Engine – The best WordPress theme for Review Websites

One of my favourite WordPress themes is Engine. This theme is available on ThemeForest for just $64. In this article, I will list down my top 10 favourite features of each of these Themes.

1. Heat Index

Heat Index is a unique feature of  the Engine theme. The theme calculates the heat index for a post based on the number of views, likes, reactions, ratings and comments. You can also define how you want the heat index to be calculated. You can just your chose multiplier in the Theme Options (see image below) and the Heat Index will be calculated accordingly.

This theme can also assign heat indexes to categories and tags based on the posts within them in a certain time period. You can then display the heat index on individual posts, or display the trending posts or topics (i.e. categories or tags) based on the heat index.

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2. Mini Sites

In Engine, you can select specific categories to show up as sections or mini-sites within your website. These special categories can be displayed with a custom colour, logo and icon. This will give your website a sectional approach. For example, if your website is displaying and reviewing products, you can have mini-sites for each category of products. See how the headers for the two categories in the demo website are displayed – Tech vs Gaming.

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3. Multiple Menu Locations

Engine theme has three custom menu locations:

• Section Menu – This is the menu displaying the icons for the “mini-sites”. For this menu, Mega Menu can be enabled.

• Main Menu – This is a menu that is displayed on clicking the “Menu” Icon.

• Utility Menu – This is a custom menu that can be inserted anywhere on a page.

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4. Multiple Layouts

You can display any post in one of the three available layouts – Classic, Billboard or Longform.

Apart from this, you can create a variety of layouts for your website pages using Page Builder and Panels. Engine comes with a few predefined Panels. And you can also include widgets anywhere on a page using Panels.

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5. Sign-offs

Sign-offs are standard content included at the end of each post, such as information about the author or a disclaimer. You can create an unlimited number of custom “sign-off” boxes in this theme. You can display the sign-off boxes anywhere in a post and can also include HTML-formatted content in these boxes. Though these are considered as Sign-off boxes, you can use these as call-out boxes or message boxes too.

6. Paged Blog

This is widget using which you can include a list of posts anywhere on a page. The website visitor can sort these post based on recency, popularity  or just alphabetical order. You can display the paged blog  one among the five available layouts.

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7. User Reactions

This theme comes with a built-in customizable user reactions feature. This is a cool interactive feature using which website visitors can convey their immediate reaction to you post (like the Facebook “Like” button). It is AJAX-enabled and updates immediately. You can even include your own reactions and even use this for polls as it shows the percentage of people who chose a particular “reaction”.

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8. Awards and Badges

This theme comes with a built-in customizable awards and badges system. I think this is a cool feature as there are endless possibilities of how you can use these. You can use either of these to show a sub-category or label your posts.

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9. “Content” Menus

This is a feature I wish my current theme had, considering how long some of my articles are. Using these “content” menus, website visitors can navigate around the various sections of an article (i.e. a post). This is useful for very long and involved posts, especially using the Longform post format, and is especially useful for review posts with many sections of content.

10. Reviews and Comparisons

I saved the best for last! The supreme feature of this theme is its robust review system with four different metrics :

1. Star-based
2. Point-based (numbers)
3. Percentage-based
4. Letter Grades

Apart from the rating, you can add extra details to your posts, including positives, negatives and a bottom line.

You can also compare two reviews. This is a very handy feature if you are extensively reviewing technical gadgets like phones or cameras.

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Get Engine

If you liked this theme, don’t forget to get it at Theme Forest. If you have a friend who might like this theme for their WordPress website, please do share with them too. You can see a live demo of this theme here.