With the veil of Internet Explorer 6 now lifted, WordPress will be receiving a major CSS overhaul for version 3.3, and the developers are asking for your help, advice, and opinions. The goal of the project is not to change the existing design, but to rather consolidate and simplify the existing CSS to allow for easy expansion and alteration in the future. If you can offer your skills to this project, I’m sure the developers and future WordPress 3.3 users will be much appreciative.

Slim comes with unlimited color options via a powerful admin panel with a built-in color picker. It also has an awesome rotating header image using the Cycle plugin. Tabula Rosa is a minimal theme with jQuery gallery implementation, sliding menus, and some other cool stuff. Translucent has a smooth and sleek look with very few hard edges and transitions.

WordPress 3.1.2 has been released and “addresses a vulnerability that allowed Contributor-level users to improperly publish posts,” while also fixing a few bugs. You should be able to upgrade automatically from the Dashboard -> Updates section of your blog’s Dashboard, but you can also upgrade manually if you run into trouble.

The students and projects for WordPress’s portion of Google Summer of Code 2011 have been announced. The students will be working with well-known community mentors on documentation revisions, file uploader enhancements, “Local Storage Drafts backup,” learn.wordpress.org (possibly similar to learn.wordpress.com), “enhanced emails,” threaded comment enhancements, “Extending WP Webservices,” additional language packs and enhancements to existing packs, UI improvements for the Android app, “Full-throttle Trac Annihilation” (clearing as many trac tickets as possible), “WordPress Move,” and “Template Versioning.” Congratulations to those of you who made it in this year, and we look forward to seeing what you bring to WordPress!

New plugins Special Recent Posts is a simple but very powerful plugin/widget for WordPress which displays your recent posts with thumbnails. W4 Post List allows you to create a list of your categories, posts, or category posts, and show it on your site’s widget area, post, or page content area by shortcode. Updated plugins WP-reCAPTCHA integrates reCAPTCHA anti-spam methods with WordPress including comment, registration, and email spam protection.

Content is all about showcasing your content prominently with little distraction. Galileo is a free WordPress theme with 3 columns and an options page where you can insert adsense for the header ad, change the RSS link and add Google Analytics to the header. HTML5Press is an HTLM5 and CSS3 theme with featured images, menu and widget support, and threaded comments. TwentyTen Allure combines the latest WordPress technology available with a clear and eye catching design. Varg is a dark wolf theme with 3 columns.

Some impressive stats came out of the WordPress camp recently. Apparently, almost 20,000 users of the WordPress.org Support Forums have checked “I make my living using WordPress” in their profile. 20,000 is a large number for people making a living off of a free blogging platform! Do you make a living with WordPress? If so, we’d love to hear about it!

New plugins BadPass-WP will test over 500 commonly used passwords against the logged in user’s account and display a warning bar at the top of the page if a match is found. Simple Top Commenters Widget allows you to to show a simple list of the top commenters on your blog. Updated plugins CloudFlare ensures your WordPress blog is running optimally on the CloudFlare platform. RSS Video Embed adds a video embed shortcode that can be intelligently interpreted by your community’s RSS Feed Readers with a graceful fall-back link to the post.