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.

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:

Basic features:

• Optimized for speed and loading time
• SEO optimal titles
• SEO optimal page layout and headings
• XHTML/CSS valid
• Customized 404 page
• Link to admin menu from home page
• 3 column theme
• Integrated Social bookmark buttons
• Integrated Multi Page widget (http://www.taragana.com/site/)
• Prints parent category in title
• Incoming Google image searches are expanded to site
• Integrated Chunk URL (http://www.village-idiot.org/)
• Adsense ready

My Take:
I love this theme! If I had a personal blog, I’d use this theme right away. Btw this theme is not only for personal blogs because it’s SEO optimized, Adsense ready and includes social networking support which are ideal features for a niche blog.

The two level navigation is also a nice integration into this theme because it can save space and provide a way for the user to highlight the important categories of the blog. Vladimir also made two very good choices: the color scheme and the font types. The colors used in Amazing Grace has a cool and soothing effect to the eyes and the font types are easy to read. It’s also widget-ready which makes it appealing to more WordPress users. One more thing I love about this theme is how fast it loads. As mentioned earlier, the author optimized it so it loads faster than a regular theme would.

The Amazing Grace WordPress theme is easy to install and if you have a basic knowledge of HTML and CSS, you’d be able to customize this theme to your liking. I love this theme so much I give it a 4.5 out of 5. Excellent work Vladimir and we hope you make more WordPress themes soon.

Do you like this theme and consider using it on your blog? Why or why not? If you’re already using this theme, what made you decide to use it?

Preview or Download the Amazing Grace theme for WordPress.

New WordPress theme – Rhea V1.0 is now available for public download! This is a Widget ready, Three-column theme with soft colors and rounded edges. We have made a special provision for you to add a Lightbox image gallery to the sidebars. You can download the Nextgen Gallery plugin and then go to the widgets section to add it to your sidebar.

The Rhea WordPress theme requires the Nextgen Gallery plugin for the Lightbox image gallery found in the left sidebar which you can easily add as a widget. This theme has been tested on Firefox, Flock, IE 7 and Opera.

Screenshot:

My Take:
Rhea v1.0 is a simple but pretty theme that will definitely appeal to most bloggers. It’s easy to customize and you can make it look even better if you can create a custom header yourself or have one made for you. You can also change the background color or use a patterned background to make it unique and different from other blogs using the same theme. This theme has a lot of potential, just use your creativity and imagination.

Even if the default setup requires the Nextgen photo gallery plugin to run the photo gallery in the left sidebar, it doesn’t mean that you need to have a photo gallery. If you prefer not to have it, you can easily replace it with something else. You can move the right sidebar contents there and because this theme is widget-ready, you can use it for your widgets. And if you’re running ads on your blog, you can use that space for Adsense, Adbrite, Bidvertiser or banners for other affiliate advertising.

Great work Jai! I’m sure a lot of WordPress users are both happy and thankful that you’ve created this theme. I give the Rhea v1.0 a 4 out of 5.

Preview or Download the Rhea v1.0 theme for WordPress.

A few months back, I featured the Sakura WordPress theme and many of you liked it especially the ladies. Well here’s a treat for you. The guys over at area381 has finally come up with an update, a 3 column version of Sakura.

This new version of Sakura now has 2 sidebars and is still widget ready so you can put more widgets to heart’s content. Sakura 3 columns theme has also been tested in all major browsers namely IE 6 and 7, Firefox, Opera and Safari. Flock users don’t have to worry coz if it works with Firefox, I’m sure it’ll also work with Flock.

Screenshot:

My Take:

I liked the previous version of Sakura and like this even better because of the additional sidebar. It gives the user more space to display their stuff and not cramp it all on one sidebar. One thing that I think the authors of this theme should add is navigation menu which can be placed on the header right below the blog title and description. I think adding that would make it more user-friendly and give easy access for visitors. Maybe we’ll see that in a later version of Sakura. Like it’s predecessor, I give the Sakura 3 columns a 4.5 out of 5.

Oh yeah, another thing. I think it would also be nice to see this theme in a different color scheme. What do you guys think?

Check out or Download the Sakura 3 columns WordPress theme.