Salla – Blog & Magazine WordPress Theme

Views count who opened, not what they liked

One post racks up plenty of views and another barely moves. That tells you which one drew the click, but nothing about how it felt to whoever reached the end. With only that figure, the next topic is picked blind.

On a personal blog, the most useful signal for deciding what to write is the one readers leave after reading. Salla, by Frenify, is a WordPress theme for personal blogs and magazines on lifestyle, fashion and beauty, design and healthy living. It brings that signal into the post itself with reactions and votes, and pairs it with tools that keep readers on the site.

Reactions and votes inside each post

Both are turned on from the theme options, and you can show or hide the title of each block.

• Ten prebuilt reactions, which can be reordered and enabled or disabled one by one, with editable text.
• Custom reactions, created with an image, a title and an ID. A 200x200 PNG is recommended for the image.
• Built-in voting system, switched on with a toggle.
• Counts kept: turning off the reactions block or the votes block does not erase the saved figures.

Custom reactions need one precaution: the ID only accepts English letters and underscores, and it should not be changed later. If you change it, the counter shows 0; entering the old ID again brings the count back.

Three tools that keep readers on the blog

Autoloading posts. When a post ends, more content loads, and the reader carries on without going back to the list.

Hot Posts. These are published posts ranked by all-time views. To enable them, you create a page with any title, assign it the Hot Page template and publish it. Because it counts the full history, older content starts ahead of what was just published.

Custom widgets. Frenify Custom Categories, Featured Articles, Followers, Social and Top Articles, along with a sticky sidebar, a back-to-top button and share options.

Post formats and eight blog layouts

• Post formats: standard, image, gallery, video, audio, quote and link, each with its own options panel.
• External audio and video through embed code, for example from YouTube, SoundCloud or Spotify.
• Eight blog layouts, five of which can be used on their own.
• Per-post style: full width or with a sidebar, chosen in each post's options.
• Over 800 Google Fonts, global colors, regular and retina logos, and custom CSS without editing theme files.

Preparing Salla Core and your blog page

The theme relies on the Salla Core plugin: without it, not all features are available. The one-click importer requires SSL, and on the server it is worth raising memory_limit to 96M, max_input_vars to 3000 and max_execution_time to 600. Setup follows this order:

1. Make a backup and avoid importing onto a site with a lot of content.
2. Install and activate the theme, then activate Salla Core.
3. Import the data from Salla, Import Demo Data. If it fails or you have no SSL, the manual XML method remains.
4. Create a page, assign it the Blog Page template and publish it.
5. Choose it as the front page in Settings, Reading, with the static page option.

When you need a shop or another builder

Salla is made for publishing, and its features include neither a shop nor a members area. The subscribe form does not work by itself either: it is enabled in the footer options and needs a plugin's shortcode, with Mailchimp for WP or WPForms Lite as the intended options.

To add sales to a blog, look at Morvarid, a minimalist blog and shop theme. Lemars is also aimed at personal lifestyle, fashion and beauty blogs, and supports Elementor, WPBakery and the block editor.

Questions from people who run a personal blog

Do Hot Posts show the most read posts of the week?

No. They rank posts by their all-time views.

Does it work for a blog with a podcast or video?

Yes, with external audio and video. You paste the embed code into the post, and videos adapt to their container.

Is it optimized for Gutenberg?

Yes, the theme is optimized for the block editor.

What do I need for the newsletter?

A subscribe plugin. You enable the switch in the footer options and paste its shortcode.