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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This theme has a nice approach to video, incorporating it in an ajax tab on the HP as well as, at least in the way the demo is set up, as a category.

Comes equipped with a lot of visual variety on the HP, showcasing a ton of content through the main well, and two other content columns. The individual post pages are a bit on the plain side.

If you like this theme, you might also be interested in the Revolution series, which also contains page and category-based navigation, prominent RSS/email and search.

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Really nice sense of balance with this magazine/news-style theme. It manages to get a lot of content onto the homepage, but without seemed too cluttered.

Categories get drop down top nav treatment. Other nice features include a tabbed main feature on the HP and video integration.

The latest release comes with three color schemes – brown, red or green.

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Good for someone looking for a basic, but clean looking theme that I would classify as more “robust blog” than magazine-style. This one is out from the same creators of the Ashes Theme, Wordpress Designers. Unlike Ashes, however, the featured posts don’t get “slider” treatment, rather a more static piece of real estate at the very top.

This one also comes with advertising integrated as well as image resizing.

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Solid, if somewhat basic premium themes out from the Wordpress Designers group.

Clean design with some nice features like the multiple featured story, color blocking on mouseover and auto image resizing. Hard to get a feel for what the category pages are like since there aren’t too many posts in the demo, but overall a nice theme.

As far as I can tell, the Ashes Pro version has two top navs (page and category-based) instead of just one, as well as more advertising integrated (additional 468×60).

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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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Overall, I think the Live Wire series does a good job of presenting a lot of information with balance. Critical items like category and page-based navigation are taken care of (though I would prefer that colored portion of the menus highlight the categories rather than the pages). I love that they all come equipped with prominent search and rss/email. Two nitpicks — personally, I do not find the flickr images a good use of HP real estate, and the bottom of the HP seems to falter a bit with the video and the whitespace next to it. A robust footer would be a nice addition.

There are also two other variations on the Live Wire theme (Live Wire 2.0 is shown below) — Live Wire Edition, which is blue and more newsy, and Live Wire Style, which is red and more men’s magazine.

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