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 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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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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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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NewsPress defies the logic that columns must be differently sized. The theme manages to present two columns of equal width on the HP and it works well. I also like that the featured stories on the HP are not just the latest stories but the latest story by category. A++ for that. Not a huge fan of the ad implementation, but I’m sure that can be easily changed. The search box is in a bit of a weird place, but overall, a very nice theme!

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Among all of PremiumNewsTheme’s themes (See the Live Wire series, for example), I’ve got a soft spot for Flash News. I like the auto scrolling main feature (which runs a touch too fast, but that can be changed), I like the look-and-feel, and I really like how the two nav menus are separated. I also like that there’s a separate video channel, and I like the big footer. I’m not particularly fond of the flickr widget, but I’m sure that too can easily be changed.

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No, the screenshot you are looking at is not CNN. Can’t tell whether it’s the font, the red or something else, but this theme certainly lives up to its name. Gazette is a solid mag-style (or should I say, news-style) theme in a three-column HP design, with some standout features, such as the arresting auto-scroll main feature as well as most-recent posts from different categories as the secondary featured articles.

As with many of PremiumNewsTheme themes, Gazette has prominent search, rss/email and “most popular” module — all tops for me.

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