It has been a common request that I make an elegant and professional “news” theme. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what people mean when they call a design “magazine” or “news” style, but to me it simply means creating a theme that can present a lot of content on the homepage in a clean and user-friendly manner. Unlike my previous release (Bold), which showcased a more stylized and abstract design, eNews is a exercise in crispness and subtlety. I tried to make it simple and organized with an attention to subtle details. You can preview the theme here, or check out the gallery page for more info.

Features

1. Increased Control – This theme was co-developed by Yuriy, one of ElegantTheme’s main forum techs. With two minds at work there was more time to focus on the theme’s backend, which resulted in some new options not previously seen in my other themes. For example, even the Featured Articles slider on the homepage has several variables that can be adjusted, including 1) Choosing which category to use for your featured articles display. 2) Choosing whether to enable/disable featured articles as a whole 3) Deciding whether you would like featured articles to be excluded from the main loop on the homepage. 4) Adjusting the animation type used when switching between articles. 5) Enabling/disabling auto rotation of featured articles 6) Changing how fast the articles auto-rotate if enabled 7) Choosing how many featured articles to display, and more. In the future I hope to continue to expand on my theme’s backend and give similar control to all aspect of the blog. 2. Custom Fields No Longer Necessary – If you don’t want to add thumbnail custom fields to all of your posts then you can enable automatic thumbnail detection, which will grab the first image in your post and use it to generate your thumbnails. 3. Multiple Color Schemes – eNews comes with 5 color schemes to choose from, including Blue, Turquoise, Purple, Green and Red. You can switch between color schemes at any time via the eNews Theme Options Page. Overall I think you will notice an improved user experience when setting up this theme due to the backend changes, and I hope to continue to improve my theme’s userfriendliness in future updates.