abcOK is a two column, clean, and search engine optimized theme. All Green is a two column green-based theme. Magazine1 is a professional solution for any Blog/Magazine WordPress site. With a simple and stylish design, it is very easy to customize and use. Minimal 2 Column is very simple, and should be easy to change or use as a template for something a bit more complex.

WordPress.com users are limited to about a hundred styles and no way to modify them except a few simple options, a variety of widgets, and the Custom CSS upgrade. Those of you with WordPress theme design and modification experience may find the lack of being able to edit the template files to be quite limiting, but nothing could be further from the truth. If you’re a WordPress.com user seeking to produce your own unique design, look no further than this collection for some of the best Custom CSS blogs on WordPress.com. Some of the blogs in this collection used the Sandbox theme (practically a blank slate) to build their unique design using nothing but their own CSS, but some have used their Custom CSS upgrade to build extensively on top of existing fully designed themes. Do you use custom CSS on your WordPress.com blog?  If so, we’d love to see […]

New plugins Headline Split Tester allows you to enter an alternate headline for every post on your blog. (review) WP Original Source adds a source attribution meta tag, introduced by Google, to single posts and the page header, and adds your permalink to the source attribution meta tag if external urls are not defined. Updated plugins Posts 2 Posts allows you to create many-to-many relationships between posts of all types. Regenerate Thumbnails allows you to regenerate the thumbnails for all of your image attachments. WP Super Cache generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog.

Ever wonder if one headline would be better than another for a particular post? If so, you’ll now be able to test two different headlines per post using the newly released Headline Split Tester plugin developed by bhalliburton and peterbessman. The plugin is incredibly simple to use. Once installed, a new meta box is added to the post creation/editing page where you can enter an alternative headline. As you can see via the screenshot, you’ll be able to view the total number of impressions the article has along with the number of clicks each headline has received. By default, the total number of impressions an article needs to have is 250 before a headline is chosen. This can be changed via the plugin options. In fact, it’s the only option this plugin has. What’s cool about this particular plugin is that it was created by these two individuals over a […]

The WordPress.com theme team will be retiring the sorely out of date PressRow theme in favor of the new Pilcrow theme. The new Pilcrow theme is incredibly similar in style to PressRow, but supports all WordPress 3 feature, like custom menus and featured images, and boasts six layout configurations and four color schemes. Those of you who use Custom CSS along with the PressRow theme, may be interested in this very short list of CSS differences in Pilcrow. PressRow will be officially phased out next week, but Pilcrow is available in the Appearance section of your WordPress.com blog’s Dashboard if you’d like to switch to it or try it out before that happens. Pilcrow will soon be available to self-hosted WordPress users via the official theme directory. Are you a PressRow user? What do you think of the new Pilcrow theme?

According to Matt Mullenweg who made a visit to the Forbes offices recently, it’s all about the author. That’s the phrase that was heard repeatedly as he conversed with the Forbes team. Lewis then talks about why they chose to go with WordPress when revamping the True/Slant website: True/Slant was also about the author — just as Forbes has been for 93 years. At T/S, easy-to-use WordPress tools enabled our contributors to do what they loved to do: create content. They freely self-published 100 to 125 posts a day, sometimes more. When you stop to take a look at the development of WordPress over the past few years, it’s hard to argue that most of the improvements have NOT been centered around the author. Just a few author specific features that have occurred recently are: Post Revisions, continually improving media management system, Quickpress, word count, quick edit, reply to comments […]

Fresh Ink Magazine gives your blog the polished look of a high-quality magazine fresh from the press. Scarf is a portfolio-style, two-column fluid layout, enabled with custom fonts, and a beautiful jQuery fullwidth slider. Techrey is a sleek clean theme with a full-fledged options panel and a white and silver color scheme.

WordPress has officially won the 2010 Open Source Hall of Fame CMS Award. WordPress initially tied with Drupal for first place, but an extra independent judge was brought in to give the winning vote. For those of who think that WordPress can’t be anything more than just a blogging platform, stop by the CMS section of the official Showcase for some great examples of WordPress used as a CMS. Do you use WordPress for more than just a blog? If so, we’d love to see it.