Rating: 5 stars
Our site has now used IssueM for 3 years. Readers can see and click to read all articles in an issue, scroll through them in order, browse them by categories of interest, and find back issues. IssueM has structured our magazine effectively and allowed the editors (who are non-technical) to keep our file structure tidy. With 500 Articles or so a year to manage, IssueM’s structure has encouraged and embedded a tidy procedure. It is great to be able to prepare a new edition in the background and then publish it when it is ready by simply changing the draft status of the Issue to Live. We would like more, of course! The documentation is weak so setting up took some time and a lot of trial and error but the results, after writing some CSS to get a reasonable look and feel, was worth the effort. It is reliable. Many thanks to Zeen for your product.
]]>Rating: 1 star
It’s a great concept, but my god is the documentation miserably bad!
There is literally no source to how you can actually arrange the content in a proper way anywhere! They just show you sites that have in some way made the layout properly.
Very poor documentation gives this good useful idea a 1 star. It’s just so hard to know anything about how to use this effectively.
Rating: 5 stars
Thanks a lot
]]>Rating: 5 stars
A great magazine plugin.
]]>Rating: 5 stars
Easy to install and use to create issue based publications.
What impressed me the most was the extent that IssueM developers went to help me out to customize my theme code to work with their plugin code (especially since I am a beginner and needed plenty handholding), to specify the pagination for only articles within each issue.
Very professional, quick, helpful, and generous! They offered quick and detailed responses, as well as patience, to all of my questions!
Thank you for a great plugin and awesome service, would definitely recommend for all
]]>Rating: 4 stars
Thanks for such a quick response (less than 10 mins on a Friday night) to my inquiry. After I built my issue with two articles as a test, I couldn’t get it to show up in the sidebar. I sent off a quick email, but found the answer in the forum. I needed to go over to the dashboard, settings, permalinks and then it cleared the permalinks and the magazine issue showed in the sidebar as advertised.
I’m just a little disappointed that the issue looks much like a series of normal blog posts rather than a magazine (with columns etc, and options for typography) if you use it as is. Maybe in the future?! Keep up the good work. We really need a good magazine option plugin for WordPress sites.
]]>Rating: 5 stars
I recently designed a website for a client who has published a monthly magazine for years, was looking for a way to deliver it online going forward (with an option for people to download past issues in PDF format). They were very happy to discover IssueM and are now using it on their live WordPress site.
It basically creates a custom post type called Article and lets you organize them into Issues, and assign Categories and Tags to each article. It has some good widgets and shortcodes to display things like the current issue’s contents, a page listing all past issues, a page of all articles by a specific author, a basic slider that displays featured images and links to any articles you designate as “featured”, etc.
I had to contact the plugin’s support staff several times to ask how to do some things (or to help me troubleshoot some plugin conflicts), and they always responded quite quickly, with helpful suggestions. Many thanks to the developers for this very useful – and free – magazine publishing plugin!
]]>Rating: 1 star
I installed this plugin because of the extension that converts the magazine articles to PDF. I’ve been very disappointed. First, the default layout of the posts does not include a post thumbnail. I search high and low to figure out how to add that in. But, every time the plugin is updated it has to be re-added. I purchased the Issue to PDF plugin and found that there are no options in the plugin for customizing, and it didn’t come with any instruction. I was finally given a link to mPDF documentation. But, no instruction on how to apply my PDF template to the plugin. I am not programmer, and this is a bit too advanced for me.
]]>Rating: 3 stars
I installed and tested this plugin.
As far as I can tell, it is basically a plugin which adds a custom post type to your site and allows you to attach a pdf to the category. (Other paid plugins add functionality)
Anyone with a year of WP experience can sit with google in hand and accomplish what this plugin provides. Its nothing more than an organizational tool as far as I can see. I can paste 10 lines of code here and give you nearly the same functionality.
Pointless as far as I can see. But solid, so I wont say the plugin is bad.
]]>Rating: 5 stars
There are still a few elements that could -and hopefully will- help the integration of the magazine within the blog.
Searching by author could bring the articles and not just the blog posts, idem for the different “author box” plugins, that is for me the next big step.
But in the end, every powerful feature brings in so much, I don’t want to loose everything I have now just because I want more !
I would totally recommend this plugin.
]]>Rating: 5 stars
This plugin has a bright future!
]]>Rating: 4 stars
I’ve been going backwards and forwards as to how many stars to give this plugin. If I could break it down I would give it 5/5 for its power and potential, 3/5 for its usage and 2/5 for documentation. This is why:
The power to publish magazine issues made up of individual articles is, in my mind, a major leap forward in WP’s ability to handle content. Moreover, with the emergence of long-content (think of the Snow Fall feature on NYTimes), online publishing is now competing with the big boys. Tablets and smartphones have become serious alternatives to printed copy and suddenly traditional media is receiving competition from online content providers. WordPress is playing a big part in this explosion and plugins like IssueM help grease the wheels of this transition. It has been observed elsewhere though that the publishing industry is slow on the take-up and it could be a while for it to catch on.
IssueM’s simple shortcodes make simple publishing easy. Cut and paste them into your pages and Bob’s your uncle. It really is that simple, but that’s where the problem lies. To really format issues and articles requires at the very least a knowledge of CSS and HTML programming, and to make the most of it you need to get under the bonnet and understand things like conditional statements and all that other scary php stuff. The lack of built-in customisation is going to put users off unless there is a comprehensive support backup and document library. What free support there is on the IssueM forums is great and Lew and Peter make a point of answering each post, but one can’t help wondering how much the developers are keeping back from Joe Public. A bit of smoke and mirrors, don’t give the whole game away, and content providers with a budget are going to want to pay for support to get their publication online. And why not? It’s a sensible business strategy. The problem is many WP users are simple content providers like myself who don’t have much money to spend on support. I am battling my way through what little documentation there is in order to get my head around its potential.
Either that or the developers are just hard-core programmers who simply don’t have time to put together a wiki, examples, documents, FAQs or any other resource that would really get people flying with this plugin. My bumbling lack of php skills doesn’t help, but I’d be happy to share my theme once I get my project up and running if it helps anyone else.
So there’s my situation. You should understand that I tried a few publication plugins but settled on IssueM for its logical back-end structure. I am beginning to build a rather splendid but simple publication for my wife’s travel writing club. Since she and her members are not tech-savvy it is my job to make publishing their magazine as simple as possible… and it’s taking me a while. Perhaps as IssueM grows in popularity the support network around it will increase, and that can only happen if people take a punt with this plugin. I have, and it’s starting to pay off. This is one of those projects I’d like to see go stratospheric.
]]>Rating: 5 stars
Made my magazine building experience simple and fun!
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