Justin Tadlock

Newspaperize: WordPress Theme

Written by Justin Tadlock on October 7, 2007

Theme Information:

  • Description: A 910px, fixed-width, widget-ready theme. Its focus is for news blogs and sites. The template makes it easy to get a lot of information to the user as quickly as possible, but in a stylish way.
  • Requirement(s): Wordpress 2.1+
  • Support: Support forums
  • Download Theme ([download#18#hits]) | Live Demo

Demo is currently down.

Newspaperize in other languages

Currently, I’m considering translating the theme into a few different languages as we’ve done with the Structure WordPress theme. If you want to translate the Newspaperize theme into your language for non-English speakers, feel free to contact me.

Updates:

I’ve added support forums for all my WordPress themes.

  • Version 1.1: Added a thumbnail option to the custom fields to give the theme a little more flexibility. Created a “category-description” class to adjust the font of the description on category pages.
  • Version 1.1.2: Fixed the category.php and archive.php to show the “Previous Stories” correctly.

Features:

  • Newspaper- / Magazine-style layout with a customized front page.
  • Feature article listed on front page.
  • Specific styles for each type of page (category, archive, etc.).
  • Customized sidebars for different pages of the site.
  • Integrated WordPress 2.3 tag and Related Posts Plugin support.
  • Placeholder divs for ads. Great sidebar sizes for Google AdSense ads.
  • Four different sidebars that are all widget-ready.

Need To Know:

  • It is important that you read the readme.txt file to understand how this theme works. Everything is explained in more detail in that text file.
  • See how to use optional excerpts to make a cleaner blog when using this theme.
  • Learn how to upload images.
  • Read up on using custom fields.

Image of optional excerpt and custom fields:

See how to use custom fields and excerpts with this magazine / newspaper style theme

Recommendations:

  • I recommend using the Related Posts Plugin because I’ve added the functionality into the single.php file.
  • Get the latest version of WordPress to make use of tags.

Download & Demo:

Thoughts

I started working on this theme way back around April 2007 when I wanted to design a newpaper-style theme. I wasn’t sure which direction to go in then and I’m still not sure now that I’ve completed this project. Of course, I didn’t spend the last several months working on it. I took a very long break. It wasn’t until reading Adii’s article, Magazine Style Themes are here that I realized I wanted to play with my old theme again.

Now, this isn’t exactly a set-in-stone newspaper-style theme, but it’s far different than the typical blog theme. (I would go as far as saying that this is my best work.) I put a lot of hours into this project and almost gave up after several mishaps with alignment (I hate you IE6!!!), but somehow, just somehow, I managed to come up with something that I like, something that can be used for both blogs and news sites, something that doesn’t take a lot of work for the blogger.

I don’t know where I came up with the name “Newspaperize.” I just remember that’s what I wanted to call it when I started in April, and it just kind of stuck. I went through four completely different redesigns before I settled with what we have here. Overall, I’m happy with it. Of course, when little bugs start creeping up, I’ll be frustrated again.

With that said, please report all your bugs in the forums. Not on my About page. Not on some obscure post that has nothing to do with WordPress themes. Here on this post. So, what do you think?