The Google Summer of Code 2011 application period has begun, and WordPress is accepting applications from eager students. There’s a lot of talent out there ready to shine, and the development team is excited to see what new and great things will be brought to the world of WordPress this year. For those interested in contributing to WordPress via Google’s program, the development team has posted some tips on submitting your application and a schedule outline. If you’re a student interested in WordPress development, send in your application today and show them what you can do.

New plugins Affiliate Links Manager helps you create friendly affiliate redirects and track them in Google Analytics. Onswipe makes it insanely easy to make your content look great on all touch devices, currently limited to iPads, but there will be more in the future. Updated plugins BackWPup allows you to backup your WordPress database, files, and more. jQuery Drop Down Mega Menu Widget allows you to quickly and easily create drop down mega menus from any WordPress custom menu. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin displays a list of related entries on your site and feeds based on a unique algorithm.

ChaosTheory is a dark single-column theme with a minimal, techy feel. Ghostbird is a blue, beige, and red one-column theme for WordPress. Nelson is a fairly minimal design that should be easy enough to customize to your own liking. TwentyTen Five is a variation of the TwentyTen Theme with many modifications.

Two very interest WordPress plugins have debuted recently. Both are built by core WordPress developers, both offer a way to push specific updates to the WordPress core through a simple plugin as opposed to a full WordPress update, and they do it safely without modifying any core files. Hotfix – “This unofficial plugin provides fixes for selected WordPress bugs, so you don’t have to wait for the next WordPress core release.” UI Labs – “UI Labs is a plugin that offers experimental WordPress admin UI features with the aim of building upon and enhancing the default WordPress User Interface.” I must admit, the two are rather intriguing. Hotfix offers immediate fixes to certain bugs that may not be addressed until the next core update, while UI Labs offers a sneak peek at some of the upcoming design improvements. I especially like the fact that, unlike core updates, these plugins don’t […]

New plugins Dynamic Content Widget will render content (such as pages and posts), using a template in your theme. SwiftDynamicThumbs prevents WordPress from generating thumbnails registered by themes and plugins, and generates them dynamically when required. 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? Updated plugins BFT Autoresponder Lite is a sequential autoresponder which allows you to send automated email messages to users who subscribe to your mailing list. Category Listings outputs the most recent posts from the category of the post that is currently being displayed. Flexi Quote Rotator displays quotes, testimonials, or other rotating snippets of content. Front-end Editor enables “edit in place” functionality on your site. WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles […]

Our recent post on WordPress 3.2’s plans generated some interesting discussion, with the bulk of it centered around the discontinuation of support for Internet Explorer 6 in the Dashboard. Internet Explorer 6, now almost ten years old, was once a power house in its own right. Now, the browser is drowning under its poor support for web standards, a pool of modern web technologies that it can never support, and a flood of hacks that many sites need to employ just to provide a decent browsing experience for IE 6 users. IE 6 was superseded by Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, followed by IE 8 in 2009, and recently IE 9 last week. Of course, alternatives to Internet Explorer, like Firefox, have been around much longer. According to Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer 6 Countdown, 12% of the world still uses the ten-year old browser. The highest concentration of IE 6 users […]

Bangkoo is a free e-commerce theme designed with a furniture store in mind. Rion is a dark style BuddyPress theme with cufon custom fonts, flickr support, and an options panel. Se7en is a magazine style BuddyPress theme with custom fonts and a beautiful jQuery fullwidth slider.

New plugins Genesis Simple Headers lets you use the WordPress Appearance -> Header functionality to upload a custom logo or header for your site using the Genesis Theme Framework. jQuery Slick Menu Widget creates sticky, sliding menu widgets from any standard WordPress custom menu using jQuery. User Spam Remover automatically removes spam user registrations and other old, never-used user accounts. It also blocks the notification e-mail that WordPress normally sends to the administrator whenever a new user registers and logs it instead. Updated plugins AVH Extended Categories Widgets gives you multiple widgets for displaying categories. One is a replacement of the default category widget to allow for greater customization. The second is a Top Categories widget, which is only available in WordPress 2.8 and higher, and there is a third for displaying a new option called Categories Groups. HubSpot for WordPress allows WordPress users to take advantage of HubSpot lead […]