Here’s a short intro from the theme author:

Pure Magazine WordPress theme is, as its name suggests, theme with pure, minimalistic and usable layout, structured to focus readers attention on content and ads, rather than designer graphics. It is built for large news sites that want to highlight important content and retain readers after their first visit. Web designers may also use it for their online projects and offer their clients web sites with all premium features they will need.

Features:

• Fully flexible layout
• 13 lovely backgrounds to choose from
• Developed with hooks – functions
• Carousel jQuery slider panel
• Featured Post panel
• Fully widgetized front page (3-column widgets)
• Custom translations of all blog areas
• Header / Footer Scripts Management
• Integrated Image Caption
• Relative Dates in Comments
• Choose Blog Title over Image logotype
• Total Feedburner Management
• Custom Control Panel
• Exclude Pages from header
• Exclude Categories from header
• Embeded AdSense Support
• Child Pages Ready (up to 4 level drop-downs)
• Child Categories Ready (up to 4 level drop-downs)
• WP 2.8 full compatibility
• Auto Image Re-size
• Custom Logo
• Author Information
• Advanced Excerpted Content – adjustable length
• Google Analytics Ready
• Gravatar Ready
• Feedburner Ready
• SEO Optimized Code

Screenshots:

Pure Magazine Homepage

Pure Magazine Post page

Pure Magazine Admin Panel

My Take:
Another awesome freemium WordPress theme from Željan Topić of Bizzartic. Like the IsoTherm News theme, the Pure Magazine could’ve easily been sold as a premium theme and people would’ve bought them. It has so many features and its very customizable that you can practically do whatever with it.

For me, the feature that stands out from this theme is the full flexible layout, which lets you mix and match the different front page sections into different combinations and match it according to your taste/preference. From the screenshots you can see that the header looks a bit awkwardly placed between the news stream and the featured post, well thats only one of the combinations that you can do with the layout flexibility of Pure Magazine. If you don’t like that, you can easily change that in the theme options page.

I love the News Stream section where you can display recent posts from different categories and showcase it on your homepage. If you don’t have the time or skills to customize the theme, you can choose from 13 different background images to style your blog. For those of you who love widgets, this theme is widget-ready and has a fully widgetized front page and includes 5 custom widgets for Flickr, Twitter, a 300×250 ad banner, Popular posts and Recent posts.

Like the IsoTherm News theme, this theme has a ton of features that I can’t go through them one-by-one. If you wanna see how the Pure Magazine works, you can check out the demo but better yet, you can just download it, install and upload to your server and play with it. Although this theme is primarily designed for large news sites, I don’t see why it can’t be used on a personal blog or niche blog. I’m sure with its full flexible layout, tons of features and customizability, you can make it work for you.

Once again, hats off to Željan Topić for another awesome freemium WordPress theme. Can’t wait to see your next WordPress theme release.

Preview or Download the Pure Magazine WordPress theme.

Screenshot:

Bug fixes:

• Fixed the spacing problems between sidebar modules.
• Fixed the problem that was causing the wrong comments to be displayed with each post (yay!)
• Corrected the behaviour of links in the sidenotes column to closer reflect my initial intentions.
• Fixed the margins to remove scroll bars when viewed at 1024×768 resolution.

Added features:

• Added Technorati ‘blog reactions’ to posts.
• The dynamic style option allowing you to choose between 16 different colour combinations for your blog right from the admin area. Both light and dark schemes are available.
• Several new admin options including the ability to turn off the ‘Get Firefox’ banner, to use a custom logo in the header, and to configure your badge farm.
• The sidenotes column (only visible on the homepage) is now widgetised!
• There is now an alternate page menu that can be displayed in a row below the header instead of in the top right corner.

New plugin support:

• WordPress Download Monitor – since switching to this plugin my downloads have been working brilliantly.
• Twitt-Twoo – update and display your twitter status in the sidebar of your blog.

My Take:
Dean Robinson did a really great job with Redoable 1.1 but he has outdone himself with this latest version 1.2. Not only has he fixed most if not all the known bugs, but he has also added several cool features. But the feature that stands out is the option to change color schemes with 16 different color schemes to choose from.

