Magazine themes with grid layouts are perfect for your news based blogs, as they give more room to showcase your content. I collected and present here ten of the most flexible and innovative FREE Wordpress Magazine themes and templates.

Zinmag Tribune

Zinemag Tribune is the ultimate free Wordpress theme with newspaper layout. It is bundled with many extra features, and a custom administration panel to enable its different modules.

This white professional looking magazine style theme was designed by Jinsona creations, and released under the popular Zinmag series.

LIVE DEMO | FREE DOWNLOAD

Scarlett

The Scarlett theme is another stylish creation by web2feel.com. It features some nice custom dynamic content elements that are built into it.

Multi-level dropdown navigation menu, Tabbed content area, Custom sliding elements with images, and so much more!

LIVE DEMO | FREE DOWNLOAD

The Morning After

The Morning After is an original and professional looking magazine theme, created by Arun Kale. After a brief survey about what features bloggers would want to see in a unique magazine theme on the Wordpress forums, Arun created The Morning After theme, considering the user feedback on this question. The Morning After theme is now released under a Creative Commons license.

LIVE DEMO | FREE DOWNLOAD

Magasin Cuatro

Magasin Cuatro is a Wordpress Magazine theme with Featured Post, Twitter Account integration, Flickr Thumbnails, Feedburner Email Subscription. This theme is adsense ready and optimized, compatible with the latest version of wordpress, and it has an integrated automatic thumbnail resize feature. It requires a number of free wp plugins to be installed for extra functionality.

LIVE DEMO | FREE DOWNLOAD

Grungezine

Grungezine is a nice fixed width, 3 column layout, Magazine-style Wordpress theme, created by wpspark. It has some important widgets and features build into it. License: Free to use, must keep the footer intact as is.

LIVE DEMO | FREE DOWNLOAD

WP Magazine

WP Magazine is a flexible newspaper/magazine styled Wordpress theme released by gabfire.com. It has 3 columns and a fixed width. Featured content is enabled, and advertising space is available. The theme has been tested with 6 different browsers. Users have contributed to make the theme available in different languages.

LIVE DEMO | FREE DOWNLOAD

Arthemia

Athemia is an innovative creation by Michael Jubel Hutagalung. The theme features paged plugin support, automated navigation page listing, headlines and a pictorial presentation.

LIVE DEMO | FREE DOWNLOAD

Branford Magazine

Branford Magazine is a popular theme with some neat features, created by Michael Oeser. It’s an amazing theme combining the very best of two other great magazine layouts; inspiration came from “Revolution theme” by Brian Gardner and the “Mimbo theme” created by Darren Hoyt. This theme is ready for localization, and a language pack is available.

LIVE DEMO | FREE DOWNLOAD

FakeBlog

Fakeblog, aka Overstand Theme, is a fresh black/white/orange 3 column Magazine style template for wordpress powered weblogs. It is available in both the English and German language. See the theme live in action on fakeblog.de

LIVE DEMO | FREE DOWNLOAD

Magazeen

The free wordpress Magazeen theme, created by the talented WeFunction Design Agency, is an advanced magazine look design which includes all the popular features. With the main focus being on typography, grids and magazine style, this theme suits all the needs for your news based blog.

LIVE DEMO | FREE DOWNLOAD

When you have a Blogger blog, I suggest you utilize these 12 best and most popular free blogger tools, used by professional bloggers, to get the most out of your new blog.

1. FeedBurner is a tool that will generate a smart feed, compatible with all the free feed readers out there. Using the “Burned feed” generated by feedburner is a great way to distribute your content over the internet. Feedburner, recently acquired by Google, also allows you to put +Add buttons for XML, Yahoo, MSN etc. on your site. Monitor the health of your feed by subscribing to FeedBulletin. Get a cool feed count button to show how many readers have subscripted to your blog feed.
2. Js-Kit is a tool that integrates trackbacks into your blogger blog. It provides other bloggers with a seamless way to add trackbacks to your blog and also imports existing comments and provides live synchronization of new comments with Blogger.
3. Avantblog is free software that allows you to post articles on your blog using a Palm or Windows CE device.
4. My Blog Log tracks outgoing links to let you know where your traffic is going. Discover who’s visiting your site, and connect with your readers.
5. w.bloggar is an application that acts as an interface between the user and one or more blogs. It is a Post and Template editor, with several features and resources that the browser based blog editors do not offer.

Most bloggers already know that it’s possible to easily embed flash video’s in blog posts. What’s not as well known is that YouTube creates a thumbnail for each video that we can also embed. This makes it possible to create a video blog with an index of clickable thumbnails.

The free Videographer theme works best with the two different plugins: WP Youtube and WP Postratings.

Once everything is installed you can post video’s, simply by including the unique Youtube video ID’s in a custom field in your wordpress posts. With this brilliant theme you an easily turn your wordpress blog into a video blog.

Personally I was so used and familiar to the old admin interface, and frankly I liked it better then this new design, and actually I’m already starting to miss the old look. But let’s have a closer look at the cool new features that come with this upgrade. Its definitely a huge improvement again.

