Medium has lost its high profile as a blogging platform since a third of the staff left and this week they were announcing premium subscriptions. These changes are an important reminder that businesses come and go, and the smart content producer maintains a home on the web with a platform that won't go away: like WordPress.
But before you start, take the time to take a look at How to install a WordPress theme, How many plugins to install on WordPress.
Then, mlet's get to work!
The developers of WordPress themes and plugins sought out the positive features of Medium, and if you're a fan of Medium, you can customize your website to look and behave like it.
Let's look at some of the methods you can employ to modify theappearance of your blog:
- Search for WordPress themes resembling Medium
- Estimation of reading effort
- Customizing the WordPress editor with "Advanced Custom Fields"
- Share what counts
Discover also: How to Display Custom Fields Out of Loop on WordPress
Medium fans may be looking for a feature that allows readers to comment on a portion of the code. This feature is not available on WordPress.
Let's go and see how you can customize your website with features similar to Medium.
Some WordPress themes similar to Medium
Medium pages have a clean, minimalist look. Sometimes you will have a graphic present on top, but most of the time there are just words. This is why almost all WordPress themes with the label “ minimalist In the directory of the WordPress theme could be considered " Medium-like "(Similar to medium).
Discover also our 15 trendy minimalist WordPress themes
All of the following WordPress themes work fine with the " Customizer Of WordPress theme. They all offer a static homepage and offer at least one widget area if you want. Even cooler, all of these WordPress themes are available at WordPress.com.
1.Independent Publisher
It's black text on a white background with simple material before the text, which certainly matches the look of Medium. By default, it uses your Gravatar as a header image. While you cannot estimate the reading time (you will see other options for later), by default, " IP Indicates the number of words in each article, which is a start.
Options include a single column.
The WordPress theme offers the new Webmentions standard. It's a more secure way to let anyone join a conversation. If you are familiar with trackbacks or pingbacks, you will understand the Webmentions.
If you're not, it works like this: You read an interesting or provocative article on someone else's website. You want to respond to the article, but maybe go to your blog to do so. Instead of posting a comment on the original article, you can respond on your own website. Web mentions allow you to link your response to the original article.
Download | Demo | Web hosting
2. Bushwick
This WordPress theme offers more color than " Independent Publisher ”, And also seeks a balance between graphics and text. Don't get me wrong, the text is always front and center, but the left side of the screen offers a nice header. You can customize the color of the header text.
Author, James Dinsdale (with the support of Automattic), suggests Bushwick for a photoblog.
Download | Demo | Web hosting
3 - Wilson
Clean interface, with a lot of nice options. Offers an area for a logo in addition to the standard website icon, multiple widget areas.
The estimate of the reading effort
One of the advantages of Medium was the reading time placed on each article. I'm really not sure if it favors shorter articles, since so many people live with the TL-DR design (" Too Long - Do not Read This is why Medium helps visitors decide whether to read an article or not.
On WordPress, two plugins allow you to offer your readers an estimate of the time it will take to read your articles:
« Reading Time WP »Offers the same simple text as on Medium, and therefore is not very difficult to use. Activate it and label " Reading time Appears automatically after the title of a published article. You can choose to edit the text (for example "Estimated time of reading").
« Worth the Read Encourages the reader to do so through a longer progress bar showing how far the article ends, based on user scrolling. If your posts don't tend to overflow the screen, you probably won't need this plugin - unless you have a lot of mobile traffic, where the screens aren't that big. Note that the display of the progress bar on "touch devices" (whose screen is scrolled with a finger and not the mouse), is not enabled by default.
Customizing the editor with WordPress Advanced Fields
Some people see the WordPress post editor and get nervous. " So many choices, so many buttons. What if I do something wrong? »
One of Medium's goals is to “ minimize barriers to display, ”Which means that when you click write a story, pretty much everything you see is a place to add your title and start writing. Some buttons to make layouts: Bold, italics, quotes, increase or decrease the size of the font, make a link. And all that's left for you to do is publish your article.
Although this process, pretty well described, is quite similar to the one on WordPress, you will not see so much on the Medium editor.
However, you can apply certain options to achieve this result:
You can use the screen options in the " Add a new article To clean up some of the editor's clutter.
You can use editor mode without distraction as well.
If you want to have something a lot closer to the Medium editor, John Huebner offers " Medium Editor for Advanced Custom Fields As an alternative.
Share what counts
It is fine to share the content of articles, and a lot of WordPress plugins allow you to do this with your articles. In most cases, the title of the article is shared. What if the best part of an article isn't the title?
Medium allows readers to select text and share this brilliant idea on their favorite social networks.
You can Use this plugin, which is a solution developed by WPMU Dev.
That's all for this tutorial, I hope it will allow you to add Medium features to your WordPress blog.
