The Magazine Theme is fully customizable, and is a great way to turn your blog into a polished publication. But it requires a large amount of customization that can all be done within the Wordpress administrative interface. You should also have assembled excellent content that includes videos, strong photography, and feature articles.
Use these steps to begin the customization process.

  1. Wordpress setup: Under media settings, set thumbnail size to 225 by 124
  2. Create a page called "home" and apply the Home Page template; set that page as your static site home page
  3. Define two custom fields in that home page: parent-site and parent-name. This will be the link in the right sidebar to your parent organization.
  4. Create a page called "stories" and set that as your blogs post page.
  5. Establish a "Features" category. Stories in that category will appear in home page rotation. You can have as many as you want, but we recommend 3-5 in the rotation.
  6. Establish a "Subfeatures" category. Stories in that category will appear, chronologically, as the three sub-features on the home page
  7. Use the "subcat" custom field to establish a heading category for a post.
  8. Thumbnails are established by the "thumbnail" custom field. Otherwise a default thumbnail will be established.
  9. Feature stories must have a custom field of "feature-photo" with a size of exactly 976x341
  10. Post thumbnails must be exactly 225 x 124; they will be downsized accordingly. Right click on medial library thumbnails to use those as thumbs for a post to avoid double-upload for each post, if desired.
  11. Header image (above story title on single story page) is created with the "header-image" custom field and a link to an image exactly 690 by 329
  12. Home page multimedia is set up via the Home Page Multimedia Widget. Use only YouTube videos and use just the video's ID code, not a full URL to the video.
  13. Byline - to add a byline to an article, add a custom field called "byline"
  14. The List Category page template will display a list of articles after the page content. the articles to display will be based on the list-category custom field that you establish on the page. The other custom field is the "list-number", which will determine how many display if you'd prefer a number different from the site default.
  15. "Subtitle" is the custom field for the text for the subtitle of an article.
  16. Pages do not automatically appear in the navigation bar. To include pages, you must add a "navigation" custom field with a value of "true"
  17. The "Page Blank" template allows you to create a page without sidebars.
  18. Use the "Parent" page attribute to nest pages
  19. Use the "Special Issues" page template to create a special issue. That special issue can be temporarily set as your home page, and it can be archived and saved.
  20. The custom fields for Special Issue pages are 'feature tag', 'subfeaturetag', 'video1', 'videocaption1', 'video2' and 'videocaption2' - use these fields to populate your Special Issue. Note that stories will be selected based on 'tags' instead of 'categories' as the standard home page is. Populate videos using the YouTube code only, not full URL.
  21. On "Special Issues" pages, you can hide videos by using the custom field "hidevideo" and the keyword "yes"