Say you’re looking for a theme for your obscure literary publication. Or perhaps it’s a poetry site. Or something else very artsy. Voila: Press! This Wordpress theme is the one for you. The homepage showcases a lot of content while still remaining very clean and visually appealing.

Category-level pages put the focus on photos, so make sure that is important to you. One minor complaint: the styling of the comment area is a big bold for my taste, but other than that, lovely.

Developer: Obox Design

Features:

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Platformate has a clean and well-organized look, all while showcasing a lot of content. A news or magazine would probably find good use in this theme. Posts by category are featured in the right sidebar, while conversation is encouraged and prominent with recent comments, posts and tags are featured in the left sidebar.

Developer: ColorLabsProject

Features:

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TypeMagz is a visually stunning theme with well suited for an edgy publication, like a music website or something artsy. Though I have to say that a lot of real estate is sacrificed in the name of being design-y. The homepage features a prominent image behind the header (the image can be refreshed), with links to articles nicely highlighted below. Fans of hierarchy beware: there are no hierarchical navigation points, so to speak. Article-level pages feature sidebars that include related, popular posts and search in the sidebar.

The homepage also does a nice job of highlighting a main article, with a slider to the right highlighting additional articles.

Developer: ColorLabsProject

Features:

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Arthemia Premium squeezes a lot of content into it’s clean and minimalistic lines, and is probably best suited for those looking to build a content-heavy website, such as a news or magazine site.

Cross-pollination is the name of the game, with article categories highlighted in a sort of a middle navigation bar (pages and sub-pages make up the top navigation), ‘random posts’ in the bottom (by photo) — a nice feature, and one article from each category highlighted in each article level page. Nice!

The homepage also does a nice job of highlighting a main article, with a slider to the right highlighting additional articles.

Developer: ColorLabsProject

Features:

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The Mortar wordpress theme strikes me as pretty flexible, though its not as content-heavy on first glance. It’s more of a traditional blog theme, except arranged to look much more visually striking. For instance, the homepage posts appear to be in chronological order, but because the posts have thumbnails and are staggered, you don’t think “blog” initially.

The traditional blog categories are under one tab within the top navigation (the rest are pages), so this theme is probably best for a site that needs both a blog as well as prominent static pages, like a business.

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The Journal is a wordpress theme that looks to be designed to showcase a lot of content and provide a lot of ways of providing editorial control.

Highlighted articles are given top billing throughout the site in a pleasant shade of yellow reminiscent of a Post-It note. Recent articles are also squeezed in above the fold in the top nav.

Categories of posts and subcategories fit nicely in the top nav. Despite the focus on text, images are given a lot of play in this theme as well.

One downside with the post-level layout however, is the focus on the “Pages” for the sidebar. Presumably the good, freshly updated content is in Categories, not Pages. But that can easily be remedied with swapping out the widgets, I would assume.

Like the Daily Edition Theme, I wonder if there is a bit too much white space. There’s plenty of utilization of space above the fold, but as you scroll down the content gets a bit sparse.

Colors are simple and lovely, however – with clean white, black, Post It yellow and red playing off each other quite nicely.

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Categories are given left-hand menu treatment in this theme from ThemeSpinner.

The HP does a nice job of featuring stories in three separate ways – through the flash slideshow, through three more featured articles and five more articles in list form below.

Recent articles, comments and most recent (unclear how recent articles and most recent differ) and ad slots are given right and left-hand column treatment. Comes with advertising integrated.

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This category-as-super-nav based theme from ThemeSpinner has a three-column HP layout and a two-column article layout.  Design features of note include a robust footer (most recent, most popular, recent comments), as well as some nice touches put to pages that are normally afterthoughts.

Article level pages feature the author (with gravatar), comments and page views – all which serve to set up the article nicely. The contributor pages, category-level pages and the search results pages all show thumbnails.

Overall, a great, cheaper premium theme for a content-focused site.

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Somewhat of a misnomer, as this theme clearly resembles the New York Times (the New Yorker is a separate magazine), but in any case, this theme gets a resounding thumbs up.

Not for the fact that it’s so similar looking to the NYT, but because of it’s heavy widgetization. Check out their widget map (on the live demo page), and you can see that pretty much the entire thing can be controlled via the theme admin, which is great for people who want some degree of customization but don’t actually want to touch any code.

Now, there probably aren’t that many people who want their site to look exactly like some version of the NYT, but I would imagine it’s easy enough to make a few changes but still use this for a very content heavy site.

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A unique looking magazine/news-style theme with many of the features that any robust WP theme hunter is looking for, including a well-thought out header (categories, pages, RSS and sign in box — would have liked to see newsletter on here) and category-based navigation. What I really like about this theme is that a lot of the little things have been thought of, too.

For instance, the pre-included Google Adsense — but it’s not just thrown up there in annoying places, but in probably quite effective ones (see the HP, and the supernav). Also, on the post pages, the creator added a related/popular/featured posts box — how very nice.

Not a huge fan of the secondary category or tag pages because the featured post seems a bit too large, but they definitely have a personality.

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