WordPress is the ultimate platform for Magazine- and News-style websites! Blogging and regular publication of news or magazine articles are similar processes with similar needs.
And WordPress is powerful enough even for large websites. As a result some big-name websites now use WordPress as an engine, including the Ebay blog, Yahoo! blogs, Ford, Wall Street Journal, People Magazine, NY Times blogs, Wired, CNN and many, many others.
The WordPress magazine themes below make it easy to set up and run a sophisticate and professional magazine or news website yourself. We’ve selected WordPress themes from many of the top WordPress theme shops, so you can be sure they’re made with quality. We’ve also sorted through hundreds of magazein themes to give you the best looking, best designed themes out there.
What did we look for? While there are some exceptions, we think the defining characteristic of a Magazine or News WordPress Theme is the distinctive front page. Like many popular newspapers or magazines, these themes aggregate a LOT of content on the home page using feature areas with large features and recent new stories, and categorized areas below the feature that consolidate recent news stories from multiple categories.
You’ll also find that most magazine WordPress themes have immediately obvious category links to different categories of content, often using secondary menus.
1. The Source
The Source is a brilliantly designed theme by Elegant Themes with bold, stark colors and a modern interpretation on Magazine-style WordPress themes.
2. Delicious Magazine
Delicious is a beautiful WordPress magazine-style WordPress theme by WooThemes. Although food-themes, this is a great, clean multi-purpose theme.
3. Gazette
Gazette is one of the older and most classic “news” style WordPress themes from Woo themes. Woo makes a number of great magazine and news themes, and this is only the second of about 5 listed on this page from WooThemes.
4. Journal
Journal is another classic news-style design from Woo themes.
5. PIM
PIM is a beautiful, clean magazine style theme from the ThemeForest marketplace. Not sure “PIM” stands for, but it’s a great design.
6. Avenue
Along the lines of PIM (above), Avenue is another very clean, magazine theme from the WP theme market at ThemeForest.
7. Magzimus
Magzimus is an awesomely designed, bold, distinctive Magazine WordPress theme. This kind of cutting-edge design is one reason Themeforest has developed a reputation for some of the best designs available.
8. Editorial
Editorial is an elegant theme with a prominent leader image and generally feature-image heavy front page that makes it very inviting.
9. Platinum
Platinum is a straightforward theme designed by StudioPress and based on the robust Genesis framework.
10. News Theme
Another class news-style WordPress design from StudioPress and based on Genesis. The News theme has less of the cutting edge styling of some of it’s other peers, but has that classic newspaper look.
11. Lexicon
Lexicon has the look that StudioPress became famous for. It’s got a relatively straightforward but nice news-style design.
12. Delicate News
Delicate news is an artfully designed WordPress theme from Elegant Themes. As the name implies, it has a “light” and inviting feel to it.
13. Grunge Mag
Grungemag is a somewhat different take on the WordPress magazine theme, with it’s bold colors and set of feature thumbs across the top.
14. eNews
eNews is yet another Elegant Themes design. Like many of their offerings, it has exceeding good styling and a great, inviting feel.
15. Global Press
Global Press is an awesome Magazine WordPress theme that manages to present a lot of content – categories, news topics, stories, links – on the home page while still making the home page light and easy to navigate.
16. Gadgetine
Gadgetine is another very well-designed theme that, like Global Press, allows the aggregation of tons of content on the home page while still managing to feel clean and easy to read. A great theme for magazine or news sites.
17. MediaPress
MediaPress is an open-style design with lots of white space that makes it easy on the eyes, but doesn’t convey the same density of content as the last two themes.
18. Cult
Cult promotes itself as a magazine-style WordPress theme, but it’s very different from most other offerings. It lacks the areas for new topics and summaries, and aggregates a simpler set of posts.
19. Repro
Repro is just a clean, solid design created by Premium Pixels and sold through the Themeforest market place.
20. Continuum
Continuum is another ThemeForest offering that’s got a busy and full news-style homepage layout that brings up lot of content and organizes it well.
21. Spectrum
Spectrum is a magazine theme that uses feature images to produce a very inviting front page without an overwhelming amount of content and aggregation.
22. BoldNews
BoldNews is yet another of WooThemes great WordPress magazine themes. Like spectrum, it makes use of feature images to produce a colorful and image-rich home page.