With many of the top theme designers switching their focus to creating and selling premium WordPress themes, it is always good to see some premium quality WordPress themes being released for free.

Today’s theme is called WP Freemium, and it was originally created by Ptah Dunbar for BloggingTips.com. It looks like due to some complications, BloggingTips.com decided to go another route so Ptah has made this theme available for anyone for free.

Here are the advertised features:

• Valid xHTML Strict 1.0 / CSS
• Code is well commented for the non technical savvy
• Sidebar Widgets enabled
• Custom Front Page with 3 featuring articles
• By default - 6 advertisement spots on all pages
• Gravatars highly Supported for Comments, Author Profiles and Author Posts.
• Author Byline + Promotion on single pages
• Author Profiles feature prominent image of the author with bio, contact details and more
• Image Gallery Support
• Print Stylesheet is included.
• Favicon + iPhone Webclip icon Ready
• SEO Optimized title tags and headers
• 404 Error Page notifies admin each time someone stumbles across a broken link so they can fix it.

I was unable to find a demo, so here are some screenshots provided by the author:

Homepage

Single Page

Author Bio

Author Page

I really like how this theme was setup for a blog that has multiple authors, making it a great free option for anyone starting a multi-author WordPress blog.

If you’d like to get a copy for your WordPress blog, click over to get WP Freemium.

This guest post was written by Jean-Baptiste Jung, who maintains a blog (written in French) that covers WordPress. If you have webmaster or WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

Inspired by the well-known Mimbo theme by Darren Hoyt, OpenBook is a free Magazine style Wordpress theme, which doesn’t require you to manually edit a file.

I first realeased this theme in January, but at this time it was only available in French. So it is the very first English version.

Download OpenBook

Download OpenBook 2.2 Wordpress Theme: zip archive

If you’re looking for a live demo, check out my personnal blog which uses this theme.

OpenBook Features

Here’s what you can expect in OpenBook theme:

• Magazine-style homepage, including 2 columns and SmoothGallery for your featured posts.
• 100% Gravatar compatible.
• Custom fields to insert images on the homepage gallery, on homepage posts and in categories posts.
• Magazine-style dropdown-menu for your categories.
• Not manual editing required. After installing the theme, you’ll find an OpenBook tab under Design, where you can set up the options for the theme, including featured posts, featured category, blog logo, number of posts to display on the gallery, categories to display on the blog homepage…
• If you hate Internet Explorer 6 as I do, you’ll probably be happy: OpenBook have an option which litteraly crash IE6 if checked. If unchecked, IE6 will not crash and people who (still) use it will see your blog just as other users.
• Compatible with Firefox 2, Firefox 3 beta, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 6. (OpenBook is also probably compatible with other browsers like Konqueror, I just haven’t tested it myself)
• Widget-ready sidebar
• SEO-friendly titles
• Page templates for Links and Archives
• Compatible with Wordpress 2.3 to 2.5.1

Installing OpenBook

OpenBook install is like installing any Wordpress theme: Unzip the archive, and upload the openbook22-en directory into the wp-content/themes of your Wordpress install.

Then, go to your WP administration panel, Design » Theme and select OpenBook.

Now, you should go to Design » OpenBook and fill the various fields:

• Your blog logo url
• ID of your featured category
• Number of posts to display in SmoothGallery.
• IDs of categories to display on the homepage.
• If you want to make any IE6 crash, just check the related checkbox.
• Number of posts to display on the homepage, by category

Configuring SmoothGallery

SmoothGallery is a very pretty mootools script by Jonathan Schemoul which display posts along with big images. In order to configure it, you must create a new category (In this exemple, we’ll call it featured) and report its ID to Design » OpenBook.

When you want to show a particular post in the SmoothGallery, just edit the post and check the featured category. Of course, you can add the post to other categories as well.

Now, you should define an image that will display in SmoothGallery. Juste create a custom field, give it featuredimg as key and your image url as value. Once saved, the post will be displayed in SmoothGallery.

The ideal SmoothGallery image size is 600*250 pixels. You can use different size, but the image will be cropped or will not fill all the available space.

Using custom fields to display images in posts

As I said above, it is possible to assign one or more image(s) to a post. Theses images will be displayed on the homepage, or in categories pages, depending of the custom field used.

Here’s the custom fields keys, and the place where the images will be displayed.

• featuredimg » The image will be displayed in SmoothGallery (Only if the related post is in the featured category)
• Image » The image will be displayed along with its related post, on the homepage.
• catimage » The image will be displayed in category pages. Ideal size is 125*125 pixels.