• New option to add in your blog posts (add video, add audio, add media)
• Widget-based dashboard
• Ability to have any number of any widget
• Undo for comment editing
• Search for both posts and pages
• Use $wpdb->prepare everywhere
• Switch to expect unescaped data for internal functions
• XML-RPC refactor

At the moment I find myself almost finished with my very first wordpress theme. This one is not going to be released, as I intend to use it on my own weblog when it’s done, and keep it unique. My 2nd wordpress theme will be released though, and it’s going to be a clean, lite Web2.0 theme.

In the meantime I wanted to share with you some of the themes from other designers that I found when searching for Web2.0 themes. I noticed that many people frequently use the term web2.0 to describe their designs, however, most of them don’t actually have much 2.0 style to be named as such.

Some of the themes that I found to be Web 2.0 Worthy are listed below. These five pretty wordpress themes all feature their own unique characteristics with detail for web 2.0 graphic design elements.

This first theme is called Sodelicious and was created by Rui Castro of web2themes.com. It has a web 2.0 style design with 3 nice features; a Slideshow screen on the left where you can place an animation or featured content, a big sidebar on the right that includes 3 widget sidebars, and 4 social bookmarks buttons that are automatically placed in your posts.

The 2nd theme, made by Aditi Tuteja, was named Curved because of the nice rounded blue corners. This theme supports widgets, and has a nice striped header along with tabbed navigation.

Gossip City is a web2.0 wordpress theme, created by DesignDisease, and is the perfect theme for your gossip and celebrity weblogs. It has a stylish 3-column, widget ready with sweet color palette theme, and was released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

The next theme comes from Ndesign Studio and has a High-tech, glossy Mac style with web 2.0 mini icons. Validated XHTML and CSS, Web 2.0 colors.… the perfect WordPress theme for your technology-related blog.

And finally the last theme is the rather simple looking Webby Blue Design from Justskins.com. This is a 2-column, widgets ready Web2.0 style wordpress theme, with light blue colors. Theme was tested with Wordpress 2.2.x.

I hope that this post was useful to you. Make sure to visit this site again anytime next month, hopefully I have released my own 2.0 theme by then.

But in case you are in need of more readers for your blog, there are plenty of ways to realize that. It’s called Blog Promotion, and it doesn’t necessarily have to cost any money. Below I have pointed out three of the easiest free methods for getting more visitors to your blog.

1. Utilize the potential of content syndication
Like I mentioned above, most blog platforms have syndication tools integrated that will allow you to distribute your content over the web, and with systems such as wordpress you can define a custom list of ping services that will be notified automatically each time when you add new content to your blog. In an instance, a link with a description of your newest blog post could appear anywhere on the web to surfers who use the particular content networks that you’ve pinged.

By default, wordpress has added a limited number of update services to the ping list, including Technorati and Ping-O-Matic. The list can be found under the Options –> Writing Tab of the administration panel. It is recommended to manually add at least the more important services, like Google Blogsearch. But many more can be added! There is a comprehensive list of English blog pinging services available on the wordpress codex site.

TIP: It is recommended to make use of the wordpress Optional Excerpt feature, if you don’t want your original post content – or parts of it – to be syndicated through these networks. Many networks redistribute their content which means that other webmasters could easily display your work on their websites using RSS parsers. Using optional Excerpts will prevent your post content from being copied via the RSS source, because it allows you to specify a different feed description for your articles.

2. Gaining more exposure with the PingBack feature.
PingBack is a weblog feature meant to link related blog posts from different authors together. It works like this: If you include a link in one of your articles to another blog post that has pingback enabled, then the author of that blog would get a notification in the form of a pingback, and would have to approve it as if it was a comment. When approved, a link with description of your post would be automatically included as a comment, and the pingback is completed. This could ultimately drive more blog readers to your site.

3. Submitting to Blog Directories
Submitting your site to Blog Directories is usually free, however in some cases you are required to link back to them somewhere on your site or in a post. But let me briefly explain how submitting to Blog Directories could benefit your weblog. First of all, your listing would of course generate some degree traffic for your blog. But also, a relevant link is seen by the search engines as a recommendation, a “vote” if you will, for your site. By gaining more “votes”, your rankings in the search results of these engines would improve, which could mean they would send you even more traffic.

I will end this post with a long list of blog directories to which you may submit your link for free. I will keep this list updated so be sure to visit back once in a while. Furthermore I wish you all the best for the new year!

• Powered by Wordpress Directory
• Blog Catalog
• Blog Hub
• BlogFlux
• Blogarama
• Blog Toplist
• Top Blog Area
• Best Blogs
• We Blog Alot
• Best of the Web Blog Directory
• Total Blog Directory
• Bloggeries
• Blogoozle
• Blog Rankings
• Search 4 Blogs
• Blogging Fusion
• Blogadr
• Blog Announce
• Bloggapedia
• Bloggernity

Good luck and Happy Blogging !

