The Morning After is a brilliant free Wordpress theme designed for magazine-style websites. It’s one of the best, if not the single best, free magazine templates available. It should meet the desires of many site owners, given it was created based on a survey of what people wanted in a unique magazine-style theme.

The template is grid-based, has a three-column homepage, highlighted featured posts and a customisable header image.

It also allows editors to associate images and thumbnails with posts, to appear on the homepage.

The coding allows for easy CSS classes to add captions and wrap text around images in posts.

Asides are built-in, as is Widget compatibility. Readers can also email stories to friends or choose a print-friendly version of stories.

The theme creator has written extensive commentary about installing, customising and using the theme on the download page.

Demo and download:

Demo
Full details and download link

The Live Wire series of Wordpress templates offers a choice of three similar but distinct styles, all of which create a stylish magazine/news website.

The themes have a wide range of customisation. For instance, the publisher can choose between a three-column or four-column homepage. It’s also easy to choose whether to show a highlighted video box, and you have control over what advertising panels to display.

As mentioned, Lime Wire comes in three different flavours. In addition, each of those comes in four different colour combinations, providing a wide array of choice. They are:

Live Wire 2.0: Live Wire 2.0 has drunk the Web 2.0 Kool-Aid. Therefore, we’re talking clean sans-serif typefaces, subtle gradients and bursts of bright colours.

Live Wire Edition: The Live Wire Edition option has more of a newspaper look, and quite a traditional feel. Here, we’re talking serif typefaces, minimal colour and lots of open space.

Live Wire Style: The Live Wire Style theme is quite similar to Live Wire Edition but with a few subtle differences in terms of colour and typeface.

Features:

• Automatic image resizer, so long as PHP GD Library is installed
• Custom page templates for archives, sitemap and image gallery
• Built-in support for Gravatars and authors and comments
• Author profiles and archives
• Featured news section is built in
• Optional video panel (for use with Flash videos)
• Stylish dropdown navigation menus
• Tabbed box in the sidebar for highlighting popular and recent content
• Widget-ready, of course
• Integrated banner ad management, with an easy option to switch this on or off
• Integrated Flickr and Feedburner

Cost

Each Live Wire series theme costs $US70 for a single licence or $US150 for a developer’s licence. Alternatively, join the WooThemes club for $150 per quarter.

Demo and download:

Demo of Live Wire 2.0
Demo of Live Wire Edition
Demo of Live Wire Style
Purchase

(Note: The download link above is an affiliate link. If you buy using those links, you’ll help support bestwpthemes.com.)

The first thing I thought when I saw the Fresh News premium Wordpress template was, ‘wow’. This is a theme with visual punch, not to mention a lot of panache.

It’s got a gorgeous, professional design, makes great use of images attached to posts and could be used for virtually any type of blog or magazine-type website.

Better still, it comes in 6 colour combinations. All of them look so nice that it might just be difficult to choose your poison.

The list of features (outlined below) is enormous, making this a theme truly worthy of the premium tag.

Features:

• Automatic image resizer (requires PHP GD Library to work)
• Custom page templates for archives, sitemap and image gallery
• Built-in gravatar Support for authors and comments
• Author profiles and archives
• A built-in video panel (for use with Flash videos)
• Three layouts for the homepage: featured items, no featured items or a traditional blog layout)
• Integrated asides section within the sidebar (optional)
• Drop-down navigation menus
• A tabbed sidebar box to showcase content such as latest posts and comments
• Widget-ready sidebars
• Integrated banner ad management
• Integrated Flickr and Feedburner

Cost

The Fresh News theme costs $US70 for a single licence or $US150 for a developer’s licence. Alternatively, join the WooThemes club for $150 per quarter.

Demo and download:

Demo
Download

(Note: The download link above is an affiliate link. If you buy using those links, you’ll help support bestwpthemes.com.)

The name pretty much says it all. Magazine News is a modern, elegant solution for magazine and news sites.

This three-column Wordpress theme has elegant, fresh typography, built-in spots for Adsense or other advertising, it’s widget-ready and displays a wide range of content on the homepage, including a large area given over to featured posts.

Features:

• Clean, modern, elegant design
• Flexibility and valid code
• Ability to highlight a lot of content on the homepage
• Built-in slots for your advertising
• Widget and plugin-ready
• Installation support and lifetime updates are included in the upfront cost

Cost

The Magazine News theme costs $US49.

