After the huge success of Mimbo, the author Darren Hoyt finally released his first and much anticipated premium theme, the Mimbo Pro Magazine Theme last week. For this project, he collaborated with Ben Gillbanks.

Here’s a short introduction from Darren himself:

Mimbo Pro is a powerful and feature-rich theme for WordPress, developed by Darren Hoyt and Ben Gillbanks and released through Ben’s Pro Theme Design marketplace.

Already familiar with the original Mimbo? Imagine no more manual template editing, no more Photoshop, no more image-cropping or FTP’ing… Enjoy using WordPress like a CMS, now more than ever.

Screenshot:

Mimbo Pro features:

• Control panel options for Google Analytics and Feedburner, logo and header image management, homepage categories, optional color schemes, and advertisement management
• Custom templates for categories, archives, authors, sitemap, search results
• Auto-resizing for images
• Built-in contact form
• HTML controls for comments (bold, italics, blockquote, link)
• Print-friendly options on single-post pages
• Two widgetized sidebars with optional advertising
• Tabbed and separated comments/trackbacks
• Built-in gravatars and author highlighting
• Cookie crumbs on single-post pages
• Print.css stylesheet
• Optional microformats in the footer

The Mimbo Pro Magazine theme is available in two packages, the Single Site license for $89.99 and Multi Site license at $199.99. The Multi Site license includes PSD files and lets you remove the footer link. If you decide to purchase this theme and want to learn more about how to use or customize it, you might want to check out the video tutorials that are provided for free.

My Take:
One of the unique features of the Mimbo Pro theme is the section located right below the featured post in the index page. In that section, you can browse through the recent posts or stories by clicking on the arrows on both sides. Mimbo Pro makes use of a thumbnail script (created by Darren) that automatically resizes images so resizing images becomes a non-issue. Aside from that, it includes some features that you can’t find in other WordPress premium themes like control panel options for Google Analytics and Feedburner.

I haven’t had the chance to test or try it out from within the admin panel so I can’t really rate the features of Mimbo Pro. IMHO the Mimbo Pro doesn’t really stand out design-wise unlike other premium themes we’ve seen recently. I guess the features make up for that. Anyways, I give the Mimbo Pro Magazine Theme a 4 out of 5 rating.

Btw, if you’re not interested in buying the theme you might be interested in making money thru Mimbo Pro’s affiliate program. For more information regarding the affiliate program, click here.

Preview or Purchase the Mimbo Pro Magazine Theme for WordPress

Yesterday, Brian announced the release of his latest project called the Revolution Pro Media Theme. If you loved the original Revolution theme, I’m sure you’ll also love this theme or even more.

Some features of the Pro Media theme include:

• Featured homepage tabber area
• Featured photos from Flickr
• Featured YouTube video
• Other featured areas using custom fields
• Google AdSense integration in between posts and comments
• Section, Archive, Blog page templates

Screenshots:

Homepage

Blog Page

Options Page

The Revolution Pro Media Theme is available in two packages: the single use package which is available for $79.95 while the multiple use package is available for $199.95. Any theme or package purchase includes a lifetime access to any upgrades made to these themes.

For a limited time only, Brian is offering the the Revolution All-Inclusive theme package for just $299.95 and will be available until midnight (CST) Thursday, February 14th.

Preview or Purchase the Revolution Pro Media Theme for WordPress

UPDATE #1: Less than an hour from being launched, there’s already a bug. If you’re using Opera, the featured article section is not aligned well. I’ll be trying to figure out the problem and fix it as soon as I can. Thanks Kuya Rhoen!

This one has been long overdue. I’ve been planning and wanting to change my blog theme for several months now but I’ve never had the time to finish it. There are three reason why it took me a long time to finally change the theme. First, I was busy. Secondly, it’s hard to look for a nice WordPress theme. Last but not least, after you find a theme that you like, most of your time is spent in tweaking and customizing it.

Initially, I wanted a custom theme but since custom made WordPress themes cost a fortune, I opted to purchase an affordable ready-made premium theme. I chose the Magazine News theme by Art Culture and designed by Brad Mahaffey. If you’re wondering how much this theme costs, it’s $49 for a single use license and $129 for a multiple use license.

Why did I choose this theme? The moment I saw it I just knew that it was the one. For those of you who have WordPress blogs and spend time looking for the “right” theme for your blog, you know what I mean. Right? Anyways, I liked the design and the overall look and feel of the theme. The only issues I had with the default layout was that the featured article occupied too much space and there was no space provided for 125×125 ad banners. Before I purchased the theme, I already planned what I would do with it and visualized the changes that I would make. Even though I wasn’t sure, I knew it was possible.

If you’ve visited this blog the past few days and noticed that it was often under Maintenance Mode, now you know the reason why. I’ve been busy customizing and tweaking this theme for the last week or so. I’m a bit of a perfectionist and from my previous themes you know that I like my theme to be neat. Although I did most of the tweaking and customization, I wouldn’t have been able to finish this theme without some help. My CSS and PHP knowledge are limited so I had to seek the help of my friends, WordPress theme designer Joni and PHP guru MM. Thank you so much guys for sparing your precious time in helping out a friend!

Aside from the theme, I’ve also made some changes on how the blog works. I’ve added a WordPress plugin called Who Sees Ads? by Ozh. With this plugin, I can configure the ads to display on certain rules. From now on, regular readers won’t see ads unless the post is 10 days old. So who sees the ads? Only those visitors referred by search engines. Other changes include moving the Categories below the content area and the putting the MyBlogLog visitors section down to the footer. Expect to see some minor changes in the next few days as I will be doing some more tweaking and optimizing. Oh yeah, I almost forgot. I’ve changed the blog name back to JaypeeOnline. Why? Because I think that it looks and sounds better that way, don’t you think? Hehe

Although I’ve already tested this theme, there might be some things that I overlooked and you could come across some errors. If you do, please let me know so I can fix it ASAP. You can leave a comment or send a message via the Contact page. Feel free to leave your comments, feedback or suggestions regarding the new theme. I’d love to hear them.