Top 15 Free Magazine Style WordPress Themes
Tons of new WordPress themes pop up every day. Unfortunately, with the high number of total themes that have already been released, it’s hard to separate the good from the bad and almost impossible to sort through the endless repository sites that feature every theme created in the past two years.
After sorting through over 130 magazine style themes here are 15 that emerged as strong leaders in terms of style, usability and functionality - and all are available for free. While some of the premium themes are stunningly well-designed, why pay a high price with great free magazine-style WordPress themes to choose from?
Mimbo
Mimbo is a non-traditional, grid based WordPress theme that many other themes use as a base. Widget-ready and latest posts are featured on the front in a unique wide-thumbnail display.
Options
The generic title is a huge understatement with regard to the number of features and options that are easily changeable on this theme. Included are three different stylesheets, each with a different color scheme, and five ‘sections’ on the main home page which are based on the specific post’s author, tags and categories.
Tag clouds, Flickr streams and video sections make this the most customizable theme in our list.
Hamasaki
The Hamaski theme is our personal favorite, since it’s the only theme that not only uses all the features that we’ve started to love, but makes them easily customizable from within the WP control panel. Strategically placed ad spots, featured post excerpts and menu bar grabs the title for ‘most complete and useful theme from the editors at DesignerTrivia.
Visionary WordPress Theme
The Visionary WordPress theme makes your blog more interactive by allowing you to easily embed YouTube video on the front page. It also comes packaged with a Flash-based video player and a jQuery powered sidebar.
WordPress Premium
The WordPress Premium theme is a free, widget-ready theme that lets you use up to three columns that passes the W3C standards test. It comes with three color combinations: Black, Soft Red and Brown. Featured are easily accessible search and RSS subscription forms, SEO optimized code and strategically placed ad blocks on the sidebar.
The Structure Theme
The Structure Theme is a three-column news and magazine theme that has built-in video and image ‘blocks’ that you can add anywhere on the page. The sidebar features advertising spots, a Flickr RSS display and a jQuery tabbed interface.
Overstand Theme
The Overstand Theme features three columns, and allows custom thumbnails to display on the front page. The blog as both German and English instructions.
Nautica
Nautica WordPress is a direct port of the nautica05 theme that features photo captions, easily controllable content blocks and a concept named ‘banner stories’. The theme may require editing after installation in order to pull your blog posts out of the correct category.
Blubbr
Blubbr is a unique and simple looking WordPress theme that is widget-ready. The latest version offers an Internet Explorer CSS fix as well as a newly implemented pagination feature.
OpenBook
This theme grabs the ‘easiest to install’ title in our list, since unlike most of the other themes we’re covering – the OpenBook theme requires little to no editing and configuration after installing. Simple upload the theme to your blog, and you have a Gravatar-compatiable, widget ready 2 column magazine theme.
The only minus we can find is that the OpenBook author decided to supply an option to crash Internet Explorer 6. We, like many other web designers, find it unprofessional to target a specific group of users based on their browser usage. This option is enabled by default, however it can be disabled from within your WordPress control panel.
Guzel Magazine
The Guzel Magazine WordPress theme is a three column, widget-ready theme with video support, AJAX tabs with Gravitar and custom post thumbnail support. Highly recommended.
NewsWeek
The cleanest and most readable theme in the group, the NewsWeek WordPress theme is designed to showcase featured videos and images, and includes the typical AJAX commodities such as the sidebar tabbed interface. The front page borrows from larger website designs such as CNN.com and Yahoo!, and includes space for a large 300 pixel by 250 pixel advertisement or web video.
Fontella
Most themes use large images to grab the reader’s attention; the Fontella theme uses large fonts which increase readability and structure. This theme is licensed under the Creative Commons.
Blogging Pro
Blogging Pro is a three-column, widget-ready theme that automatically shows your most commented and most recent posts on your front page. Blogging Pro is compatible with WordPress 2.1 and up.
BranfordMagazine
BranfordMagazine was inspired off of Mimbo (see the above theme) and features an AJAX tabbed interface on the front page, inside of a large ‘featured articles’ box (which isn’t included on Minbo). Included are spots for advertising and WordPress widgets.
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