The Original Premium News Theme is the very first premium WordPress theme released by Woothemes.

Although it may look a little old compared to the magazine-style themes that are being released these days, Premium News is still a rock solid foundation for anyone that want to create a magazine or news portal-like blog. Actually, having few graphic elements in the design, it actually gives you, as a designer, the flexibility to modify it to your needs.

The theme comes packed with featured posts, ad support, navigation effects and more. Let’s have a look:

Premium News Features:

  • featured posts homepage panel using jQuery to cycle through them;
  • supports the most popular ad sizes:  468×60, 300×250 and 125×125;
  • animated horizontal drop-down menu’s for category navigation;
  • 7 colour styles to choose from;
  • lava-lamp style menu for displaying pages;
  • tabbed sidebar navigation (popular posts, featured, comments, tags);
  • Flickr widget in the sidebar;
  • cool “recent videos” section – uses Javascript to cycle through the recent videos
  • sidebar jQuery expanding menus

Since Premium News was the foundation of other themes from Woothemes, it also includes these (now standard) features:

Standard Features:

Backend theme options

Making simple changes without editing code, like adding your own logo, changing to an alternate colour style, adding Google Analytics code, couldn’t be easier with our WordPress backend theme option’s panel.

Cross-browser compatible

Themes are tested to ensure they are compatible with all the popular web browsers like Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer 8, 7 and even the not so popular 6! They should also all be web standards compliant.

Auto-sizing thumbnails

An image resizer script built into the Woo framework automatically scales your post images for pixel perfect display in our templates. No need to upload new cropped images when re-designing your website.

Localized for translations

WooThemes come packaged with a .po file for easy WordPress theme translations into your desired language – editing one neat little file without hunting down text in all our theme templates.

Woo framework

All Woothemes are built on the same stable WooThemes framework – modifications are a breeze, whilst all is neatly coded for search engine readiness and further theme development.

Custom page templates

Our themes come packaged with a full width page template without the sidebar, and sitemap/archives page templates for efficient quick links to all the hidden posts you wrote ages ago that still deserve to be seen.

Also, Woothemes have a permanent 2-for-1 offer, which means that when you buy a theme from them, you get to pick another one, free.

NOTE: this is a free wordpress theme, and Woothemes have released it “as is”. You will get no support for this theme if you are not a member of Woothemes (join here).