We love our readers. We respect the hard work of designers and developers across the globe. And we do our best to make the web design community stronger and the Web a little bit prettier. Therefore we ask talented artists and creative professionals to showcase their skills and release something unique and beautiful as a gift to the community. And when designers agree, truly impressive works see the light of day.

Today we are glad to release Magazeen — a free advanced Wordpress-theme in a magazine-llok created by the talented WeFunction Design Agency. This bold magazine 2-col-theme was designed with the main focus being on typography, grids and magazine-look. It was created especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

Download the theme for free!

The theme is released under GPL. You can use it for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. Please link to this article if you would like to spread the word. You may modify the theme as you wish.

• live demo
• large preview (.jpg, 1.7 Mb)
• download the theme (.zip, 0.3 Mb)
• download the PSD-sources (.zip, 4.5 Mb)
• release post on WeFunction.com

Inspiration behind the design

As usual, here are some insights from the designers themselves:

“We’ve created the Magazeen theme to try and pump as much style and functionality into a WordPress theme to give people something they might not expect from their standard Wordpress theme. There really is very few limits to what WordPress handle, so we’ve built in a lot of custom features and options to give people a little taste of what is possible, and how some small functionality tweaks can make a huge difference to the overall experience of browsing a blog. On top of that we’ve wrapped all that functionality up in a really cool and modern theme, with nice big title fonts, and a stylish colour scheme.

The Magazeen theme is packed full of cool features to really encourage your readers to explore new posts and similar items. The first thing you might notice is the jQuery image showcase at the top, which is fully automated and will display the image from the latest post, and the title above it without you having to do anything other than define the image URL in the custom field we have created which will appear on in your admin post area.

Drop-Down Menu

The other cool and fully automated feature is the related posts drop down effect. It’s a simple idea, if you click the category of the full posts a drop down will appear with some related posts from that category. And if you don’t see a post you like you can always view the full category by clicking view more.

Sidebar

The sidebar area’s have been created to give you a lot of control over the featured posts, and recent posts. Once you’ve installed the theme, you need to go to your Widgets area, and simply activate the “Magazeen Latest Posts”, and “Magazeen Featured Posts” widgets. You can easily control how many posts each feature displays, and using this widget will ensure the area is styled correctly with the post image showing correctly.”

Footer

Thank you, guys. We appreciate your great work, your attention to details and the brilliance of the execution.

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Thanks,
Sanjeev

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Ok we have Shreyas explaining how you can create a heavy wordpress site. He created a site with his friends called http://www.radioverve.com. He created a plugin to manage bands , artists, songs etc. This guy is really confident about wordpress and its functionality.

Ok now he says we can customize, login, user profile etc. Actually we don’t need to add lotsa code and all for that . He used a plugin called customize plugin, by overloading the default php page, or functions.

Quick snippet

add_action(’load-profile.php’,'rv_update’,profile’,98);

Well this guy also wrote an application for iPhone just to see how many users are coming in and going outta his site:)

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Ok we have Matt Mullenweg on the board and he is sharing his experience of evolving with wordpress. He being the founder knows more than anyone else. Just a quick note his contact information

m@mullenweg.com

http://ma.tt

twitter@photomatt

http://bit.ly/mattbook

Matt, loved textpad to blog with. So matt met this guy called mike and they converted b2 to wordpress. Now there are about 23-24 wordcamps all over world now.

Matt thinks last year was really good for wordpress casue people around the world started to get involved more and more. Average user install around 4.96 plugin. couple of weeks ago wordpress crossed 4000+ plugins and 5000+ themes which are officially listed with wordpress. Wordpress also added Built-in update and installers which was also a time saver for matt.

14 days back 2.7.1 v of wordpress released and 41,730 downloads per day which is actually 2.5 times than other versions update. Matt is kinda impressed with firefox update use case

alright we have “Hindi” in matt’s presentation, oh what some more bangla, telgu, marathi. So wordpress is healthy enough with regional languages of India. 11,651 blogs are in other regional languages up and working.

15-20 thousand people are testing wordpress 2.8 release. Testing, coding 24 hours, re-iterations, re-designs makes up a new release.

• Themes , would available with one click install, just like plugins
• Custom taxonomies, idea from facebook
• Faster, minimize the http,caching trips.
• Moving widgets in the side bar, for the end user

2009 Vision for wordpress by matt

Software should be humble, agile and global

• Humble - user driven
• Agile - Plugins and Themes
• Global - Every country, Every Language, Accessibility

Further matt says that one can copy wordpress and make a clonepress but cannot copy the community associated that is we all. When matt started wordpress he was a kid studying political science no computer science at all.

How can you help as a community ?

Write a tutorial, write some plugins if you know PHP. Make themes if you are a designer. Help people, help community.

And there Matt finished his preso.

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