Features:

• Built from the ground up using HTML5 and CSS3
• Portfolio custom post types
• Custom admin settings
• 2 alternative homepage image slider templates
• Admin settings for featured images in slider
• Widget-ready
• 2 columns
• Gravatar support
• Compatible with Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari

Screenshots:
Homepage

Blog

Post

Portfolio

Admin Settings

Aside from it’s clean, sleek and professional design, the Graphite WordPress theme also has very good typography. It also features a very nice image slider with cool transitions on the homepage. Graphite is widget-ready and has built-in gravatar support. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to support threaded comments. Overall, the Graphite theme is still a very beautiful WordPress theme that should fit not only creative companies and individuals but any WordPress user who likes these types of themes.

As a bonus for MediaLoot subscribers (premium members) they will also get the original Fireworks PNG and PSD source files for Home Page, Portfolio Page, About Us Page & Blog Page in the download package.

Preview or Download the Graphite WordPress theme from MediaLoot.

Speaking of MediaLoot, I’m giving away 3 1-year MediaLoot Elite Memberships worth $288/each. Check out this post for more details.

Of all the theme styles and layouts, my most favorite is the magazine style layout. Today, I’m gonna share with you another freemium WordPress theme with a magazine style layout. Created by WP Skinner, the Moi Magazine theme is a 2 column, magazine style WordPress theme with a modern and elegant design. Here’s a little introduction from the theme author:

Moi Magazine is a free 2 column magazine style WordPress Theme. It looks very modern and elegant from the front end and offering vast Admin options at the back end. With a wide variety of tunable Theme options in the admin menu you don’t need to edit .php files manually to do basic theme adjustments.

Features:

• Modern & Elegant look
• Fast loading structure
• Jquery powered Random posts on homepage
• Recent posts with Thumbnails
• Sidebar 125 x 125 ads support
• Social icons integrated
• Admin options page to adjust theme settings
• Jquery Lavalamp menu installed
• Twitter and RSS button pre-installed
• Thumbnail support for homepage and posts
• Email subscription form available
• Supports comments threading and paging
• Fully WP 2.8.5 support
• Premium Quality
• Fixed Width
• 2 Columns
• Right Sidebar
• All the other fancy bells and whistles
• Free of cost

Screenshots:

Homepage

Post page

Admin Options

My Take:
The Moi Magazine theme is a beautiful magazine style WordPress theme that is free but contains elements and features found in many premium WordPress themes. If you like magazine style layouts, then you’d most likely love the Moi Magazine WordPress theme.

Fast loading structure. Aside from the modern and elegant design, the first thing I noticed about this theme is that it loaded quite fast compared to other magazine style themes or themes that used a lot of graphics. I’m sure a lot of users would take that into consideration because page speed and page load times are becoming more important these days.

The features that I like most on this theme are the hovering effect/style on the nav bar (Home, About, etc) and the JQuery-powered random posts with small thumbnails that’s located below the header and on top of the first post in the homepage. The latter is a good way to feature or promote your articles to your blog readers and visitors. I also like the layout used for the Latest Articles (Recent Posts), aside from the thumbnail it also features an excerpt of the post, total number of comments, dates posted and author’s name.

All premium themes have an admin options page but not all free WordPress themes have it. One of the features that makes the Moi Magazine a freemium (free & premium-quality) theme is its admin options page. Once the theme is installed, you can find it under the Appearance tab > Moi Magazine Theme Options menu. From there, you can control the Twitter and RSS buttons – enter your Twitter name and your blog’s feed or Feedburner address. You can also manage the 125×125 banner ads and specify the banner URLs and links. Last but not least, you can also setup the Email Subscription Form.

The theme file download includes all custom graphics – Twitter icon, RSS icon, comment icon, blockquote icons, etc. and also the social icons (RSS, del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Stumbleupon & Technorati) used for the bookmarking – “Share this post” section.

Other notable features on the Moi Magazine are support for comment threading and paging and built-in gravatar support. This theme also doesn’t require any plugins to be installed so users can immediately use it after the files have all been uploaded and the theme has been activated.

Kudos to the folks over at WP Skinner for creating and releasing this beautiful freemium WordPress theme free of charge. This theme is not really new, it was released late October of 2009 and I’m hoping to see them release a new theme soon.

Preview or Download the Moi Magazine WordPress Theme.

NOTE: This theme was scanned using the Theme Authenticity Checker and doesn’t contain any hidden or encrypted code.