Please note

The OpenBook theme is (and will stay) 100% free. I also try to always help people who use it as much as I can. The only thing that I’m asking, is that you leave my link on the theme footer. Thanks in advance

Edit on July 3, 2008: I just wrote a simple tutorial for modifying OpenBook color scheme. You can read it here.

A few days ago, I ran across another great free WordPress theme over at Daily Blog Tips.   If you don’t want to purchase a theme, I would definitely pick out some of the themes they’ve been releasing recently.  This particular theme is called PassionDuo, and it has a lot of the quality that I look for in a free WordPress theme.

Here are the features the author lists that are associated with PassionDuo:

• Advertising ready: The theme comes with a 468×60 banner spot on the header, and 6 125×125 spots on top of the sidebar. It should also be easy to integrate ad units of other sizes throughout the theme.
• Feedburner Integration: The theme has an options page where you can simply paste your Feedburner feed URL. It also comes with a styled email subscription form, where you just need to put your Feedburner email id.
• Comments Styling: The author comments already come with a different style so that readers can easily identify them.
• Search Engine Optimization: As usual the title and meta tags have already been optimized. The categories and archive pages are also structured to display only post excerpts.

In addition to these great features, you will also get the choice of either green, red, or blue.   Here is a screen shot of the green version:

If you’re interested, here is the demo and download information:

Green: Demo | Download

Red: Demo | Download

Blue: Demo | Download

I will be adding this theme to the appropriate WordPress theme galleries.

About a month ago, I sent a call out to the WordPress community requesting that more themes be released that by default include slots for 125×125 banners. They are all the rage, yet it seems that few designers took the time to optimize their themes for these banners. Common sense says that if there is very little supply but a lot of demand, the people that fill the demand will find success.

In looking at the recent trends with newly released themes over this past month, it seems that bloggers have really responded and there is now a wide variety of WordPress themes available for download. I decided there are finally enough of them now that I can throw together a gallery of WordPress themes that allow for 125×125 banners. Enjoy!

2-Column Themes

Slick Blue Theme

Source | Download | Demo

PassionDuo Theme (3 Colors)

Green: Demo | Download, Red: Demo | Download, Blue: Demo | Download

WP Freemium Theme

Source | Download

Dark Zen Theme

Source | Download | Demo

Maggo Theme

Source | Download | Demo

Green Tech Theme

Source | Download | Demo

Blue Sensation Theme

Source | Download | Demo

3-Column Themes

iPhOne Theme

Source | Download | Demo

Padangan Theme

Source | Download | Demo

SimpleWP Theme

Source | Download | Demo

Black and White Theme

Source | Download | Demo

WP-Polaroid Theme

Source | Download | Demo

Firebug Theme

Source | Download | Demo

Simple Red Theme

Source | Download (Requires free registration) | Demo

True Blue Theme

Source | Download (Requires free registration) | Demo

Blue Block Theme

Source | Download | Demo

WP Premiere Theme

Source | Download | Demo

Magazine-Style Themes

Structure Theme

Source | Download | Demo

Forte Theme

Source | Download | Demo

Mag on Wood Theme

Source | Download | Demo

Know of one we missed? Contact us or let us know in the comments below!

I’ve been talking a bit about the need for free theme designers to spend some time building more advertising spots into their WordPress themes.  They are really in demand right now and there is currently a lack of themes that provide them out of the box.

Recently Daniel of Daily Blog Tips released the GreenTech WordPress theme, which is available for free to any interested WordPress users.   The theme was created by a friend of mine, Mayank Gupta of ReviewSaurus, as a way to showcase his design talents.

First, here is a quick look at the theme:

I think this theme is going to become extremely popular over the coming months in the same way that the BloggingPro theme did for much of last year.  Here are the features that Daniel lists:

• Advertising Ready: The theme comes with six 125×125 banner spots on the sidebar. You will just need to upload the banners to the theme “Images” folder and update the ads.php file.
• Easy Feedburner Integration: The “Theme Options” section inside the WordPress control panel enables the blogger to insert his Feedburner URL, which will be used all over the theme.
• Widgets Ready: The theme supports widgets, so just drop the ones you use.
• About the Author Section: The theme comes with a sidebar section dedicated to the author. You can upload your picture and a small description using the author.php page.
• Comments Styling: Author comments have a different style.
• Read More Tag Styling: The “Read More” tag is already styled and integrated into the design. Useful for bloggers that use post excerpts.
• Search Engine Optimization: The meta and title tags are already optimized for search engines.

If you are interested, you can view a live demo of the theme or download the theme.