I’ve been sitting on this a while, waiting for the time to put the finishing touches on it. I found this template while surfing a CSS templates website looking for inspiration. It’s nothing fancy, but doing things like this helps keep my chops up…plus it gives me a chance to try new things.
Download: News Portal WordPress Theme
Demo: Here
In this one, I’ve used a couple of custom functions to power things. The first is an “unwidgetized” version of the WordPress recent comments widget in the sidebar. Again, nothing fancy, but it adds to the theme.
The biggest addition is the use of the ever-classy Suckerfish drop-down menu technique. To accomplish this, I had to re-write a few of the stock WordPress functions and classes to make this work. 
In the end, you’re left with a list_pages() function that will give you a nice cross-browser drop-down menu that’s based on parent/child page hierarchies. It’s not much, but I think it looks nice.
So yeah, that’s the majority of my contributions to this excellent template. If you’d like to use it, go for it. If you want to use this theme to build your own, again, go for it. In accordance with the original template, it’s released under a Creative Commons license, so you can do whatever you want it, as long as it’s for a non-commercial purpose.
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave a comment here or drop me a line via the Contact page.