time has become a precious commodity. We value a product by the benefits, but we also judge it by the speed it delivers the output. We have tested SmartMag default demo on different page speed tests, and it loads the content very fast.
Downsides
The theme panel could use a redesign with more customizing options. No post views system is available, and there is no masonry layout. Even if video posts can be created, you can not add a video playlist on your website.
Great place to get inspired for a new website for the services that I offer. Really nice.
Hello, Lorin! We are very glad that you can find your inspiration after reading our articles! Good luck building your website and have a lovely day!
Hello, why is the SEO-friendly grade so low ?
Hi, Berangere! Thank you for pointing this to us. Our team tested the SmartMag theme and at that time, there were missing some SEO capabilities. We will take another look and make the necessary adjustments accordingly.