]]> http://www.bloggertools.org/2007/12/31/more-visitors-to-your-blog/feed/ 1 http://www.bloggertools.org/2007/09/14/embed-youtube-videos-in-wordpress-with-klm-flashembed-plugin/ http://www.bloggertools.org/2007/09/14/embed-youtube-videos-in-wordpress-with-klm-flashembed-plugin/#comments Fri, 14 Sep 2007 19:05:15 +0000 Blogger Tools http://www.bloggertools.org/2007/09/14/embed-youtube-videos-in-wordpress-with-klm-flashembed-plugin/ In this post I’m going to show how to embed flash into your wordpress blog posts. This will allow you to show youtube videos directly from your blog. KLM Flashembed is a plugin for wordpress that will do the trick. Download the latest version and upload the files to your plugins folder, then activate the plugin in your wordpress administration panel.

When writing a post or page, you can embed the youtube video with the following code:

[*kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/jZULGg9kfCo" height="350" width="425" /]
(remove the asterisk *)

“jZULGg9kfCo” is to be replaced with the video ID. Width and height is optional and can be adjusted to fit in . The output of the above code would look like this:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/jZULGg9kfCo" height="350" width="425" /]

]]> http://www.bloggertools.org/2007/09/14/embed-youtube-videos-in-wordpress-with-klm-flashembed-plugin/feed/ 0 http://www.bloggertools.org/2007/04/22/runphp-include-php-in-your-wordpress-blog-posts-or-pages/ http://www.bloggertools.org/2007/04/22/runphp-include-php-in-your-wordpress-blog-posts-or-pages/#comments Sun, 22 Apr 2007 12:18:38 +0000 Blogger Tools http://www.bloggertools.org/2007/04/22/runphp-include-php-in-your-wordpress-blog-posts-or-pages/

RunPHP by James van Lommel, is a Plugin for WordPress that enables bloggers to embed PHP code directly into their posts.

How to use:

• Download the plugin from the author’s site, and upload the files to the plugin directory of your wordpress weblog (/wp-content/plugins).
• Activate the plugin by logging into your WordPress administration panel, going to ‘Plugins’ on the menu bar, then clicking Activate at the end of the RunPHP row.
• Now add php codes in your posts and pages, by simply checking the new option box that says ‘run PHP code?’

The code executed by runPHP is not in the global scope. It is executed as if it were inside a function block and so you’ll need to declare your globals accordingly.

Note: The plugin doesn’t work with few badly written WordPress themes. This is most likely caused by a missing wp_head() call in the theme’s header template (often called header.php). If that is the case, fixing it is simply a matter of inserting.

]]> http://www.bloggertools.org/2007/04/22/runphp-include-php-in-your-wordpress-blog-posts-or-pages/feed/ 2 http://www.bloggertools.org/2007/04/18/wordpress-adsense-theme-wp-colors/ http://www.bloggertools.org/2007/04/18/wordpress-adsense-theme-wp-colors/#comments Wed, 18 Apr 2007 23:43:10 +0000 Blogger Tools http://www.bloggertools.org/2007/04/18/wordpress-adsense-theme-wp-colors/ Wordpress adsense themes are the easiest way to place your adsense or other contextual ad codes on your blog. All you have to do is to replace the publisher code in the appropriate template files of the adsense theme.

This SEO Friendly Wordpress Adsense Theme was made by Coleen Chard and it’s called WP Colors. The theme is available in both fluid and fixed width, and four different color combinations. click here for a demo

WP Colors is adsense ready, with three locations for optimal exposure of your ads (728×90, 300×250 and 120×600). Instructions on where to replace your publisher ID are included in the download. The theme is also compatible with widgets

This adsense theme is SEO friendly, it’s making use of negative margins and the sidebar content comes after the main content in the source code, so your main content is spidered first, which is generally important to search engines.

The strategic placement of the ads in this template has proven to increase the clicktrough rate on your contextual ads, as as they are integrated around your content, complying with Google’s quality guidelines.

]]> http://www.bloggertools.org/2007/04/18/wordpress-adsense-theme-wp-colors/feed/ 5 http://www.bloggertools.org/2007/04/14/welcome-to-bloggertoolsorg/ http://www.bloggertools.org/2007/04/14/welcome-to-bloggertoolsorg/#comments Sat, 14 Apr 2007 12:59:48 +0000 Blogger Tools http://www.bloggertools.org/?p=3 Welcome to my newest Blog. On this weblog I want to write about the many blog tools that are available. Personally I find it very interesting to extend wordpress with plugins and addons.

Currently I am working on my own wordpress templates which I will release soon. I have been designing websites since 2005 and it became an addictive hobby to publish content on the internet and making attractive designs. So far I have been creating only static html designs, but ever since I discovered the power of blogging I have been focusing on the many dynamic content management systems. The wonderful blogging community has inspired me to launch bloggertools.org

I hope this weblog will be useful for those of you seeking for information and resources about the wonderful world of blogging. Be sure to visit again soon as more content will be published from today on.

Thank you for your visit

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