I’ve created a variation on the Plain Masses theme, based on the idea of having lots of extra columns on the front page. I got the basic idea from the International Herald Tribune site — they use tables to achieve the effect, and obviously have strict control over what shows up where.
I’ve been trying to decide if I want to make the “main” story a special one, like the latest article in a specific category, but since I don’t usually post even daily, never mind multiple times a day, it doesn’t seem useful to me to have that main article be the “lead story” ...
The next three most recent articles have their “excerpt” displayed in the second column (actually the number of stories in that column is easy to adjust, the variable is right at the top of the index.php file). The third column shows just headlines in a list for the remaining stories on your front page.
The catch to using this theme is that you have to think about things a little more. I had to turn my front page count up to 15 articles to make the third column look right, and I have to write my excerpts more carefully, and use the WordPress more feature carefully, making sure to put enough content on the front page to keep the layout straight. In case you’re not familiar with it, that’s the tag which breaks your post into front-page and full-article sections, and the point is that you need to have enough content on the front page for it to work
I also integrated LiveSearch into this theme, so if you grab the theme download, be aware of that. I was careful enough that it should work without any problems, but if it doesn’t, or you just don’t want it, you can disable it by simply removing all three of the livesearch files …
On my server, the livesearch seems to be a bit slow, I haven’t looked into why yet, the fact is, it works, and in the worst case it still works “the old way”.
If you want to try it out, I’m giving away the theme … as always, please feel free to modify it before you use it. It’s in 7-Zip format, so if you haven’t upgraded yet, you may want to get “a better archiver”:http://www.tugzip.com