SHARE
SmartMag Theme
SmartMag Theme
Last updated on: March 3, 2017

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.

SmartMag PageSpeed

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.

SmartMag Theme Review
Category: News
COMPARE
Price: $52
Poor
Excellent
Features
User experience
Documentation quality
Flexibility
Performance
Stability
SEO Friendly
Monetization
Code quality
Value
Conclusion
In the last major theme update, the authors have improved the backend user interface and have made it more customizable. Suitable for news & magazine websites, SmartMag will cover your basic demands with the drag and drop page builder and Themesphere custom plugins. For advanced users, this is a simple-to-use template. You can enhance your website using this template only if you have the required coding skills to take the theme beyond the author's design.
Good for
  • Clean template
  • Custom review system
  • Drag and drop Bunyad Page Builder
  • RTL support
Not so good for
  • No automatic theme updater
  • Post views system is unavailable
  • Video playlists cannot be added
Overall score:
74%
Awards:
SHARE
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.

4 COMMENTS

    • 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!

    • 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.

LEAVE A REPLY