A couple years back you’ll have a difficult time finding a good portfolio style WordPress theme thats free. These days, there are lots of very nice premium quality portfolio themes that WordPress users can choose from. One of those themes comes from Graph Paper Press and its called the Work-A-Holic theme.

Work-a-holic is a free minimalistic two and three column WordPress theme that focuses mainly on showcasing portfolios for artists, web designers, photographers and illustrators. Work-a-holic separates your portfolio from your blog, enabling easy navigation for clients in a clean, intuitive fashion. It also has a separate sidebar for portfolio (shows recent projects) and a separate widgetized sidebar for the blog and pages.

Main Features:

• Separate Blog and Portfolio Section
• Blog lists posts as normal blog
• Portfolio pulls latest thumbnail of the post and lists each of them on three columns
• Multiple image gallery container (slider) on portfolio posts
• Basic Theme Options
• Twitter integrated – shows latest Tweet
• Separate sidebar on Portfolio and normal sidebar on Blog
• One Page template with separate sidebar
• Ability to have a separate desired Thumbnail if WP-Post-Thumbnail plugin is installed
• jQuery effects on Portfolio thumbnails
• Multi-level Drop Down Menu
• Support Nested Comments
• Three footer widgets
• Uses 960 css framework and jQuery javascript framework
• XHML: This theme has been tested on Firefox, Safari, IE 8, 7, 6.

Screenshots:
Portfolio Homepage

Blog Homepage

Blog Post

My Take:
If you’re an artist, web designer, photographer or illustrator who’s planning to create a WordPress-powered online portfolio, you should definitely check out the Work-A-Holic theme. If was gonna create my own online portfolio, I’d definitely consider this theme. Its simple and minimalistic but doesn’t lack on the features/functions that you’ll need for an online portfolio. This theme also lets you put up a blog and have it separate from the portfolio.

Basic features include widgetized sidebars, widgetized bottom bar/footer with custom widgets, built-in gravatar support, Twitter integration and nested comments support. For the portfolio section of this theme, you can have a multiple image gallery on your portfolio posts with jQuery effects on the portfolio thumbnails and if you have the WP-Post-Thumbnail plugin installed, you can choose to have a separate thumbnail.

This theme only has one color scheme but because it doesn’t use much custom graphics making it highly customizable. Customizing this theme is something that can be easily done via a few tweaks on the stylesheet and/or using your own custom background image. The Work-A-Holic theme has an option page that lets the user specify the Blog Category ID and Twitter username.

In the Work-A-Holic post page, the author has provided some links with examples of the built-in gallery script in action, portfolio category archive, blog archive and page template. There’s also a video tutorial on how to separate the blog and portfolio and setting up the images and excerpts on Work-a-Holic. The theme files also include an html file with instructions on how to install, setup and configure the Work-A-Holic theme.

The Work-A-Holic is an excellent portfolio style freemium WordPress theme and kudos to the folks at Graph Paper Press for a job well done and for creating and releasing it to the public.

IMPORTANT: Graph Paper Press requires users to sign-up with a valid email address to download their themes.

Preview or Download the Work-A-Holic WordPress theme.

NOTE: This theme was scanned using the Theme Authenticity Checker and doesn’t contain any hidden or encrypted code.

These days, its not uncommon to find free premium quality WordPress themes. A lot of WordPress theme authors, design websites and even Premium theme sellers are now creating and releasing freemium WordPress themes and sharing it with the WordPress community. One good example of such a theme is the Milano theme brought to us by Web2Feel. The Milano theme is an advance magazine style, 2-columned theme that has the qualities of a premium theme and lots of built-in features.

Here’s a short description for the Milano theme.

This is an elegant theme designed with attractive color combination for bloggers who look to make money online via ads. This theme is suitable for any niche. The theme layout is stylish and dynamic contents modules like, image slider, tabbed content area are built into it.

List of Features:

• Premium theme layout
• Multi-level dropdown javascript navigation menu
• Featured sliding posts
• Site wide customizable 125 x 125 custom banner ads
• Adsense enabled
• Tabbed content area * Featured Video * Recent posts * Popular Posts
• Two widgetized sidebars
• Customizable welcome message
• Page navigation enabled
• WP 2.7 ready, threaded comments
• Theme support
• Custom theme option page in the admin panel

Screenshot:

My Take:
Like the Monkeypr theme that I reviewed recently, the Milano is hands down a very pretty and well designed WordPress theme and could easily be marketed as a premium theme. It has a lot of features and built-in functions that most free WordPress themes don’t have and can be found only on premium themes.

