By the creator of Mimbo Pro, the Elemental framework is well thought out and a good choice for a content-heavy website. The homepage retains a typical blog format, however, unlike Mimbo Pro – one main story is featured, with posts organized chronologically. I almost prefer the category pages, where snippets of posts are listed. The category and subcategory pages have a nicely updated breadcrumb feature, which is always good for SEO.

Being a framework/CMS, Elemental is highly configurable. There are a lot of things which can be controlled from the admin panel, which some of the videos on the Elemental page attest to, for instance changing up which categories and pages are blocked from the front page. If you’re someone who shies away from touching actual code, then this may be the framework for you.

The site also has a feed of your latest twitter posts, which is a nice way to include conversation into the post, as well as “popular posts” and what I’ll term a post utility bar.

The two top navigation menus are handled well, separated by the header so that all of your options are clearly accessible.

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The Revolution Series does what any theme claiming to be a magazine-style theme should do, and then some. Revolution Pro Media adds more multimedia to the mix than some of the other Revolution variations, such as Revolution Magazine or Revolution News. Flickr images and video is integrated prominently. A unique feature of this theme is the tagged/tags section of the main well, which for those of you who hate auto-scrollers/sliders, is a neat way to present a lot of information.

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I think I’d put this theme in more of the robust blog camp, in that it appears to be page-based-navigation (correct me if I’m wrong). The theme layout is perhaps more text-heavy than others. Unique design elements include the big footer, the “quote box” (upper left hand corner) as well as the HP latest entry — all in text. The prominent search box is nice.

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The Revolution Wordpress Theme series (comes in different flavors, Revolution Magazine, Revolution Tech, Revolutions Sports, etc) is a nice jumping off point for anyone interested in content-rich sites.

Standard mag-style features include two-tiered top-nav: page-based for the first tier and category-based for the 2nd tier (with subcategory drop downs). Touches which distinguish this theme from others in the Revolution series and other mag-style themes in general is a large call-out to subscribe (hugely important to get return visitors), as well as a tabbed treatment for the main HP feature. Another nice thing with the Revolution series is that there are phpBB3 forum templates included.

One nitpick: I would like to see some “most popular” type features and more advertising out of the box.

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This Wordpress theme by Solostream offers critical magazine-style features with some emphasis on community. A big check to my #1 must-have — a category-based nav — as well as a large and potentially auto-scrolling main feature. But prominent too is the “most popular”/comments/tags/etc block on the HP; recent comments and gravatars get play as well. Comments on the article pages are nicely color-blocked.

The version I’m referring to is the version in the live demo; the theme comes with several different layouts for its HP and category pages.

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What I like about this paid theme is the great job it does showcasing a lot of content very effectively. The HP manages to squeeze in 13+ article options (1 main well, 5 recent stories, 4 secondary stories with image (in slider), and then 3 more articles (with 3 links each!), yet maintains a clean and balanced feel. Same goes for category/subcategory landing pages, which very gracefully highlights one story, gives another four stories less emphasis, then finally offers up 8 story headlines. Some other very nice touches include a breadcrumb, except in English — i.e. instead of Category > Subcategory > SubsubCategory, this theme has “You are here: Home -> Election ’08 -> Huckabee Angling for Debate With McCain”. Another nice touch is the article -level pages, where color zoning highlights “More from this category” and “More from this author.”

Comments are currently located in the robust footer, which may not be ideal for some, but is probably easy enough to change. Another benefit is the auto image resizer described as follows: “custom script that automatically crops and resizes images – no more creating two or three versions of each image.”

More Info | Live Demo