I recently came across this awesome looking magazine theme and I thought I would share it with all of you in a review. It’s called Guzel Magazine, created by Custom Theme Design. I’ll be going over how to set it up and other features.

And now onto the review…

Setting Up

After uploading and activating the theme, you’ll probably have a pretty empty looking front page, even if you have lots of existing content. To fix this, you’ll need to open up your settings.inc.php file in the theme editor. This is where a number of theme settings are stored. Option 1 controls which categories are displayed on the top tabs on the homepage.

$cat1 = 1;
$cat2 = 3;
$cat3 = 4;
$cat4 = 5;
$cat5 = 6;
$cat6 = 9;

Replace the numbers 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 9 with your actual category ID numbers.

To change the categories on the left and right columns on the homepage below, you’ll need to scroll down to option 5 and 6. You’ll need to replace the category ID numbers in a similar fashion.

$leftcolumn_category_1 = 17;
$leftcolumn_category_1_postsnum = 3;
$leftcolumn_category_2 = 18;
$leftcolumn_category_2_postsnum = 2;

There are a few other things that can be edited in this file, including:

• Featured excerpt length
• Amount of items in the “popular” tabs to the right
• FeedBurner information (ID, blog title, and location)
• Post excerpt length (for bottom columns)
• Video category ID number

Set the Language

This theme has 2 built in languages, English and Spanish. If you plan on creating a Spanish blog, you can change that on the theme options page.

You may notice some strange code in place of where you would expect to see words in the theme files. If you want to edit any language of the theme, it can be edited with a text editor. The language files are located in the /lang/ directory. Since these files are located in a subdirectory, they can’t be edited in the theme editor.

Thumbnails

One of the features in this theme is automatic thumbnail support for stories. All you have to do is upload the image on your post, and the thumbnail is set. This is handled by WordPress’ built in image resizer. It’s recommended by the developers of the theme to use 135 width and 100 height, cropping to those exact dimensions. These settings can be configured on the “Miscellaneous” settings page.

Conclusion

Like the Arthemia theme, Guzel doesn’t make much use of the theme options page. It would certainly be nice if the settings.inc.php page was somehow integrated in the options page, instead of just language settings. I do like how the thumbnails are supported, as no extra custom fields are needed.

All in all, this is a very good looking magazine theme, one that I would almost expect to be considered “premium.”

I hope you enjoyed the review, and if you have any suggestions on which theme I should review next, I’d love to hear them.