Here’s a short introduction/insight from the theme authors:

Releasing a theme on Smashing Magazine is always a challenge for us at DesignDisease. A challenge we look forward to. ‘Splendio’ is a theme where we try to solve the empty space that exists around most themes with a joyful rhythm of lines and squares, complimented with a light color palette. The specialized header images complete the package, as it can be used both in a static or randomized manner.

Designed by Vlad and Elena Scanteie and developed exclusively for Smashing Magazine and its readers, the Splendio theme is a 3-column, widget-ready theme that’s based on the Twenty Ten WordPress theme.

Basic Features:

• 3 columns (homepage)
• 2 columns (post/page)
• Widget-ready (6 widgetized areas)
• Built-in gravatar support
• Built-in threaded comments support
• Homepage post/image slider (Featured Article)
• RSS/Social bookmarking buttons
• Flickr gallery

Screenshots:
Homepage

Blog Post

Page

My Take:
Splendio is an awesome freemium WordPress theme. Aside from the basic features – widget-ready, threaded comments support, gravatar support, etc. it has a premium quality design and other elements that you don’t normally see/get in a free WordPress theme. I like the post and image slider on the homepage (Featured Article), RSS/social bookmarking buttons on the left side of the header and the Flickr gallery. Another thing I love about the Splendio theme is the style/layout and custom icons/buttons on the comment form.

Another cool thing about this free WordPress theme is that the PSD sources are available for FREE. This means if you have some Adobe Photoshop skills, you can completely change or customize the look and feel of the Splendio theme.

Although the theme can run without them, a few WordPress plugins are required to implement 100% functionality of the Splendio theme – Flickr RSS, WP Featured Content Slider and WP PageNavi which by the way are all included in a separate download package.

Because Splendio is based on the the Twenty Ten WordPress theme, users can choose to display random header images. The theme package includes several custom images but if you want to use your own custom header, you can upload it via the Appearance > Header section.

Preview the Splendio WordPress Theme
Download the Splendio WordPress Theme (Theme + Plugins)
Download the Splendio WordPress Theme (Theme + Plugins + PSD Sources)

NOTE: This theme requires WordPress 3.0+

How do you like the Splendio WordPress theme? What specific feature/s do you like most? What other features/options would like to be added to this theme? Please share your thoughts.

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.

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.

With the slow but steady success of The WordPress Master Theme – WP Remix, I am inspired to release a free but quality WordPress theme. And as promised few days back, The WP Premium theme is going public today. “WordPress Premium” is an elegantly designed, 2/3 column, feature packed, widget ready theme that comes with three color-scheme options.

Basic features:

• Comes bundled with 3 color-scheme options
• Separate css for layout and color.
• Multiple Search option with Tabber Functionality
• RSS e-mail subscription form
• 2 and 3 Column sidebar
• Three 100X100 pixel ad blocks in sidebar.
• Easy Editable, Light weight, Strategic Code
• SEO Optimized
• W3C Valid
• Table Less Coded
• Optimized XHTML code
• Short Hand CSS

Screenshot:

WP Premium Brown version

If you want to change the color scheme of WP Premium, all you need to do is open the style.css file in your text editor and look for this line @import url("style-RED.css");. Default value is RED and you can change the value to “black” or “brown” depending on what color scheme you want to use.

My Take:
WP Premium is definitely an elegantly designed theme and I’m sure many WordPress users would love to use this theme because it’s widget ready, it has 3 color schemes and it’s FREE. The WP Premium theme has space for 125×125 banner ads and includes a tabber functionality for search, archives and categories that not only saves space but also makes it easy for the user to navigate and search for blog contents. Even though the WP Premium theme is free, it’s design and functionality wasn’t compromised. It has all the elements that most users look for in a WordPress theme.

This theme truly lives up to its name and deserves to be called WP Premium. Great work Mr. Bhavesh! Looking forward to more free premium-quality WordPress themes from you. I give this theme a 4 out of 5.

Preview or Download the WP Premium theme for WordPress.