Less than a month ago, Jeff announced the end of long-time WordPress community, news source, and podcast, WordPress Tavern. While all seemed lost, WordPress Tavern was picked up by an anonymous buyer, and as announced, Jeff will be containing to helm the community as always with no major changes in store for the foreseeable future. This is definitely a major victory for Jeff and the WordPress Tavern community, who’s forum had often been the go-to place for the greater WordPress community outside of the walls of the WordPress.org forums. Well done, Jeff!

New plugins Menu Humility shoves plugins with top level nav menus (below “Dashboard”) to the bottom of your Dashboard sidebar. Newsletter Sign-Up provides various ways to gain more subscribers to your mailing list. WYSIWYG Widgets allows you to create easy rich text widgets without having to know HTML. Updated plugins Query Multiple Taxonomies adds an advanced taxonomy navigation widget that lets users filter posts by multiple criteria. WordPress Beta Tester allows you to easily upgrade to WordPress Beta releases.

Twenty Eleven, the new WordPress default theme, has been officially unveiled. If you notice the similarities between Twenty Eleven and Duster, that’s because Duster was more or less the beta release of Twenty Eleven, but don’t be fooled by the similar looks. Twenty Eleven contains several under-the-hood enhancements and additional features, and it will be included by default with all WordPress downloads as soon as WordPress 3.2 is released! WordPress.com users are welcome to try Twenty Eleven on their blogs now, and self-hosted WordPress users eager to try Twenty Eleven are more than welcome to get involved in WordPress 3.2 beta testing. Of course, if beta testing isn’t your thing, you can always try out the theme’s demo. What do you think of the new default WordPress theme?

Char is a dark, edgy, and grungy theme. Gridnotez is a two column theme with a brown grid-paper design and hand-drawn icons. Scylla lite has awesome skins, fonts, slider, layouts, and an easy to use theme options panel.

New plugins +1 Button Plugin adds a Google +1 button to your posts. The Google +1 plugin adds the Google +1 button to your site so your visitors can vote to tell the world how great your site is. Hide Unwanted Shortcodes prevents unwanted shortcodes from showing on blog. Update Active Plugins Only tells WordPress to only check for updates to active plugins. Updated plugins Front-end Editor allows inline editing of your content. Theme-Check allows you to run checks on the current theme before uploading to WordPress. This plugin uses the same API and is kept more or less in sync with the WordPress.org uploader tool.

Brunelleschi is a clean and modern theme that celebrates content. Driftwood is a perfect theme for the onset of summer. Mantra is a clean and very web 2.0 theme with customizable layout, colors, fonts and graphics.

WordCamp San Francisco, “the official annual conference of the WordPress open source project” and heralded by many as the largest annual gathering of WordPressians, is putting out the call for speakers for the 2011 convention. This year’s WordCamp SF will be held at the Mission Bay Conference Center from August 12th – 14th, and they are “expanding the programming for publishers, bloggers, and developers.” I’ll definitely be there this year. How about you?

New plugins Cleanup HTML adds a button to your visual editor, which when clicked, strips your post HTML of any div or span tags you might have, usually (but not always) junk tags to have in a post. Easy Modal allows you to easily add a Modal window with just about any content. Revert is a one-click button to revert a post to its previous revision. Updated plugins Admin Menu Tree Page View is a WordPress plugin that adds a page tree in the admin menu, so all your pages will always be available within just one click, no matter where you are in the admin area. Awesome Flickr Gallery Plugin is a simple, fast and light plugin to create a gallery of your Flickr photos on your WordPress enabled website. Exploit Scanner searches the files on your website, and the posts and comments tables of your database for anything […]