DarkMood The DarkMood Theme is a free dark greenish theme 980px wide with two Sidebars and an Option Page to populate the Footer. Expressivo Expressivo is a three-column theme with two righthand sidebars – going to a single sidebar on single posts and pages. With Cufon embedded fonts for post titles, threaded and paged comments – you can also replace the header completely with your own image. Bright Light Bright Light is a two columns, fluid width WordPress theme with support for custom top navigation. It also has built-in support for social icons. 5 Grunge WordPress Themes Themes are a little bit dark, a little bit dirty, and very grungy. Widget-ready and gravatar-enabled

By now you have surely read the news of the release of BudyPress 1.2 (which now will work with single WordPress.org blogs, previously limited to WordPress MU) and this dev blog announcement from Jane last evening about another plugin Andy wrote that lets you use your present theme with BuddyPress. I have always been of the opinion that this blog, its content, its collection of authors and most of all, its community of readers, is a prime candidate for BuddyPress. Having a common signup between comments, ratings, forums and blog posts would be a fantastic feature. This news is the first step in making those features a reality. We will start working on our test version of this blog very soon. Are you thinking about trying BuddyPress? What is your greatest concern in adding BuddyPress to your blog? What is the greatest benefit?

Improvisation is the name of the game, and we tend to do a lot of it with plugins and themes. In that process we tend to modify functions by adding more variables to incorporate changes in them. However, unlike most of the other languages, PHP allows users to set default values for variables passed to a method too.

New Plugins Flickr Digest A simple to use WordPress plugin based on Flickr API which digests all your photos posted in last X days in a single post periodically. Feed Thumbnails This plugin simply adds your post thumbnails to your RSS feed as enclosures. Nothing else to it. Simple Twitter Connect Simple Twitter Connect makes it easy to integrate your site with Twitter, in a wholly modular way. Updated Plugins Hikari Email & URL Obfuscator Hikari Email & URL Obfuscator plugin obfuscates emails and URL links, to hide them from spam harvesters and Search Endigne crawlers. It uses ROT13 or cc8b to encode each link while PHP is building the page, then uses JavaScript to decode it and show it to the user. If JavaScript is not available, it uses CSS to hide them. Rico Tabbed Menu This is a simple plugin to create a tabbed menu in a post […]

Presenter Presenter is a child theme for the Hybrid theme framework. Presenter gives you a quick way to show your portfolio or services with few elements and easy customization from the back-end. Neat Theme Two column, gravatar ready theme with a featured section and theme options. Widget Ready, with four position widget. 42k All major components are user changeable, be that colors, sizes or layouts.The theme works perfectly out of the box, or you can change things around to suit your needs via the extremely easy to use huge admin control panel with its built in admin area inline previews. The theme comes loaded with 4 widget areas, dedicated Favicon, 4 different front page layouts, user defined error messages, dedicated tag cloud area, 2 advert areas and a free background PSD is available to download to allow you to change the look completely. Acosmin5 Simple two column theme available in […]

About a month ago I was augmenting a client site with some added functionality that, while technically out of scope, I was able to add quickly thanks to a plugin. For whatever reason on this particular instance, I was really struck by how much value I was able to add to a client site thanks to that  plugin. There was relatively little effort on my part to make the client happy due to a significant level of effort by the developer that built the plugin. Regardless, it didn’t cost me, or my client anything more than a little time. Because I realized how much more I’ve been able to do with almost every site I’ve built in the last two years thanks to plugins, I decided to try to start a movement, not out of guilt or self interest, as I have never released a plugin, but rather out of gratitude to the […]

New Plugins Mloovi Translate Widget The Mloovi widget allows you to easily add links to 52 different language versions of your blog and RSS feeds. Online Backup The plugin allows online backup as well as email backups both on demand and scheduled. Put your backups on auto pilot with 50 MiB of free space and encryption. Save time and protect your blog from lost info. You will need to register for a free account. WP Comment Pages Your users can link directly to an interesting comment, instead of the whole article. InvestorGuide.com Stock Ticker Link This plugin automatically looks for ticker symbols like (AAPL) or (GOOG) and link the tickers to research pages at InvestorGuide.com WordPress Exploit Scanner This plugin searches the files on your website, and the posts and comments tables of your database for anything suspicious. It also examines your list of active plugins for unusual filenames. Updated […]

The biggest reason many of us require to edit themes is to add JavaScript libraries, CSS codes or analytics tracking code. However, the problem with editing themes is that you will lose all your customization when you decide to change your theme or redesign it.