MH Magazine Lite is a versatile magazine WordPress theme that can be downloaded free from WordPress.org.
It is currently installed on over 30,000 WordPress websites; which makes it one of the most popular free WordPress themes available today.
The design was created by experienced theme developers MH Themes. You may have come across MH Themes before as they have released many magazine styled WordPress themes over the last few years. They fully support GPL and have released a “Lite” version of many of their designs through WordPress.org.
In this article I would like to show you what MH Magazine Lite can do.
Design and Features
MH Magazine Lite is a responsive WordPress theme that looks great on desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. The design supports WordPress multisite installations, is translation-ready, and has built-in styles for the popular contact form plugin Contact Form 7.
Seven custom widgets are provided with MH Magazine Lite. This includes an affiliate widget, MH Custom Posts widget, MH Posts Focus widget, MH Posts Large widget, MH Posts Stacked widget, MH Slider widget, and MH Tabbed widget. These widgets help you create the magazine style front page that the theme is known for.
Without doubt, MH Magazine Lite is one of the best looking free WordPress designs available on WordPress.org. It rivals many of the premium WordPress themes available in marketplaces such as ThemeForest.
By default the home page displays a list of your latest posts. When using the widgetized Homepage template, you can place several widgets on your front page and display posts based on categories or tags and widgets can be displayed in the sidebar or in one of the four footer columns.
Blog post categories display articles with featured images on the left-hand side. It’s a user-friendly setup that I am sure your visitors will appreciate.
The single post template displays content well with good typography. Blog post meta information is displayed at the top of the page and underneath the article you will see post tags, an author bio box, previous and next post links, and the comment area.
There isn’t a great selection of page templates. Only two page templates are available: The default page template and a home page template.
Customising Your Website with MH Magazine Lite
All customisation options for MH Magazine Lite are handled through the WordPress theme customizer. This allows you to modify a number of areas on your website and see the changes in real-time.
The number of options available to you in MH Magazine Lite are a little limited. You can change some basic layout colours, move the sidebar from right to left, and disable the post author box and post navigation box. You can also define default website settings such as name and description and manage widgets and menus.
I am a big fan of the WordPress theme customizer so I was pleased to see MH Themes place all options for MH Magazine Lite in that area; however there is no denying that the free theme does not give you a lot of control over your website.
The theme does have everything you need to launch an online magazine, though you may want to upgrade to the premium version of the design if you want full control over your theme.
MH Magazine
The premium version of MH Magazine Lite, simply called MH Magazine, retails at $49. Upgrading will unlock many new features and give you priority support from the theme developers.
MH Magazine adds many additional page templates including a full-width page, an authors page, an HTML sitemap, and a contact page. It also adds many more custom widgets and widget locations.
Other features that you will find in the premium version of the theme include social media sharing buttons, a related posts feature, built-in advertising options, a news ticker, Google fonts support, and more typography options.
MH Magazine adds many more great features and additional options. Like MH Magazine Lite, everything is controlled via the WordPress theme customizer.
Check out the table below for a complete breakdown in what features you will unlock if you upgrade from the lite version of MH Magazine to the full version.
MH Themes have a demo area that shows you several different examples of MH Magazine. They highlight how more refined and feature rich the full version of the theme is when compared to the lite version.
The demos show you exactly what can be done with MH Magazine. The example below shows you how it can be used to build a technology blog.
The feature list table displayed previously explains exactly what you will get when you upgrade to MH Magazine, but to really see the difference you need to look at MH Magazine in action.
The content area looks more professional. Additional features such as advertising integration, social media sharing, and related posts, help bring the article to life.
I encourage you to check out the showcase area of MH Themes to see more examples of what MH Magazine can do.
Final Thoughts
I was thoroughly impressed with MH Magazine Lite. It is a functional WordPress theme that looks great and is very easy to use. I recommend checking it out if you are searching for a good free blog or magazine WordPress theme.
There are a lot of reasons to upgrade to the full version of MH Magazine, though I would not recommend purchasing the premium version right away. My advice is to download MH Magazine Lite directly from your WordPress admin area or from WordPress.org. You can then pay to unlock additional features if they are required.
If you are unsure about how to use the free or premium version of MH Magazine, I recommend checking out their installation guide.
The thirty-six minute video tutorial below also walks you through how to get the most out of this design.
To find out more about the design, please visit the MH Magazine Lite on MH Theme’s website.
Thanks for reading.
Kevin