Ideas to use WP as a CMS of an electronic magazine

  • I wish I could add this thread in the ‘Beyond Codex’ category.
    Anyway. I want to set up a WP installation as a CMS for an electronic magazine. Thing is that I want to use categories as sections of the e-mag and tags as… well, tags.
    My question is, what system do you recommend to use to separate posts by issues and display them correctly on homepage (current issue) and in a page for every old issue?

    I have some ideas. Would custom fields work (I mean, when rendering issue pages and homepage with current issue)?

    Thanks a lot in advance everyone!

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • Check out Darren Hoyt’s tutorial on how he came up with the Mimbo theme. Multiple loops pulling specific categories to create a magazine like theme.

    Once you get it, it seems so simple, but it’s not the default setup for WordPress.

    (Second time I’ve mentioned Hoyt’s blog in 24 hours, so just want to state that I have no connection to Hoyt except for finding his tutorial extremely useful, and exchanging a few emails with him.)

    Thread Starter aldeasim

    (@aldeasim)

    Yes, I have read it before. I find it very useful, but I have already build sites using multiple loops, Mimbo-like.
    But the thing I’m asking for is how can I mark posts as articles of a determined issue of the magazine, and how to retrieve them as they were forming a number of a printed publication. Something like Yay! Monday! is.
    Thanks StrangeAttractor.

    How do you plan to organize those “issues”? Will those be categories?

    Are you trying to do what Dave Shea did with Mezzoblue? Note the dated “issues”…
    https://mezzoblue.com/

    Here he goes into detail about his thought processes with regard to his unique way of organizing the site. I can tell you that he’s definitely not using WP and prolly not using MT either. Likely he created it himself.
    https://mezzoblue.com/about/mezzoblue/

    how can I mark posts as articles of a determined issue of the magazine, and how to retrieve them as they were forming a number of a printed publication.

    There are many ways, depending on how much you’re willing to tweak with the back end.

    The simplest way I can think of is to mark all articles belonging to an issue as published on the same day, with cover story published at 23:59, the second story, at 23:58, and so on. Then a simple link to the publication date will render the issue. An issue selector can then be implemented by modifying either the Archive functionality (for a monthly or quarterly magazine) or the Calendar functionality (for a more-often-than-monthly publication).

    I would also like to find out how it can be done. https://clutchmagonline.com uses wordpress, but I can’t figure out they do the issues.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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