Today I’m gonna review and share with you another beautiful freemium (free and premium quality) WordPress theme. Remember the One Room theme that I recently reviewed here? Well this theme I’m reviewing today has a few similarities design-wise with that theme. They both use a left column to display the custom date icon and some post info like author and category.

The theme I’m reviewing is called the Furvious theme which is brought to us by Kreative Themes, a design company that specializes in free and premium quality CMS themes. Here’s a short description of the theme:

Furvious helps you feature your best contents with our simple yet easy custom admin page. Boost your content-rich posts and get more visitors out of it. A feature-packed theme that will completely rock your site! And it’s free too.

Basic Features

• Widget-ready
• 5 Style Variations
• Featured Posts
• Built-in gravatar support
• Threaded comments support
• Plugin integration
• Changeable logo
• Cufon fast text replacement
• Theme admin panel
• Jquery optimization

Screenshots
Homepage

Post page

Theme options

My Take:
Furvious is a 3 column, widget-ready and feature-rich theme that is well designed and offers the user flexibility and functionality. The theme admin panel gives the user control over some areas of the theme’s layout, while the 5 unique style variations (color schemes) provide the user different looks for their theme. Furvious is widget-ready and comes with a couple custom widgets so users who like widgets won’t have to worry about that aspect.

Like what the description says, the Furvious theme lets you easily publish annd feature your best content via the Featured Posts section. Users can select which category and how many articles to be featured. I have one slight issue with it. IMO, the location of the Featured Posts section (right sidebar) is not really ideal because only the first featured post is visible above the fold (visible portion of a web page without having to scroll down). The best place to have a Featured Posts section is somewhere above or below the header section or anywhere above the fold. But then again, “to each their own” so I’m sure some users wouldn’t mind or prefer to have it there.

Like the One Room theme, Furvious uses a left column to display the post info – date, author and category. Again, some users won’t like or have an issue with the theme because of that. So with regards to this issue, it will be determined by the user’s preference. I’ve seen some users who maximized the space by placing vertical advertisements on it. If you run Adsense, the ideal ad to put there would be either a 120×240 vertical banner or 120×600 skyscraper. Btw, the data displayed in the left column includes a gravatar of the post author which makes this theme ideal for blogs with multiple authors.

Other cool features include a built-in page navigation located at the bottom of the index page that provides users an easy way to navigate through posts and eliminates the need for the WP-PageNavi plugin. It also has a built-in related posts/entries feature which displays related posts at the bottom of each post and also eliminates the need of a Related Posts plugin. Another are the built-in social media/networking share buttons displayed beside the Related Entries section which gives readers an easy way to share the post. With a few tweaks on the single.php file, the user can either change or add more social media button options. The comments section feature built-in gravatar support and supports threaded comments, creating a nice and functional environment for readers/visitors.

Since the Furvious theme uses a lot of custom graphics and because of the left column, customizing the theme would be difficult for some users and could take a lot of time and effort to others. Customization might also involve editing the custom graphics which would require graphic manipulation skills.

To sum it all up, Furvious theme is an awesome freemium WordPress theme that has a fantastic design and lots of cool features. The Kreative Themes team did a really good job and I can’t wait to see the premium and free WordPress themes that they’ll be releasing in the future.

Preview or Download the Furvious 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.