New plugins Pro Blog Stats provides a single location to monitor the performance and statistics for your blog. WP Github Gist provides the ability to embed gist and files from Github in your blog posts or pages. Updated plugins Plugin Dependencies provides static dependency management for plugins. Slick Social Share Buttons allows you to add Facebook, Twitter, Google +1, Digg, Google Buzz, Linkedin, and Stumbledupon social media buttons in a floating or slide out tab. Simple Facebook Connect is a framework and series of sub-systems that let you add any sort of Facebook functionality you like to a WordPress blog. Tallyopia Analytics provides analytics that you can embed into your site using shortcodes or view in your admin dashboard. W3 Total Cache allows you to improve site performance and user experience via caching. WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and […]

The weekend is just around the corner, so it may be time for yet another fun project on your WordPress blog. Are you one of the millions of bloggers using the default theme with absolutely no customizations? Are you interested in perhaps modifying it just a little to stand out from the crowd? At this year’s WordCamp San Francisco, Jane Wells gave a great presentation with an outstanding Q & A to highlight some of the basics of theme customization. If this doesn’t inspire you to change at least one element in your theme, you must really love your current theme.

Idris is an elegant, modern and professional theme built with simplicity in mind. Orbit is reminiscent of space and would be suitable for sites featuring space, flight, science, technical, computer, astronomical and other related subjects.

BuddyPress has been quickly moving to a major update in version 1.5. There have been hundreds of bug fixes, and steps have been takes to make BuddyPress 1.5 much more efficient and secure than its predecessor, but what are the noticeable changes that users can look forward to? Lead BuddyPress developer John James Jacoby took some time at this year’s WordCamp San Francisco to share what’s new in BuddyPress 1.5.

New plugins Domain Name & Path Fixer can be used to fix broken links and image paths following a change in your domain name or WordPress path. Gallery Extended allows you to put a specific part of the gallery in a post using start and stop attributes. Insert AdSense allows you to insert ads in your post at the place of your choice in a single click. Updated plugins Benchmark Email Lite creates a newsletter signup form widget. Header Image Slider allows you to easily build a slider of your header images. UI Labs offers experimental WordPress admin UI features with the aim of building upon and enhancing the default WordPress User Interface. These are unofficial core UI experiments – who knows what could happen?

Black skyline is a black-based theme with custom menu, custom header, and post thumbnail support. Blocks is a vivid, colorful and very cheerful theme that will suit any blog or website. Green Hope is a fast and easy-to-browse green-based theme.

If you’re the kind of person who loves playing with statistics over the weekend, you’re going to love this! The anonymous results from the survey mentioned in this year’s State of the Word have been made available. There’s a lot of fascinating info to collect from the data. The piece that interests me the most is already detailed in the post itself: 6,800 self-employed respondents were responsible for over 170,000 sites personally, and charged a median hourly rate of $50 . . . If each site took only 3 hours to make, that’s $29.5M of work at the average hourly rate. Yes, that’s an impressive amount of money to be generated by folks using a free blogging platform. Which fascinating stats were you able to collect?

New plugins Color Manager adds an option panel to the front-page which enables your client or theme users to pick the colors and see the results live in the page. Social Media Tabs allows you to add facebook, google +1, buzz, twitter and RSS profiles and feeds to any widget area with stylish sliding tabs. WordPress Snap is a simple shortcode for displaying a thumbnail from any website. Updated plugins Humans TXT allows you to credit the people behind your website in your humans.txt file. Slick Social Share Buttons adds facebook, twitter, google +1, linkedin, digg, google buzz, and stumbledupon social media buttons in a floating or slide out tab. Top 10 tracks daily and total visits on your blog posts and displays the count as well as popular posts. TwitterCounter integrates TwitterCounter.com badges on your blog to display the number of followers you have on Twitter.