Alkane is a simple, customizable, and clean theme. Landscape is a simple and responsive theme, perfect for photography sites. Newschannel is a pretty versatile theme, that places the emphasis of the home page and archive pages on featured images. Panels is a panel-based theme theme with custom header, custom background, custom menus, and widgets.

New plugins Flowplayer 5 for WordPress allows you to show videos with videos with FlowPlayer 5. HotSpots draws a heat map of mouse clicks overlayed on your webpage allowing you to improve usability by analyzing user behaviour. Updated plugins CampTix Event Ticketing is an easy to use and flexible event ticketing plugin. Facebook makes your site deeply social by integrating functionality from Facebook. HyperDB is an advanced database class that supports replication, failover, load balancing, and partitioning. Google XML Sitemaps will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines to better index your blog. Intercom for WordPress provides easy integration of the Intercom CRM and messaging app.

CustomFolio is a simple, responsive theme for portfolio and or business sites. Night Class is a classic, elegant, and professional theme. Scuba is a responsive diving-style theme.

Development on WordPress 3.6 has taken off like a rocket, and six areas of focus have already been defined. The Post Formats UI will be getting a major usability overhaul, lead by Helen Hou-Sandi. Autosave and Post Locking will be getting some new love, so you’ll hopefully never lose your posts again, lead by Andrew Ozz. The Editorial Flow experience will be getting a major overhaul too, lead by Daniel Bachhuber, so we can probably expect some bits of Edit Flow to make an appearance. Revisions will be getting some improvements, particularly in author attribution and comparing diffs, lead by Peter Westwood. Menus will be seeing some usability improvements, lead by Dave Martin. Distraction-Free Writing will be getting more visibility, a smoother experience, more features, and some overall polish. A leader for this project has yet to be chosen. If you aren’t already following along with the Make WordPress Core blog, […]

New plugins FikraTicker is a simple newsticker that displays the recent news/posts on your website/blog. Jellyfish Invaders adds animated flying retro space invaders to your blog. WP Ads Within Contents allows you to show ads within your post content. Updated plugins CloudFlare ensures your WordPress blog is running optimally on the CloudFlare platform. Contextual Related Posts helps you increase reader retention and reduce bounce rates by displaying a set of related posts on your website or in your feed. 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. Jetpack allows you to supercharge your WordPress site with powerful features previously only available to WordPress.com users.

Cell is a clean and lightweight theme. CyberChimps features Twitter Bootstrap, and responsive touch friendly theme options. Fotogram is a clean and fast loading theme. Spartan is a responsive magazine theme. Zenith is a responsive theme designed for blogs and magazines that aren’t about fluff.

New plugins Advanced Blog Metrics allows you to learn more about your readers and how they react to your posts. Media Library Assistant provides several enhancements for managing the Media library Updated plugins Block Bad Queries protects your website against malicious URL requests. Jetpack allows you to supercharge your WordPress site with powerful features previously only available to WordPress.com users.

WordPress had a great 2012, bbPress had a great 2012, and we had a great 2012 too! This handy report was generated for several WordPress.com and Jetpack-powered WordPress.org blogs with moderate to high traffic, and it really is quite nice. Here’s one of my favorite excerpts from our report. About 55,000 tourists visit Liechtenstein every year. This blog was viewed about 950,000 times in 2012. If it were Liechtenstein, it would take about 17 years for that many people to see it. Your blog had more visits than a small country in Europe! So, with visits from 217 countries world-wide, and the United States, India, and the United Kingdom rounding out the top, we had more visits than 17 years worth of tourists to a small European country. That’s not bad, but we could always do better. What would you kind folks love to see from us in 2013?