This is our original collection of reviews themes for WordPress, so many of these themes may be a little bit dated. I still think they’re quality themes, but many have a look that seems like it was more relevant half a decade or more ago. With things trending toward a sleeker, more modern style, these themes might not be ideal for crafting a reviews site anymore. For our newer collection of WordPress reviews themes, our collection is a great place to start to find something you’re going to absolutely love. We’ve also got a really big collection of magazine themes for general news and blog sites. With the right plugin, you can create a really cool reviews site with one of those themes as well.
Anyway, that’s enough introduction oh, I think that you get my point. So, here is our original collection of reviews themes, hopefully some of this still has a little bit of life left in it. Considering how many different people there are, one or more of these themes could come in handy at some point.
Allegro
Allegro is a powerful magazine theme with built in reviews system. It’s quick to get started with Orange Themes page builder blocks with it’s simple, straightforward, drag and drop page building system. Visual shortcodes, custom weather widget and more. This theme has it all.
Allegro is a true Premium WordPress News Magazine and blog theme that’s completely customizable to fit your every need. With a built in review engine, this theme is great for really getting your users to help generate content for you. How cool is that? What’s more, Allegro is totally responsive with a powerful back-end admin panel to make changing and customizing the theme a snap. It’s translation ready with custom backgrounds and gives you four options for sliders up top. Visual Composer ensures the layout will be precisely what you were looking for and the category mega-menu makes navigation simple and straightforward for your visitors. Four post formats (featured image, sound cloud, slider and video) ensure you can keep your posts from getting lost in the shuffle.
Valenti
Valenti is an outstanding feature-filled WordPress premium HD review magazine theme and it’s got also a WordPress parallax theme too. Valenti has it’s own Drag & Drop page builder, so even beginning users can have quickly craft a unique homepage and make any kind of modifications to it any time they wish. Valenti packs a unique mega-menu system for gorgeous and functional drop down menus and also the ability to set the featured image of a post to have a parallax effect. This theme is retina ready, and really dun to use. The drag and drop interface is pretty straight forward and isn’t overly complex, yet it is still feature filled. Your community will be able to review anything, so this could be a great magazine about food or movies. WooCommerce, bbPress and BuddyPress are all supported, which means you can grow a community and then monetize it in some way if you see fit.
Valenti calls itself a cutting-edge and feature-rich WordPress theme and back during its original release in 2013, that was certainly the case. Since then, this theme has been updated consistently to keep it fresh in fact, it has been updated so many times that he really can’t consider the original and the newest version 5 to be the same at all. It’s got a new sticky side bars, new mobile menu and logo new post title design options and a new homepage patinated block. So, this theme really has kept up after all. Oh yeah, it’s still great for creating reviews of products and services too.
Steam
Steam is a fully featured WordPress games review theme with trending carousel, WooCommerce enabled and Buddypress compatible too. Steam makes it easy to set up a magazine to review whatever you like, from games to movies to music to videos and everything else. Tons of Google fonts, tons of short codes, tons of widgets…this theme has it all! Check out our collection of WooCommerce WordPress themes for more awesome themes for creating a cool online shop.
Steam considers itself to be the most advanced magazine-style WordPress theme available, but considering the fact that it has not been updated in over a year, I sort of doubt that that is the case. This theme started off very strong with over a thousand downloads it’s for CDs appears on the market, but the updates have stopped coming as quickly as one would like. This theme is still really great for gaming magazines, but I think that at this point, you need to know a little bit more about WordPress and have a support at yourself for me to recommend it. If you are beginner, this theme is probably not going to be a great fit for you.
Puzzles
What sets Puzzles apart? For one, Puzzles has a flexible system of setup for the entire blog, for each of its categories and even every single post or page. In the blog, every post has its own style. Need to remove the sidebar? Slide it over to the left and replace the sidebar (select another sidebar with its own set of widgets), as well as perform lots of other useful settings – you will be able to do it easily for each category, page or post! This theme is WooCommerce, BuddyPress and bbPress ready too, so making an online community based around this template is pretty easy. Plenty of online communities are springing up using Puzzles.
Puzzles is another aged WordPress theme, one that supports bbpress and buddypress, woocommerce and lots of other different plugins and add-ons. With recent updates and upgrades, the developer has taken the time to ensure that this team is continuously getting more and more features, making it a better option for those of you who are in it for the Long Haul. You certainly don’t want a theme that is not going to be updated and not going to be kept fresh, which is one great thing about this particular template.
Oblivion
Oblivion is here! This is the ultimate gaming review them, and it was made with the newest HTML5 and CSS3 techniques, so you can create amazing review sites or portfolios for your game development. Add a forum and now you’ve got a real online gaming community website just like that. With unlimited colors, backgrounds and fonts, there’s no style of website you can’t create. bbPress and Buddypress compatibility means you can craft a community based around this theme and the rating system means your readers will be engaged and give you feedback on your content. Drag and drop page building is here! Finally, Oblivion allows you to create pages with the layout you want, not what’s pre-packaged in the design. A parallax slider is bundled, so you can make real impact from the very beginning with this theme.
