Here’s another beautiful “freemium” WordPress theme from Kreative Themes, the same guys who gave us the Furvious WordPress theme, a theme I reviewed late last year. Bright Sky is a clean, simple and yet elegant theme with minimalistic elements. This is the first design created by Kreative Theme’s only lady designer – Nur Fathihah.

Here’s a little introduction from the Kreative Themes blog:

We are really proud to announce the release of our latest FREE WordPress Premium Theme, Bright Sky. This is a special release because it was made to celebrate our 500th fan in Facebook (actually we’re already doing the soft launch of the theme on our FB Fan page).

Basic Features:

• Widget-ready
• Built-in gravatar support
• Built-in threaded comments support
• Banner ad management
• Powerful admin framework
• Twitter integration
• Lifestream integration
• Custom related entries section
• Cufón fast text replacement
• Theme options page

Screenshots:
Homepage

Blog post

My Take:
Bright Sky is a beautiful example of a simple yet elegant freemium WordPress theme. It has a premium-class design and has very nice typography. It comes with most of the basic features bloggers want and need from a free WordPress theme like widget-ready, gravatar and threaded comments support, etc. and it also has some features that’s mostly found on premium WordPress themes.

Aside from the overall design and layout, one thing I like most about this theme is the custom Related Entries section found at the bottom of each post. It displays a thumbnail and the post title of 4 related posts. It’s a built-in feature so you don’t need any plugins to implement that feature on your blog.

The Bright Sky theme uses the WP PageNavi plugin by Lester Chan for pagination but you don’t have to worry about getting the plugin because it already comes with the theme download. Another cool feature on the Bright Sky theme is Cufón fast text replacement which lets you use your own custom fonts or texts on your blog.

Another cool freemium WordPress theme from the folks of Kreative Themes. Looking forward to future free WordPress theme releases from you guys!

Preview or Download the Bright Sky WordPress theme.

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

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.

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.

The FREEmium WordPress theme was designed by Paul Kadysz and Dariusz Siedlecki and shared to us by the good folks at Freebiesdock.com.

Screenshots:
Homepage

Post page

Features:

• XHTML 1.0 Transitional
• jQuery menu
• quick submitting to web2.0 websites support
• flickrRSS plugin support
• threaded comments support
• feedBurner subscribe via email support
• a lot of advertising spots (125×125, 120×600, 300×250)
• 2 widget ready sidebars
• free for commercial & non-commercial use
• Compatible with Safari, Firefox 3.0x, Opera

My Take:
I LOVE IT! Honestly, if I found this theme earlier or if it was released earlier, I would’ve used this on my blog. Anyways, I almost couldn’t find anything wrong with this theme. The design is awesome, it has most of the features I want/need, very customizable, has 125×125 banner ad spots, support for Feedburner email subscription and its widget-ready. Design-wise, I like how the content are displayed in the homepage, complete with post image and post date. The categories and archives shown on the left sidebar, ad banners and recent comments on the right sidebar, no space is wasted. And in the post page, I like how the post details are displayed (post date, time, author), tags and especially the custom bookmarking option “Share This” section at the top part of the post. FREEmium also has built-in support for the flickrRSS plugin and gravatars.

Regarding customization, since the FREEmium theme doesn’t use too much graphics customizing it won’t be that difficult. If you decide to change the color scheme, you might have to do some editing as some of the graphics contain the default colors. But if you want customize the header, it won’t be a problem. You change the font style or create your own custom header image and use it. If you want a bigger or more attractive RSS feed icon, you can also change the default icon. The FREEmium WP theme has a lot of potential and just like the authors said, it was designed to be as customizable as possible but it would be better and much more customizable if the theme package included PSD files to the custom graphics.

Although the FREEmium WP Theme is a very beautiful and very well designed theme, it is not perfect and it can’t please everybody. There are some things that I think would be an issue for some users. First is the navigation menu. The FREEmium theme has little space so if your blog has a lot of pages, you might have a problem with that. You could make the font size smaller but that will only free up a little space. Best thing you can do is to move the navigation menu or the search bar someplace else. Next would be the post content width size. For the post image on top of the post, the image has to be 350 pixels wide and for other parts of the post, you can have images as wide as 460 pixels. If your current blog post images are bigger than that and you plan to use the FREEmium theme, then you’ll have to resize your images so it would fit into the theme layout. There’s also another fix that can address both issues and that is to increase the theme’s width but make sure that it’s still compatible with small screen resolutions (at least 1024×768 resolution).

To sum it all up, all I can say is that the FREEmium WP Theme is one of the best free WordPress themes I’ve ever seen. Paul and Dariusz did an amazing job with this theme and hats off to them and thanks to the people behind Freebiesdock.com for making this wonderful theme available for everyone.

Preview or Download the FREEmium WordPress theme.

*hat tip to AJ