JaypeeOnline

Its good to see sites who normally sell premium WordPress themes release some free themes to the public once in a while. One of the sites who do this in a regular basis is WooThemes. Some of the free WordPress themes they previously released are the Meta-Morphosis, Irresistible, Blog Theme and Typebased themes. Their most recent free WordPress theme released to the public is a theme called Mainstream, designed by Adii Pienaar himself.

A vibrant personal blog theme with a colourful selection of styles, built on WooThemes flexible theme framework, boasting a selection of theme options, most importantly it’s FREE!

Mainstream is a 2 columned, widgetized theme that’s primarily designed for personal blogs.

Basic Features:

• 2 columns
• Custom widgets
• Widgetized sidebar
• Integrated banner ad management
• 5 color schemes

Screenshots:

This is the default color scheme and other available color schemes are blue, khaki, violet and minimal (light grey).

My Take:
The Mainstream WordPress theme features some ribbon elements like similar to another free WordPress theme I previously featured here called the Imprezz theme. The ribbon elements I’m talking about are the graphics used for the edges of the welcome message and segment titles – Search, Pages, Sponsors, etc.

The default setup of the Mainstream theme features categories and sub-categories on top and I know some users like it that way but I also know that this setup doesn’t work for some. With a little bit of modification, you can edit the code and replace it instead with page links and then move the category links to the sidebar.

I like how there’s a section on the upper right corner of the theme dedicated for the RSS feed, Twitter and Facebook, which makes it easy for readers and visitors to subscribe to the blog. You can always modify this and customize to your own personal preference like if you’re not using Twitter or Facebook and would like to replace the links with Myspace, FriendFeed, Plurk or other social networking sites or social bookmarking sites.

Unlike its premium theme counterparts, the Mainstream theme doesn’t have any admin panel options but does have some custom sidebar widgets (Search, 125×125 ads, Flickr, Twitter) that can be used to customize the appearance and displayed content on the sidebar. If you have the skills to tweak and customize WordPress themes, you can do more stuff with this theme and make it better or make it more customized to your blog’s needs.

Overall, the Mainstream theme is a colorful and vibrant theme that can be used for any type of blog, not only personal blogs. It doesn’t have much advance options but it does provide all the basic features and functionality that most self-hosted WordPress blogs need. Since this theme is a free theme, WooThemes doesn’t provide any kind of support for it so before you use it, make sure that you or someone you know has the necessary skills/knowledge to tweak or customize WordPress themes so you won’t have any problems using or customizing it for your blog.

Preview or Download the Mainstream WordPress theme.