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.

The theme I’m reviewing today comes from Organic Themes, a small company founded in the remote town of Lahaina on the Hawaiian Island of Maui and one of the newest premium WordPress theme providers in the community. For the launching of Organic Themes, they’re released a batch of WordPress themes and one of those is a free WordPress theme called Structure Theme, a minimalistic theme that comes in 4 different styles.

Here’s a little intro from the Structure Theme page:

The Structure Theme is a set of free premium WordPress themes with a modern minimalist design offered by Organic Themes. There are 4 themes included with the Structure Theme package; a white theme, black theme, two column blog and a single column blog. The theme was created with a simple and clean aesthetic meant to easily adopt the style of the content added to the site.

Features:

• Widget-ready
• Theme options page
• Custom page templates
• Multiple color and layout options
• Photoshop files included
• Built-in gravatar support
• Threaded comments support
• Compatible to WordPress 2.9+

Screenshots:
Structure Theme Black

Structure Theme White

Structure Theme Single Column

Structure Theme 2 Column

My Take:
The Structure Theme is easily one of the best-looking and well designed, minimalistic WordPress themes available out there. It is professionally designed but released to the public for free so this theme falls under what I call the “freemium” category (free + premium quality).

Organic Themes have created this theme in a clean and logically organized code and they’ve also included the Photoshop files so users can easily make basic and advanced modifications and customizations to the theme. Aside from that, the Structure Theme comes in 2 different color schemes – black and white, but with a few minor tweaks (either with the PSD file or stylesheet) users can change it to their preferred color scheme. The theme is also available in 2 other layouts – single column and two column layouts. So there are 4 different styles and layouts to choose from.

Aside from the basic WordPress theme features like widget-ready, built-in gravatar support and threaded comments support, the Structure Theme comes with a thumbnail auto-resizing feature that utilizes the new WordPress auto-sizing script, automatically scaling post and custom field images, so users won’t have to worry about resizing images and would save them time.

The Structure Theme comes with a theme options page thats lets users select which category to display in the Home page text banner and featured image, select what category to display in the middle column of the Home page, select what category to display in the Blog page and insert tracking/analytics code.

As most of you regular readers know, I’m not into minimalistic themes but if I were into it, the Structure Theme would easily be one of the themes in the top of my list. Hats off to the guys from Organic Themes for creating Structure Theme, a very nice minimalistic freemium WordPress theme and sharing it to the community.

Preview or Download the Structure Theme WordPress theme or check out the official Structure Theme website.

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.

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.