Now you can try some of the latest and greatest WordPress 3.1 features without having to upgrade your own blog to the alpha release. All you need is a free blog from WordPress.com. The WordPress.com team has just merged all of WordPress.com with the 3.1 branch. Not only will WordPress.com users have access to new features like internal linking, improved Dashboard pagination, and Dashboard column sorting, but the WordPress 3.1 branch has just gained well over a million beta testers! If you can’t wait to try WordPress 3.1, get a free WordPress.com blog today and don’t be afraid to contact the Happiness Engineers if you find any bugs. Do you have a blog on WordPress.com? What do you think of the new features?

Big Square is a clean, tidy, and elegant photoblog theme. Cleanfrog is a simple, clean and sharp theme. It’s eye-catching design is vibrant yet light on images so page loads should be nice and fast. Jenny is a premium-quality, free theme handcrafted to perfection with focus on even minute details. This two-column, multiple-colour, fixed-width minimal theme puts great emphasis on typography.

Yesterday, Andrew Nacin celebrated his first full year of WordPress contributions. To quote Nacin, “It’s been one hell of a ride, and I don’t intend to slow down.” Nacin’s WordPress career began on November 16th of 2009 with an almost insignificant twelve-character patch. Just three months and about a hundred patches later, Nacin was asked to become a WordPress core developer. Fast-forward to today, Nacin is one of the most recognized core developers with about seven hundred contributions and six WordCamp presentations under his name. When not contributing to WordPress, Nacin can often be found blogging about WordPress, tweeting about WordPress, publicly speaking about WordPress, supporting WordPress, editing a book on WordPress plugin development, working on the WordPress Core Contributor Handbook, and dodging a humorous onslaught of #blamenacin tweets. So, how did Nacin learn to contribute to WordPress? I learn first by reading, and second by doing. If you want […]

New plugins Custom Post Widget allows you to display the content of a custom post type called Content Block in a sidebar widget. Gecka Submenu allows you to put menus or potions of menus anywhere in your site: sidebar, templates or page contents. Shuffle modifies and improves your Media Library in a number of ways. Updated plugins All in One Webmaster has options to add Google, Bing, Alexa, Blog Catalog, Yahoo’s Webmaster and Analytics code (meta tags). AVH Extended Categories gives you two 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. SyntaxHighlighter Evolved allows you to easily post syntax-highlighted code to your site without having to escape the code or anything. As seen on WordPress.com. WP Social Blogroll provides a sidebar widget and a template tag that adds an enhanced blogroll to your […]

Not too long ago, we asked about your top 5 plugins and got some interesting results. Well, I’m sure you could have guessed that this was coming next, so without further ado, we’d love to know what your favorite WordPress themes are and why they rank #1 out of the thousands available.

Hamid Bakeri is a blue and gray theme with a simply layout. Plain Fields is a very simple, clean, and readable theme. Serenity is a silver blue theme with featured posts, twitter updates, 125×125 ads, Gravatar support, threaded comments, menu, and widget support. Somero is a white and simple design, with featured posts in a slideshow.

Premiering with WordPress 3.1 some time next month, Post Formats is one of the most talked about and often confusing of the new features. The documentation is beginning to take shape, and a list of Post Formats is being finalized, so what is a Post Format? Think of Post Formats like categories, but more from a design standpoint than an organizational one. Basically, Post Formats offer a microblogging-style way to assign a specific style to your post based on content. So far, Post Formats are available for asides, audio, chat transcripts, galleries, links, quotes, single images, status updates, and videos. What that means is, if your theme takes advantage of these Post Formats, you will have any easy way to display each format with a unique style. As Otto illustrates, Matt Mullenweg has done this for some time. Many themes have brought similar functionality tied to specific categories, but what happens […]

New plugins Embed Facebook lets you embed various Facebook objects (album, event, group, note, photo, or video) in a post or page. mySimpleAds WordPress Ad Manager allows you to easily place your mySimpleAds Ads inside your WordPress posts, pages, or even right in your templates. Plugin Test Drive lets you test any plugin before actually using it. 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. Wickett Twitter Widget allows you to display tweets from one or more Twitter accounts as a WordPress widget. As seen on WordPress.com. Updated plugins Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. Facebook Like for Tags allows you to automatically share into Facebook when posting new articles with the same […]