It looks like the crew over at Premium News has been busy, releasing their eighth theme in the last five months. This premium WordPress theme is called Fresh News, and it was based upon the extremely popular Flash edition news theme.
Here are some of the features included with the Fresh News theme:
- Automatic Image Resizer (requires PHP GD Library to work)
- Custom Page Templates for Archives, Sitemap & Image Gallery
- Built-in Gravatar Support for Authors & Comments
- Author Profiles & Archives
- Featured news section
- Video Panel (for use with Flash videos)
- Traditional Blog Layout (for homepage)
- Integrated aside / sideblog section within the sidebar of the theme (optional)
- Navigation Dropdown Menu’s
- Sidebar Tabbed Box
- 2 different homepage layouts (featured section)
- Widgetized sidebars
- Integrated Banner Ad Management
- Integrated Flickr & Feedburner
Upon first glance, there are two things that jump out at me about this theme. I don’t believe previous versions of premium News themes have had multiple colors (I could be wrong), but Fresh News comes with 6 different colors to choose from.
The other really neat thing you get is something that I’ve been suggesting premium theme designers do for months now, and that is to provide a blogging template with the theme. It looks like if you purchase the Fresh News theme, you will get a blogging template that you can use. This opens up a lot more options for a potential buyer and creates more appeal to bloggers that don’t want a content management homepage.
Here are some screenshots of Fresh News:
Homepage
Post Page
This theme comes with everything you’ve come to expect from the News theme crew, and it is available at the same price. You can purchase a single-use license for $99.95 or a multiple-use license for $249.95.
Check out the Fresh News WordPress theme!
Kyle Eslick
Kyle Eslick is the founder and primary author of WordPress Hacks. You can learn more about him at KyleEslick.com or you can follow his personal tweets here.
Thanks for releasing this version. 
As your site has a lot of widgets, so I think it will significantly reduce the server usage. 
I'd love to do the 301 redirect, but it seems that with Wordpress's canonical URLs, redirects create infinite loops that ...
Great gallery. But I wasted 3 months to find a good free wordpress template and finally no one was customizable ...
This is really the first theme from the Premium News crew that I’ve liked at all. I’ve always felt their prior releases were too similar and a little on the dull side, but this one I could be interested in.
I have to say, this is the best damn theme they have put out since releasing their first theme. Very pleasing to the eyes and I love that soft color scheme.
I really like the look of this theme too, and think that the inclusion of a normal blog homepage was a great idea too. Not every blog is going to be appropriate for a magazine layout, so this theme covers all the bases. I also think the image gallery is a nice touch.
I think the pricing in your post is incorrect; it’s actually $99.95/$249.95.
@ Tommy – This is definitely my favorite theme they’ve made as well. Its interesting that you felt that they were very similar, because they’ve used a large variety of different coders and I believe designers as well.
@ Jeffro – Yes, it is very gentle on the eyes. I’m loving it!
@ PJ – Thanks for the correction, I have updated the post. The pricing structure is consistent with their past releases, I just had the amounts wrong.
It looks really nice and with the Dollar’s lousy exchange rate it is rather cheap (from a European’s perspective).
Thanks guys for the warm comments on the design, I really appreciate it
Premium News theme has different colour style sheets…
However I still think this theme is still too similar to the others.
Great theme but I am having the hardest time getting the automatic thumbnailer to work (thumb.php). I’m getting a 404, but the script and the image location &src= all seem fine.
http://soccercharge.com/wp-content/themes/premiumnews/thumb.php?src=http://soccercharge.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/muscle_structure.jpg&h=57&w=100&zc=1&q=80
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you
Got it working – please disregard previous comment