This is the first post in my Comparison of Magazine Themes series. In this post, we’ll see about The Morning After and Your Revolution. I chose these two because they were so close in the layout and look.

The Morning After

The Morning After is a free magazine-like theme by Arun Kale. The theme was created based on a brief survey on the WordPress forums about what people would want to see in a unique magazine-style theme. To my knowledge, it is the first magazine-style theme to be released(see below). Not only the first, it is my favorite. I use this personally on one of my sites and i’m loving this. This theme has many features that are essential for a magazine. Especially, i really appreciate the use of Custom Fields. I love the way the posts are displayed on the homepage, and the recent posts section. The Morning After doesn’t fall behind on the post display page also. It is very nice too like a professional magazine. If i wanted to choose a magazine-style theme and didn’t have money to spend, i’d definitely choose The Morning After. To look at an excellent implementation of The Morning After, go to PopSofa.com

Pros

• Excellent Layout
• Very good use of Custom Fields
• Integration with Email Posts Plugin (a typical magazine feature)

Cons

• Colorless. By default it is fully in grayscale

Your Revolution

First of all i’d like to tell that i have no personal vengeance against Adii and this post is truly unbiased. The first thing that stuck me when i saw Your Revolution was its color. It was too bright and was a heavy strain on my eye. Of course, i complained that The Morning After was colorless. But, i didn’t want this much color either. Anything like the Revolution News Theme will be optimal. Coming back to Your Revolution, i’d tell that it gives less emphasis for the posts on the frontpage. That is, the first and the second column on the frontpage are equally wide. But, its is logical that the first column needs to be wider than the second.

Your Revolution gives excellent position for the 300 x 250 advertisement, which was absent in The Morning After. Your Revolution’s single post page look impressive too. Though Your Revolution’s category page is nice, i like The Morning After’s better. Also, Your Revolution has a poor header design which is a big drawback. To conclude, i’d say that Your Revolution isn’t worth your bucks when The Morning After is available for free.

Pros

• Good Positioning for Advertisement

Cons

• The color scheme
• Poor header design
• The “Can-do-better” type of layout

UPDATE : Sorry to have mentioned that The Morning After was the first Magazine-style theme. Its looks like Mimbo Magazine theme was released before The Morning After. Sorry for the mistake. Thanks for letting me know Darren.