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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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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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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This straightforward theme is probably a good choice for someone who doesn’t know how to do tons of customization. One of the most common questions when implementing a theme is inevitably “How do I change the logo/header”? This developer has thought of that. Advertising in also integrated, as is the popular most commented and most commented functionality.

Would love to see a larger search, email, RSS box, as well as category-based drop down navigation.

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Gorgeous and clean Wordpress theme with a two tiered-navigation menu — page-based and category-based. The majority of the homepage is taken up by the featured story (appears to be the latest story). Nice features include a slick “most popular” sidebar with popular, comments, latest and tags. Another unique feature is the robust footer which manages to pack in six stories in three selected categories. Currently does not come with advertising already implemented.

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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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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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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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