How to Create a Magazine Site on Joomla (Detailed Guideline)
Creating a magazine site on Joomla can be easy when you have the right tools in hands. No matter the type of magazine site you want to create, it all starts with a wonderful magazine Joomla template. Today, we will show you how to create a magazine site on Joomla. Whether you want to create a magazine for fashion, politics, sports, games, technology, marketing, food or any other niches, our detailed guideline has you covered.
A modern magazine site will have a flexible navigation system, post sliders, stylish content layout and sections resembling its particular niche. We will make sure your magazine has all these features including some more advanced ones. Let’s get started.
How is a Magazine Site Different from a Regular News Site?
You may find many news and magazine templates under the same category. It’s because this is where they both belong. Actually, there’s a slight difference between them. The main difference is in the content they have. Apart from that, a news site mainly covers most of the stories happening around. A magazine site, on the other hand, sticks to its niche and publishes content that way.
Aside from news, a magazine goes deep inside stories and draws a bigger picture. Despite the longstanding culture of magazines being weekly, periodical, monthly, quarterly, and even yearly, modern magazine sites don’t go by this pattern anymore. They publish frequent posts on different issues but definitely not as frequently as a news site. An online newspaper covers the current events in a more concise fashion, while magazines seek to inspire, entertain, educate, and inform readers by providing more in depth coverage on timeless information and advice.
As a rule of thumb, a news site needs to have a weather update section, polling system for visitors, news sliders, breaking news sections, and more. A magazine site, on the other hand, may avoid these features by adopting other features like stylish galleries and categorized content presentation instead.
How to Create a Magazine Site on Joomla
Your magazine’s look and feel depends on the type of magazine you would like to create. Don’t worry. There are plenty of templates to cover your magazine niche. You better choose the right template before creating the site. Some of our news and magazine Joomla templates have been downloaded 100K+ times for different sites.
Choose a Magazine Joomla Template for Your Site
You can choose a Joomla magazine template form any of the below options. Make sure you choose the one that goes well with your magazine niche. The available options are:
- Newsberg - Professional Joomla template for news and magazine sites
- Gazette - News, magazine, and blog Joomla template
- NewsKit - Professional Joomla template for news and magazine sites
- Newedge - Responsive Joomla magazine news template
Once you have the right template in hand, you can create a magazine site in a couple of ways— installing a template Quickstart pack for a fresh start, or installing the news template on a Joomla site. Then you are ready to go with your content.
Fresh Journey: Install a Joomla Magazine Template Quickstart Pack
Now that you know the templates you can choose for your magazine site, let’s install the template and get one step closer. We recommend you go for the Quickstart method for a fresh start. The Quickstart pack contains the CMS and template with all its pages including demo content. Installing a Quickstart pack is just like installing Joomla on your server. In this tutorial, we will use our Newsberg template. Please follow the steps below.
Step 1: Create a Database
Visit the MySQL Database Wizard on the cPanel and create a database. In case you don't use cPanel, contact your hosting service provider to learn how to find the database management panel.
Step 2: Upload the Template Quickstart Pack to Your Website’s Root Directory.
Unzip the downloaded Quickstart file then upload that to the “public_html” directory (webroot) of your hosting server. Make sure these files are located directly on the public_html folder.
Step 3: Install the Quickstart Pack by Visiting Your Website Address
Open your browser and go to your main domain (i.e. http://example.com). You will be taken to a page just like below.
Fill out the fields with all the required information and click “Next”. Place your database credentials on the very next page.
If you haven’t missed any required field, you are good to go. Click “Next”. You will be redirected to the Joomla installation overview page where you can find your site’s configuration, database and setting information. You can go to the previous page if you want to make any changes. If everything is ok, just click “Install”.
You are done. Remove the installation folder. You can either visit your site or go to the admin panel straight from the success page.
A magazine site built with our Newsberg Joomla template will look like below.
Customize Your Magazine Site
Your magazine site built with a Quickstart pack will mainly be full of demo content. If you have had a look at the previous screenshot, these are not the content and media files you want to have on your site. Now you have to remove the demo content and add your own content. Before that, you better discard all of the sections you think you don’t need.
Since being built with SP Page Builder Pro and Helix Ultimate, you can customize the look of your magazine site and make it more personalized. So, customize your site the way you want.
Monetization
Most of our news and magazine templates come with monetization opportunities. Newsberg is no different. With the Banner component, you can show ad units on different places of your website and manage from the backend.
Alongside covering stories and events, you can make money by displaying advertisements on your magazine website.
For an Existing Joomla Site: Install a Magazine Template Without the Quickstart Pack
If in any case you don’t want the demo content and want to install the template on your existing Joomla instance— you can just install the template like the way you install any other Joomla template. Make sure you upload the template file without the quickstart pack. Please read this detailed guideline on how to install a Joomla template.
Make your Magazine Site Stand Out
Apart from the regular features, you can enhance your magazine with plenty of advanced ones. Newsberg has multiple hero sections, slider variations, multilingual support, SP Poll component, and many more in the package.
Our templates are capable of making a fully responsive magazine site with an SEO friendly structure. Your site will not only look amazing on mobile but also increase your chances of appearing on the SERPs.
If you have followed each step carefully, you have had your Joomla magazine site by now. If you run into any issues you can contact our support. Also, you can explore more Joomla templates if you want to. We have plenty of Joomla templates and tools to meet your needs. Good luck with your Joomla magazine site.
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You should work more and more on templates speed and performance and you should have your own speed up extensions.