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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This is a great example of a clean, minimalist Wordpress news-theme with a nice emphasis on images. Could see this being used for a recipe or food site.

Homepage uses  a slick featured content well, and stays uncluttered by employing two top menus – the supernav for the less-accessed things like “About Us”, etc, and primary navigation is reserved for categories (and subcategories) of content. The homepage has a prominent place for the once very common popular box, which showcases the most popular etc. posts: “Popular”, “Latest”, “Comments”, “Tags”.

Category landing pages have a nice presentation – similar to the homepage, they’re not just a bunch of text links slapped together. The subcategory landing pages are a bit more typical.

Overall, a nice theme, but a little bit too much white space for my taste.

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A place for everything and everything in its place. This Wordpress theme does a nice job of bridging the gap between a blog and a full-blown magazine-style site. The look has a lot of personality, some might say on the crafty/feminine side, which could either be a great thing or a bad thing depending on if you want to use it out of the box. The theme comes with options so don’t get discouraged if paper isn’t your thing. Options include: “default, newspaper, red print, wood and floral prints.”

Preserves a few very bloggy themes like the posts by calendar (see the right sidebar) and the tag cloud.

Other nice touches: prominent call out RSS feeds by post, comments and email (feedburner)

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An elegant and appropriately named magazine-style theme (that also comes with an alternate more bloggy template) from the folks over at WooThemes. Category-style navigation is nice, but the top menu (with image gallery etc) is implemented cleanly.

Downsides: a little too much white-space for my liking.
Upsides: image & video gallery. More image-oriented instead of text-heavy (for instance, category landing pages are not your boring list of headlines & teases, but an image-driven page.)

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