A vibrant personal blog theme with a colourful selection of styles, built on WooThemes flexible theme framework, boasting a selection of theme options, most importantly it’s FREE!

Mainstream is a 2 columned, widgetized theme that’s primarily designed for personal blogs.

Basic Features:

• 2 columns
• Custom widgets
• Widgetized sidebar
• Integrated banner ad management
• 5 color schemes

Screenshots:

This is the default color scheme and other available color schemes are blue, khaki, violet and minimal (light grey).

My Take:
The Mainstream WordPress theme features some ribbon elements like similar to another free WordPress theme I previously featured here called the Imprezz theme. The ribbon elements I’m talking about are the graphics used for the edges of the welcome message and segment titles – Search, Pages, Sponsors, etc.

The default setup of the Mainstream theme features categories and sub-categories on top and I know some users like it that way but I also know that this setup doesn’t work for some. With a little bit of modification, you can edit the code and replace it instead with page links and then move the category links to the sidebar.

I like how there’s a section on the upper right corner of the theme dedicated for the RSS feed, Twitter and Facebook, which makes it easy for readers and visitors to subscribe to the blog. You can always modify this and customize to your own personal preference like if you’re not using Twitter or Facebook and would like to replace the links with Myspace, FriendFeed, Plurk or other social networking sites or social bookmarking sites.

Unlike its premium theme counterparts, the Mainstream theme doesn’t have any admin panel options but does have some custom sidebar widgets (Search, 125×125 ads, Flickr, Twitter) that can be used to customize the appearance and displayed content on the sidebar. If you have the skills to tweak and customize WordPress themes, you can do more stuff with this theme and make it better or make it more customized to your blog’s needs.

Overall, the Mainstream theme is a colorful and vibrant theme that can be used for any type of blog, not only personal blogs. It doesn’t have much advance options but it does provide all the basic features and functionality that most self-hosted WordPress blogs need. Since this theme is a free theme, WooThemes doesn’t provide any kind of support for it so before you use it, make sure that you or someone you know has the necessary skills/knowledge to tweak or customize WordPress themes so you won’t have any problems using or customizing it for your blog.

Preview or Download the Mainstream WordPress theme.

Last week he announced the release of Revolution WordPress theme. This theme is geared for people who would like to use WordPress as a CMS (Content Management System).

Screenshot:

The Revolution WordPress theme is ideal for: online newspapers, online magazines, church websites, real estate agents, corporate blogs, personal blogs, photo blogs, celebrity blogs, affiliate marketing, WordPress MU users.

Basic Features:

• XHTML & CSS standards compliant
• Works out of the box. No plugins required
• Tested on IE 6 & 7, Firefox
• Multi-column

Revolution is a premium WordPress theme, therefore it is not free for download and you’ll have to purchase it. The theme is currently available in two packages. The Personal Package which costs $59.95 is for the blogger who wants to use this theme for personal blogs and websites. With this package, the customer may use it as many times as they want as long as it’s for personal use and that the credits remain intact in the footer.The Developer Package priced at $249.95, is for web designers or webmasters who want to use the theme as a base for their client’s websites. With this package, the user may remove the footer credits but will have to pay a license fee for each subsequent use. The author also plans to release a Blog Package which may cost around $19.95.

Users who will purchase the theme will also have unlimited access to resources like theme support, tutorials, additional stylesheets and background images.

My Take:
The release of Revolution could start a new trend on premium WordPress themes and a new market of affordable and highly customizable WordPress themes. I like what I see and I’m curious to know more about this theme and what it can do. If Brian decides to release the Blog Package, I might get one for myself. Btw, I give the Revolution a 4.5 out 5.

Preview or Purchase the Revolution WordPress theme.

The theme is called Skittlish. It was created by Cristi Balan for Mephisto, a Ruby on Rails weblog publishing system. Cristi deserves the vast majority of credit and love for this theme. I simply threw some WordPress guts into it. I was a bit unsure if it was kosher to port Skittlish as I couldn’t find a license for it, but after a couple of failed attempts to contact Cristi I went ahead and ported the sucker.

Screenshot:

Skittlish has been tested with the latest versions of Firefox, Safari, Flock, Camino, OmniWeb, and Opera. Other features of Skittlish include Christian Montoya‘s comment.php template, support for hatom and built-in support for the following WordPress plugins:

• Ultimate Tag Warrior
• Similar Posts
• Live Comment Preview
• Gravatars
• Get Recent Comments
• OpenID plugin

Skittlish works right out of the box and would work fine with or without the mentioned plugins.

Skittlish is designed to work with later versions of WordPress, meaning versions 2.0 and up. So if you’re running an older version of WordPress and encounter any problems, the reason for it would be the 2.1 specific tags. The best thing to do is upgrade your WordPress installation.

My Take:
I love clean themes and that means that I also love this theme but not enough to make me change my current theme. What I love most about it is it’s seven color option. The fixed or fluid width option is a cool feature since visitors have different screen resolutions and they can adjust the theme to fit their screen. But for the blog owner, you have to make sure that the images and other media that you insert in your posts aren’t too wide or else you’ll have them overlapping into your sidebar when the width is made narrow. One more thing, Skittlish is not widget-ready. Overall, I give it a 3.5 out of 5.

Preview or Download the Skittlish WordPress theme.

Screenshot:

My Take
On a scale of 1 to 5 and 5 being the highest, I give the Zenlike a 3.5. I like the way it’s designed, simple and clean. The color scheme is good but I think the shade of green used for the menu doesn’t match the background. I think this could be improved and would look better with a brown color scheme. I like the wood panel background which makes the Zenlike unique compared to most free WordPress themes. Because the Zenlike theme is widget ready, you can add your favorite widgets and customize it.

I’m not a fan of the Georgia and Times New Roman fonts because of the issue of readability. One of the most important aspects of a blog or website is the font. The recommended typeface to use is Sans Serif. The most commonly used and known ones are Arial, Tahoma and Verdana. The Sans Serif typeface have become the standard for content text, especially online because computer monitors and other electronic screens provide a cleaner and more legible rendering of sans-serif fonts than serif fonts. So if you decide to use the Zenlike theme, you can just edit the style sheet and change the font style.

Check out or download the Zenlike WordPress theme.