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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This category-as-super-nav based theme from ThemeSpinner has a three-column HP layout and a two-column article layout.  Design features of note include a robust footer (most recent, most popular, recent comments), as well as some nice touches put to pages that are normally afterthoughts.

Article level pages feature the author (with gravatar), comments and page views – all which serve to set up the article nicely. The contributor pages, category-level pages and the search results pages all show thumbnails.

Overall, a great, cheaper premium theme for a content-focused site.

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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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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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