The feature that stands out the most from the Milano theme is the featured post slideshow. This feature not only enables the author a cool and attractive way to promote the featured posts but it also provides the user easy access to check out the blog’s featured posts. You can configure the slider, video, Adsense and banner ads from within the WP dashboard via the theme options page. It also has features a javascript-powered multi-level drop down navigation menu that is useful when your blog has a lot of categories and sub-categories.

The Milano theme features page navigation, post excerpts and popular posts and in order for it to work, you’ll have to install 3 plugins – WP Page Navi, Popularity Contest and Limit Post. The theme author has included those 3 plugins into the theme download zip file. This theme also uses the TimThumb script to generate the post thumbnails.

So far, I haven’t found anything negative to say about the Milano theme. Maybe the only things that can be an issue for some users are the color scheme and those required plugins, but those can be easily fixed with a few minor tweaks. Other than that, the Milano theme is an awesome theme. It’s very customizable, easy to install, has lots of features and can be used by any blogger and used for any type of blog niche – personal, technology, entertainment, sports, movie reviews, gadgets, etc.

Great job by the theme designer and hope they’d release more free WordPress themes like these in the near future. Btw, the theme author also provided the PSD file for the header logo, so users can customize it to their own preference.

For more detailed installation instructions, check out the Milano Theme Setup Guide.

Preview or Download the Milano WordPress theme.

Here’s a beautiful freemium (free and premium quality) WordPress theme from Retro Design Studio called Monkeypr which was released earlier this month. The theme page doesn’t contain any details or information so I can’t really provide much information except for the stuff that I’ve seen and observed from the demo. Monkeypr is a 2 column, widget-ready WordPress theme that includes built-in gravatar support and custom graphics.

Basic features:

• 2 columns
• Widget-ready
• Built-in gravatar support
• Custom graphics
• Custom header editor
• Ajax sliding content header
• Sticky post feature
• Footer content section

Screenshot:

My Take:
With regards to the design and layout, the Monkeypr theme is awesome and is easily one of the best looking free WordPress themes around. It also has the basic features like widget-ready sidebar and built-in gravatar support that most blogs need. It has very nice custom graphics and includes a custom header editor that lets the user customize the font color and a few other settings.

I also like the jscript-powered Ajax sliding content header, found at the upper right section of the blog, beside the blog header. It lets the blog author display important announcements or news to their readers. The user navigates through the different news articles using the arrows found on each side.

Unfortunately, the Monkeypr WordPress theme lacks the proper documentation. The theme page only contains the live demo and download links and doesn’t have any information regarding theme installation. The only documentation found in the theme file is the readme.txt file which is written in Turkish. So even if the theme is simple and easy to install for some, it might be a nightmare for others who aren’t familiar with WordPress theme file structures and stuff. I tried installing it on my blog to see how it works and I was able to run it but I had an issue with one file – border-radius.htc (found in root folder). I don’t know what its for and how you install it. This file is mentioned in the readme.txt file but because it is in Turkish, I don’t understand the instructions.

Some users might have an issue with are the sidebar title graphics – category, archives, pages which are all in Turkish. The theme author didn’t provide the PSD file for these custom graphics so the user who wants to use the Monkeypr theme has to create their own custom graphics for the sidebar titles.

The Monkeypr theme includes a built-in 125×125 banner ads support but because of the lack of documentation, users won’t be able to use it. From what I can see, the only way to do it is to manually code the banner ad links and image source into the sidebar. Another thing that users (especially those who use a lot of images in their posts) need to consider is the post/content width. The default width is around 371 pixels, is quite narrow compared to other regular WordPress themes. So if your post images are larger than that, you’ll have to fix them so they won’t overlap.

The Monkeypr WordPress theme is such a beautiful and well designed theme and it’s very unfortunate that the theme author didn’t spend time to include proper documentation. I’m sure more WP users would’ve installed or would be able to use this theme if there was proper documentation and installation instructions included in the theme file.

If you’re Turkish or if you are able to create your own custom graphics or have someone do it for you and if you don’t mind getting your hands “dirty”, then installing/using this theme on your blog won’t be a problem. The theme works well except for the issues that I pointed out earlier. The best way to find out if this theme works on your blog is to download, install and activate it.

Inspite of all the issues, the theme author still deserves credit for creating a very beautiful free WordPress theme and sharing it with us. Kudos to the folks from Retro Design Studio!

Preview or Download the Monkeypr theme for WordPress.