Awaken

The Awaken WordPress theme is one of the most popular free magazine themes on WordPress.com, and with good reason. Bundled post slider, two widget areas, and a Bootstrap-based, grid layout allows you to present a lot of information easily.

The bundled social media widgets aren’t anything to write home about, and feel like a half baked effort to cram in additional features with not a lot of benefit.

Layout

Awaken’s magazine layout comes with three “post block widgets” as a way of customizing it’s front page. This allows you to chose between different categories, or chasing by date – a nice feature most magazine themes are lacking.

The standard two column layout allows you to easily incorporate ads, and additional widgets, but isn’t going to win you very many design points with your readers.

Pros

• Clean magazine/news layout.
• Multiple Widget Areas.
• Bootstrap based.
• GPL license.

Cons

• Responsive, but mobile styling is lacking.
• Standard typography needs to be manually spruced up to prevent it from looking generic.

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