Today I’m gonna review and share with you another beautiful freemium (free and premium quality) WordPress theme. Remember the One Room theme that I recently reviewed here? Well this theme I’m reviewing today has a few similarities design-wise with that theme. They both use a left column to display the custom date icon and some post info like author and category.

The theme I’m reviewing is called the Furvious theme which is brought to us by Kreative Themes, a design company that specializes in free and premium quality CMS themes. Here’s a short description of the theme:

Furvious helps you feature your best contents with our simple yet easy custom admin page. Boost your content-rich posts and get more visitors out of it. A feature-packed theme that will completely rock your site! And it’s free too.

Basic Features

• Widget-ready
• 5 Style Variations
• Featured Posts
• Built-in gravatar support
• Threaded comments support
• Plugin integration
• Changeable logo
• Cufon fast text replacement
• Theme admin panel
• Jquery optimization

Screenshots
Homepage

Post page

Theme options

My Take:
Furvious is a 3 column, widget-ready and feature-rich theme that is well designed and offers the user flexibility and functionality. The theme admin panel gives the user control over some areas of the theme’s layout, while the 5 unique style variations (color schemes) provide the user different looks for their theme. Furvious is widget-ready and comes with a couple custom widgets so users who like widgets won’t have to worry about that aspect.

Like what the description says, the Furvious theme lets you easily publish annd feature your best content via the Featured Posts section. Users can select which category and how many articles to be featured. I have one slight issue with it. IMO, the location of the Featured Posts section (right sidebar) is not really ideal because only the first featured post is visible above the fold (visible portion of a web page without having to scroll down). The best place to have a Featured Posts section is somewhere above or below the header section or anywhere above the fold. But then again, “to each their own” so I’m sure some users wouldn’t mind or prefer to have it there.

Like the One Room theme, Furvious uses a left column to display the post info – date, author and category. Again, some users won’t like or have an issue with the theme because of that. So with regards to this issue, it will be determined by the user’s preference. I’ve seen some users who maximized the space by placing vertical advertisements on it. If you run Adsense, the ideal ad to put there would be either a 120×240 vertical banner or 120×600 skyscraper. Btw, the data displayed in the left column includes a gravatar of the post author which makes this theme ideal for blogs with multiple authors.

Other cool features include a built-in page navigation located at the bottom of the index page that provides users an easy way to navigate through posts and eliminates the need for the WP-PageNavi plugin. It also has a built-in related posts/entries feature which displays related posts at the bottom of each post and also eliminates the need of a Related Posts plugin. Another are the built-in social media/networking share buttons displayed beside the Related Entries section which gives readers an easy way to share the post. With a few tweaks on the single.php file, the user can either change or add more social media button options. The comments section feature built-in gravatar support and supports threaded comments, creating a nice and functional environment for readers/visitors.

Since the Furvious theme uses a lot of custom graphics and because of the left column, customizing the theme would be difficult for some users and could take a lot of time and effort to others. Customization might also involve editing the custom graphics which would require graphic manipulation skills.

To sum it all up, Furvious theme is an awesome freemium WordPress theme that has a fantastic design and lots of cool features. The Kreative Themes team did a really good job and I can’t wait to see the premium and free WordPress themes that they’ll be releasing in the future.

Preview or Download the Furvious WordPress theme.

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

As I promised you earlier that I will release my current WP theme (I call it ‘resurrection’ and you can call it whatever you like) to public download. Well… here it is.

I have removed some of my personal stuff such as my cellphone, PSP, Yankee hat etc from background image instead of something else, you can change it in anyway by doing a little photoshop work.

Basic features:

• 3 columns
• Twitter tweets section
• Tag cloud
• Custom icons

Screenshot:

My Take:
Resurrection is definitely an eye candy. I’ve always admired the author’s blog design and layout and was surprised to find out that he was offering the theme for free. I love this theme! I love that it has 3 columns and its sidebars are designed to accommodate all the necessary stuff including advertisements. I also love the custom icons.

Although this theme is beautiful and well designed, IMO it does have a few “flaws”. First is, Resurrection is not a widget-ready theme “yet”. I believe it won’t be long before the author or someone else will make it widget-ready. Second, the background image’s file size is very big, at least 110 KB each compared to a normal background image which is less than 10 KB in size. This can be an issue and make page loads slower for visitors who have slow Internet connections. Lastly, the Resurrection theme doesn’t work out of the box and requires the following plugins to be installed:

• Ultimate Tag Warrior
• WP-PageNavi
• Twitter Tools
• Feed Count

Although the author does include these plugins in the theme’s download package, the thing about it is that not all bloggers use Twitter or UTW. The theme won’t work if you don’t install these plugins. So if you don’t use the required plugins but still want to use the theme, you’ll have to do some code editing before you can use it.

Oh, one more thing. When I installed this theme in my sandbox, the Twitter Tools was messed up in Firefox but not in IE.

Btw, the package also includes 3 extra background images aside from the default background image. Overall, it’s still a very nice theme and I give the Resurrection a rating of 4 out of 5. Thank you Yichi for sharing this theme with us!

Preview or download the Resurrection theme for WordPress.

UPDATE: 09/03/07
While browsing through my files, I found the customization kit for the Dark Black theme. The kit is what you’ll need to create your own customized header for this theme. If you want it, just leave a comment with your email address and I’ll send it to you.

UPDATE: 08/05/07
I found out from Nemo’s comment that OneMoreRevision can’t be accessed at this time. If anyone wants to have this theme, just leave a comment with your email address and I’ll send the zip file to your inbox.

Dark Black is a beautiful theme scheme created OneMoreRevision for the popular Dark theme by Bartelme. Dark Black works exactly as the original theme and the only difference is the color scheme.

The Dark Black theme has been tested on WordPress 2.1.3 and browsers like Firefox, Safari, IE 6 & 7. It’s been validated as XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.0 compliant and supports the following WordPress plugins:

• flickrRSS
• Gravatar
• Ultimate Tag Warrior
• WP-PageNavi

You can also download the Dark Black customization kit to create a personalized logo. Right now, the kit doesn’t include instructions so you’ll have to figure it out yourself.

Screenshot:

My Take:
The Dark Black is a beautiful “dark” WordPress theme. If you love dark themes, you’ll definitely love this one and I’m pretty sure you’ll be downloading it soon afterwards. Personally, I like it more than the original theme. I think the color scheme suits the design better. The author, Brad Bowen did a really good job with this theme.

When I first saw this theme, I was tempted to use it here on JaypeeOnline but changed my mind because I know some readers might have a hard time reading my posts with the dark background. IMO, this theme would be fine for personal blogs or photoblogs but not for blogs that have lengthy or wordy posts.

The only drawback that I can see for this theme is that it isn’t widget-ready. Although it might not be long before someone decides to make this theme widget-ready. So for those who use widgets, you’ll just have to wait. I give this theme a 4.5 out of 5.

Check out or Download the Dark Black theme for WordPress.