Demo and download:

Demo
Download

The initial release of the Brian Gardner’s Revolution theme marked a whole new level of professionalism in premium Wordpress themes. Never before had the market seen such stylish design and attention to detail.

Other theme designers have since stepped up to the plate and released ‘children of the Revolution’, themes that are of comparable quality. Nonetheless, Revolution still stands up as an extremely high-quality premium Wordpress theme – or rather themes.

Brian Gardner has now released a total of eight distinct but related themes under the ‘Revolution’ banner. They are:

Revolution: The original in the series is perfect for either a small business homepage or for a simple magazine-style site.

Revolution News: Perfect for those who want their site to have a similar layout to news websites such as CNN, complete with much of the polish of professional news providers.

Revolution Magazine: Anyone who wants to publish a magazine-style website would be well served by checking out this theme, which is built for daily posting, allows for video posts and is easily monetised with ads.

Revolution Sports: This design is similar to Revolution Magazine but with a specific focus on publishing sports news and information.

Revolution Tech: Another theme with a magazine-ish feel but this time the design elements have been tweaked to give a more high-tech feel. That makes it perfect for publishing a gadget website, tech news or product reviews.

Revolution Pro Media: This version of the Revolution Wordpress theme retains a magazine-ish feel but is structured towards media and has an image-heavy homepage that also includes space for featured tabs, video and more.

Revolution Pro Business: A stylish, dark theme designed with small businesses in mind, allowing for a professional-looking static homepage plus a corporate blog.

Revolution Real Estate: This Wordpress theme might be the answer to many a real estate professional’s prayers. It’s an attractive theme that provides space to showcase their listings and market themselves to their community.

Revolution Music: A sensational, modern theme designed to serve as a music magazine type site, however, with some tweaking this theme could serve many purposes.

Features:

• With nine styles to choose from, the Revolution theme series should have something for pretty much everyone, whatever their desires and site plans.
• All themes have a professional look and feel and great attention to small elements of the site.
• All Revolution themes work great out of the box but allow for a wide range of individualisation if you have the skills.

Cost

Each individual Revolution theme costs $US79.95 for use on a single site. You can also purchase all 8 themes for $US399.95.

Demos and download:

To view demos or to purchase any of the themes, go to the Revolution Theme homepage.

(Note: The link above is an affiliate link. If you buy using that link, you’ll help support bestwpthemes.com.)

Mimbo Pro started life as an imaginary men’s magazine site used as an example in a tutorial about how to use Wordpress to publish magazine-style websites. But the demand from readers meant the theme had to become a reality.

Then, a pro version of the theme, taking it to a whole new level, was developed. The result is a very professional layout suited to any style of magazine-style website. It includes featured posts with images, ad spaces and stylish drop-down navigation for subcategories.

The theme includes a lot of features you won’t find included in free themes and even in most premium themes that give the site owner a lot of control and flexibility without the need to know a lot about coding.

Pros:

• A control panel allows site producers to control all aspects of the site without the need to edit the templates manually
• The theme includes a contact form with control panel options
• There are custom templates for: search results, date archives, sitemap, contact, author archives and category archives
• Google Analytics, Feedburner and simple advertising options are included in the control panel
• A custom script automatically crops and resizes images so you don’t need to create two or three versions of each image
• Single post pages are rendered in a printer friendly format.

Cons:

• Nothing of note.

Cost

The Mimbo Pro theme costs $US89.99 for a single site or $US199.99 for a multi-site licence.

Demo and download:

Demo
Download
Buy it now

(Note: The download and buy it now links above are affiliate links. If you buy using those links, you’ll help support bestwpthemes.com.)

News by Quommunication has to be one of the best premium magazine-style Wordpress themes around, if not the best at this point in time.

The layout is clear, the navigation is sensible and the typography is beautiful. It also has a lot of the bases covered in terms of finer details, with automatic image resizing, for instance, making things easier for anyone using this theme to run a small magazine-like website.

Pros:

• Professional-looking magazine-style layout
• Easy to manage without a lot of coding knowledge
• Great typography
• Nice rollover box for display of latest comments and popular posts
• Good support in the theme creator’s forum

Cons:

• Nothing of note.

Cost

Quommunication’s News theme costs $US75.

Demo and download:

Demo
Download