Shade is a simple theme with a charcoal gray background and an accent color that is available in four color variations: blue, red, green and yellow. Universal Web is a universal, modern, and very functional theme with optimized/light code.

Make Waves is on its way to enlist 500 people to give back to WordPress in 2012, and if you’re curious about how you can be a part of that, don’t miss How to Give Back to WordPress from Automattic‘s own Jane Wells on Tuesday, April 10 from 2 to 3 PM CDT. The webinar will cover ways for any WordPress user to help make WordPress the greatest blogging platform of all time. This isn’t just for developers. Even if you only blog with WordPress, there are plenty of ways that you could give back to WordPress, and Jane Wells will cover them all. If you’re ready to give back to WordPress, take the Make Waves 2012 Pledge now!

New plugins Google Authenticator gives you two-factor authentication using the Google Authenticator app for Android/iPhone/Blackberry. WordPress Password Expiry expires a user’s access to the site after a specified number of days. Updated plugins Better WordPress Google XML Sitemaps is the first WordPress XML Sitemap plugin that comes with comprehensive support for Sitemapindex, Multi-site and Google News sitemap. BFT Autoresponder allows scheduling of automated autoresponder messages and managing a mailing list. Image Widget uses a native WordPress upload thickbox to add image widgets to your site. Jetpack supercharges your self-hosted WordPress site with the awesome cloud power of WordPress.com.

WordPress 3.4 Beta 1 has been released. As always, this is still in development and not meant for use on live sites, but the team is planning for a final release in May if all goes as planned. This beta includes a few notable additions over the current stable release, including a new theme customizer and previewer, the ability to select header and background images from the library, support for flexible custom header image sizes, and a much improved theme browser with the ability to install child themes from the official directory. This is not yet meant for live sites, but please do take a few swings at it on a test installation. If you find any bugs, please report them, and contact the support forums if you need any help.

Ascetica is a simple portfolio and blog theme with a responsive layout, sticky posts slider, and a widget for presenting your work. Reno has a color scheme usually associated with building trades and a leather texture background.

WordPress has been around for quite a while now and sure has grown from the small following that it had in the early days. To that end, WordPress educator Lorelle VanFossen has collected an impressive amount of stats and data regarding the usage of WordPress today. Some highlights from the article include 98 version releases of WordPress to date, more than 100 books published on WordPress since 2006, 65 million WordPress downloads since version 3 was released in June of 2010, 14.7% of the top million websites are powered by WordPress, an average of 2.5 million pages served to 352 million people per month on WordPress.com, and (out of 2 job sites) an average of 8,615 WordPress-related are jobs posted each month. That’s just a small sampling of what Lorelle has to offer. Head on over to her article for an incredibly informative read.

New plugins Add to All is a powerful plugin that will allow you to add custom code or CSS to your header, footer, content, or feed. Updated plugins Bad Behavior complements other link spam solutions by acting as a gatekeeper, preventing spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your site in the first place. Better Search replaces the default WordPress search with a contextual search including search results sorted by relevance. Fast Secure Contact Form lets your visitors send you a quick e-mail message and blocks all common spammer tactics. Additionally, the plugin has a multi-form feature, optional extra fields, and an option to redirect visitors to any URL after the message is sent.

Are you looking for a way to easily manage tasks either for yourself, your team, or perhaps even your entire company? Well, now you can with WordPress! All you need is the P2 Theme and the handy Resolved Posts plugin. We use project-specific P2s for roughly 90% of our communication at Automattic, and the Resolved Posts plugin has made it incredibly easy to stay on top of bugs, recommendations, and even simple tasks. P2 is the perfect theme for collaboration within a team or company, as it allows anyone to easily write a post with threaded comments visible on the main page. The Resolved Posts plugin allows you to easily mark a post as unresolved or resolved along with some handy styling for identifying the status of tasks at a glance. If you’re looking for a new way to manage your tasks, give P2 and the Resolved Posts plugin a try […]