Here’s a short intro from the theme author:

A clean Portfolio Theme ideal for photographers, artists and designers to showcase their portfolios. This is our first attempt at creating a WordPress theme and then offering it on a public domain. The theme does need intermediate level of familiarity with WordPress. There is an online help document available to get you started. You may download this theme for free and use it on your site; however you may NOT remove the Dizeno Co link in the footer.

Basic Features:

• 2 column (blog section)
• Fixed Width
• Widget-ready
• jQuery slider (homepage)
• Twitter-ready
• 3 category templates – full posts, excerpts & thumbnails only
• Compatible with IE7, IE8, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari
• CSS and XTHML standards compliant

Screenshots:
Homepage

Post page

My Take:
The Brave Zeenat WordPress theme is a simple, clean and beautiful portfolio style theme that you can use for your online portfolio. It’s widget-ready, has several category and page templates, has a nice jQuery-powered slider on the homepage. Another cool thing about this theme is that the theme download includes the sources file or PSDs for the templates, page headers, portfolio titles, logo and buttons so the user can basically edit and customize the look and feel of the entire theme. Aside from that, it also includes a Help Document that can help you with the installation, configuration and customization of the Brave Zeenat theme.

Brave Zeenat requires the use of third-party WordPress plugins – WP PageNavi and Limit Post, both are included in the theme download.

Overall, the Brave Zeenat is a clean, simple, lightweight portfolio style WordPress theme that’s highly customizable. Kudos to the folks of Dizeno Co for creating and releasing the Brave Zeenat WordPress theme for FREE to the community!

IMPORTANT: The Brave Zeenat WordPress theme is FREE to download in the condition that the Dizeno Co footer link remains intact. If you want to remove the footer link, you can purchase the Pro version for $37.

Preview or Download the Brave Zeenat WordPress Theme.

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

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.

Time for another WordPress theme review. There are so many free WordPress themes released these days that its hard to keep track of all of them. The theme I’m reviewing today was release early this year. Its a 3 column, widget-ready theme called One Room created by Jeremie Tisseau of Web kreation.

Here’s a short intro from the theme author:

I am very pleased to release my new WordPress theme, “OneRoom“, a three columns theme with fixed width and widget-ready.

I wanted to design a new theme months ago but actually never had time to work on it. And then, I was moving to Thailand and another couple of weeks past. But now I have settled in Thailand and had no reasons to postpone that job any longer.

I hope you will like this theme as much as I do.

Basic Features:

• Widgetized Sidebars
• Built-In Author Section in Sidebar
• Built-in Gravatar Support for Comments
• Custom 404 error page
• Built-In Banner Ad Blocks
• Left Sidebar for PostMetadatas

Screenshots:
Homepage

Post page

My Take:
The One Room WordPress theme is another excellent addition to the list of freemium (free & premium quality) themes available to all WordPress users. Design-wise, One Room is top notch and can easily be mistaken as a premium WordPress theme. I really like the gradient/texture used in this theme and also its typography.

Basic features include widgetized sidebars, built-in author section (top of sidebar), built-in gravatar support and built-in banner ad blocks. I like what the author did with the style of the comments section and how the gravatars are positioned and displayed on the left side of the comment. Gives the theme a different look from other WordPress themes. Also, trackbacks and pingbacks are separated from regular comments so you don’t have to worry about tweaking your theme to address that issue.

Aside from the readme.txt file in the theme download the theme author has provided a Usage page that contains a few FAQs to help users and also a link where you can download the logo PSD file so you can customize it for your blog. The author also provided a Typography where users can see samples of the different image classes, headers and other tags that you can use to manipulate the theme’s typography.

Another thing I like about this theme is the custom 404 page. The custom 404 page displays a custom message and displays a list of the recent posts, pages, archives and categories. A 404 page is something that many bloggers take for granted and its good to see that the theme author has included a cool custom 404 page in this theme.

One thing that I think some users might have an issue with on this theme is the left column. The author designed the left column that way to serve a purpose and to complement the overall design. However, some users like to maximize the space used by their themes and don’t like the amount of space used by the left column. This is something that will be a problem based on the user’s preference.

Overall, the One Room WordPress theme is an excellent theme. Kudos to Jeremie Tisseau for creating such a pretty theme and for sharing it to the WordPress community!

Preview or Download the One Room WordPress theme.

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

• Trackbacks & comments separated
• Stylized comments
• Small size (90Kb)
• Web 2.0
• Wide content area
• XHTML validated

Screenshot:

My Take:
Even though the popularity of premium WordPress themes is continually increasing, the majority of WordPress users still use free public themes not only because they can’t afford premium themes but also because the quality of free WordPress themes we see today are not only getting better but can also compete with premium themes. One good example is this Velocity theme, another cool and beautiful theme from Blog Oh Blog. I love the design! It’s simple yet elegant. I really like the custom graphic background for the sidebar titles and the doodles located in the header, footer and in the post pages. Velocity has the content in between the two sidebars and if you don’t like that format, with a little bit of HTML and CSS skills, you can easily change that and move the content to the left and make the two sidebars go side-by-side.

Testing Velocity on three different browsers – Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera, I didn’t find any problems with styling, alignments and other design issues. So if you decide to use this theme, you don’t have to worry on what browser your visitors use to visit your blog. Btw, I’m using the recent versions for all three browsers and I’m not sure if this theme has any issues with older browser versions.

There’s only one thing that I have a problem with this theme and it would be the header image. The theme doesn’t include a PSD file for the header so if you want to have a different background image for your blog header, you won’t be able to keep the doodles or the design in the default header image. I’ve seen some theme authors include the PSD files for certain custom theme graphics, making it more appealing and customizable for users. I don’t know why the author didn’t include the PSD file for the Velocity’s header image, but who knows he might change his mind and include it in the theme download file.

I love this theme and I know most of you guys do too. I’m giving the Velocity theme a 4 out of 5 rating. Great job Jai and looking forward to more awesome WordPress themes from you and BlogOhBlog!

Preview or Download the Velocity WordPress theme.

Basic features of this theme include a fixed width, a post date icon, a bottom bar and a sliding sidebar made possible by a third-party javascript. Dezinerfolio 2.0 is tested to be compatible with WordPress 2.2 and supports the following plugins:

• Authimage
• flickrRSS
• Gravatars
• Recent Comments
• Sideblog
• ShareThis
• Sociable
• Subscribe to Commetns
• WP-PageNavi
• WP PostRatings

Screenshot:

My Take:
I like the Dezinerfolio 2.0 WordPress theme because of it’s good design, sliding sidebar and custom graphics for post date, comments, avatars and the curled up page corner. The javascript powered sliding sidebar can be an issue for some users but it can be easily turned off or disabled by deleting the .js file.

Although this theme won’t work straight out of the box because of the required plugins, it’s not a problem because the author includes all the necessary plugins with the download. All you need to do if you aren’t using the plugin yet is to upload and activate. IMO, this can be an issue for some users and make them back away from this theme.

Overall, I give the Dezinerfolio 2.0 a 3.5 out of 5.

Check out or Download the Dezinerfolio WordPress theme.