This bbPress compatible theme is in this collection for one good reason. Well, two. One, it’s got a super easy to use star rating system. Two it’s quite a bit older than some of the themes in our newer collection of reviews templates. This theme is currently just about a hundred downloads shy of 2,000 for its career. With a solid 4.52 rating, it’s still a pretty good theme. The developer updated it just under one year ago and it really does seem to have all of the kinks worked out, making it a solid choice for anybody who wants a theme that looks exactly like this one. Haha.
Backstreet
Backstreet is a modern WordPress magazine, portfolio and blog theme with a built in reviews feature that helps you take your content and make it a little more interactive. It’s a fun and highly successful strategy with the right content and if you’re reviewing products anyway, it’s a great fit. Backstreet provides you with three post formats (audio, video and image galleries) and Backstreet can be used for any topic or niche. The review system is comprehensive, with five rating criteria and even better, you can customize the look and layout of the site quite easily with the theme options panel. Backstreet is responsive to look great on any device, which may even be more necessary on a reviews magazine site. With a flexible page layout, you’ll never get tired of Backstreet.
So, that is what I had to say about this team back when I first reviewed it. Since then, quite a bit has changed. For one thing, the developers not updated this team in over 2 years. That is really a fairly porcine. The rating has plummeted from respectable 4.8 to a 4.2. Clearly, this theme is not ready for the big time anymore. So, you’ll probably have a lot more look checking out other, more highly rated themes.
I think that BackStreet, at least for a while, was in our collection of minimalist WordPress themes. But, I had to remove it for many of the same reasons that I removed it from our reviews collection.
The Reviewer
Reviewer is a WordPress theme built for one purpose: writing reviews. Whether it’s reviews for movies or TV shows, Reviewer can handle it. This theme is localized, so it’s ready for translation into any language. There are bundled background images, or create your own to add your own flair to it. Reviews are a perfect way to increase user involvement in your website, so this theme is perfect for creating a movie reviews website.
If you are writing reviews, you might need a theme like this one. Now, what you do get is a GPL licensed theme that has a truly unique, somewhat retro-style. What you don’t get, great support or modern code. That’s because this theme has not been updated since August of 2015. That’s almost won Olympic cycle, and no signs of updating in the near future. They are still saying that they are supporting this team, but I somehow doubt it. Anyway, if you really do want a GPL theme and you feel confident about your own ability to supporting update a theme, this one could be a decent choice.
Drive
Drive is…puts on sunglasses…driven to please. It’s a great magazine theme with a functional and responsive layout, thanks in large part to it’s modular design system. That means it can be used for anything from a personal blog, to magazine or newspaper theme and more. Anything that pushes the limits of content will be ideal with this theme. There are over four dozen shortcodes with Short Code generator support, support for post formats, color schemes, static and widgetized carousels and modular section design that’s really flexible. The ratings system is pretty cool too, allowing visitors to rate posts, projects and other content.
Made
So, this is a theme called made. It is sold over 3,000 times so far and it has earned a solid 4.4 rating on ThemeForest. This is a responsive theme with a couple different unique skins, it packs the power of buddypress and I think it makes it great for user reviews websites. One great thing about this template, it doesn’t rely on visual composer to achieve its look. That can result in a faster loading WordPress based website, all important these days.
Made is strong review theme powered by a rock-solid framework which will help you to showcase your own reviews and help your visitors to make some tough decisions. Got a beer review blog? Video games? Movies or new mix tapes? Your users can review anything you want them to. Also, this theme comes with many different features which will help you to customize it on the way you want. Many themes don’t include four different ratings types, but Made absolutely does. Building a music review site? add from originality, production, lyrics and musical quality to your ratings and let folks give their take. Restaurants? How about ratings for food, decor, service and value. The choices are endless, based on what kind of niche you’re in.
The Times
If you want to see what a dated WordPress theme looks like, in my opinion, you’re looking at it. This theme looks like it’s about 10 to 12 years old, which I suppose is possible, but I find it really hard to believe that it is still on the market. In fact, this theme was released in 2011, making it arguably one of the oldest themes still for sale on ThemeForest. Well, maybe it’s right for somebody, but that’s why it’s only in this collection and not the main one anymore.
The Times is a feature-rich WordPress magazine theme with built in reviews capability, and it’s suitable for almost any niche. Add up to 7 custom criteria for your reviews, adjust the look and feel of the website with a powerful theme options panel, switch up the homepage layout and even adjust the global style of the theme with ease. There are unlimited skins available, two homepage styles, multisite support, a half dozen custom widgets and over fifty shortcodes built-into the site, with shortcodes manager to help keep them organized.
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