Check out the changelog.txt for full details. Or if you wanna know more about installing and upgrading, visit the Redoable homepage.

Preview or download the Redoable 1.2 WordPress theme.

iTheme is a WordPress theme that is designed for the Mac lovers with a truly customizable sidebar. As an administrator, you can customize your sidebar’s contents without modifying the source code using WordPress widgets (no programming required). As an audience, you can rearrange the sidebar by drag & drop or you can collapse the box to save space.

Screenshot:

Basic features:

• Supports WordPress Widgets.
• Drag & drop sidebar
• Tested on WordPress 2.0 and 2.1
• Tested on the following browsers: IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera
• Icons from iMini set
• Drag & drop Javascript by Brothercake.com.

My Take:
I love everything about the iTheme WordPress theme, from the background to the icons to the drag-n-drop sidebar. It just seems that there’s nothing you can’t like about this theme and I’m sure it won’t be long before someone comes up with a modified version of this theme.

I’d love to see the iTheme have different color schemes or maybe themes based on the different Mac OS versions. I’d also wanna see a footer or bottom bar added to this theme to accommodate other content that you can’t have on the sidebar. Overall, I give the iTheme a 5 out of 5. Excellent job Nick! Can’t wait to see your upcoming free WordPress themes.

Preview or Download the iTheme WordPress theme.

Redoable is a 3 column, widget and module ready free WordPress theme created by Dean J. Robinson. Redoable was built using the code of the popular WordPress theme K2 with a lot of modifications making it a totally different theme on it’s own. This theme’s sidebar is widget and module ready with over 20 different available modules to choose from. A default installation would display the calendar, categories, tags, blogroll and listen & watch modules as long as the necessary plugins are installed. You can add more modules or widgets to your liking.

Redoable has a feature called Sidenotes which is based on Matt’s Asides technique used in K2. You can set the category and number of sidenotes that you want to display from the Redoable options panel. Sidenotes are displayed in the homepage. Like in K2, you can setup the Extended Live Archives from the Redoable options pane and an option to add the Archives page. Redoable also supports Alex King’s Articles plugin.

Redoable is compatible for both WordPress 2.0.x and WordPress 2.1 installations.

Screenshot:

Supported plugins:

The following plugins are supported by Redoable “out-of-the-box”. Just download them, add them to your plugins folder, activate and your good to go.

• Alex King’s Articles v1.1
• Brian’s Latest Comments v1.5.10
• Extended Live Archives v0.10beta-r18
• Semiologic’s Google Analytics Plugin v1.9
• Gregarious v1.5.2 and v2 beta
• Noteworthy v1.0
• Random Quotes v1.3
• Rechuked Buttons v1.0 (Based on Sawchuck Buttons) Not WP2.1 compatible
• Related Posts v2.04
• Share This v1.4
• Ultimate Tag Warrior v3.1415926
• Ultimate Category Cloud v2.0 (Based on Weighted Categories plugin)
• Word Count v0.01
• WP-PostRatings v1.04
• WP-PostViews v1.1
• iMP Download Manager v1.2
• Quoter v1.1
• Subscribe to Comments v2.0.8
• Spam Karma 2
• wp-recent-links v2.0

Known Issues

• Some people are experiencing a problem where the comments and the permalinks are all referring to the incorrect posts. As yet I have been unable to replicate this problem, and it doesn’t seem to happen on everyones blog. It could be related to the use of different permalink structures, but as yet I don’t have a solution for it.
• Sidebar overlap issue. This hasn’t been completely fixed but the sidebar will now overlap on top of the footer instead of disappearing behind it when there is only a small amount of page contents.
• LiveSearch doesn’t seem to work with custom permalinks. This has also been reported by other users of K2 (which Redoable is based on), but as yet no-one has had a good answer.

My Take:

I like this theme inspite of it’s issues. Redoable has a simple and neat layout. It offers a lot of functionality and customization with widgets and it’s ready-to-use modules. Redoable also supports a lot of the commonly used plugins. The color scheme is okay but not appealing to some users. What I want to see is the Redoable theme to be available in a different color scheme or to have the option to change color schemes from the Redoable Options panel.

To know more or to download a copy, visit the Redoable homepage.