WordPress is definitely a large community where we can find thousands of sites offering us free and paid themes, making the task of finding the right one a pretty complex one. Theme Finder represents an excellent and free web app from we can easily pick our theme.
One of the coolest features of this web app is the simplicity to use it. In the top we can find all the common search options to find our theme:
Color.
Free or paid theme.
Number of columns.
Soon as we click the option we would like, the themes will be highlighted. Just by clicking on any of them, we’ll be redirected to the theme creator site where we can download it.
This is a great option to find in a simple way the theme we are looking for, unfortunately this finder contains a large majority of paid themes.
Page.ly created a very interesting infographic about WordPress numbers. We may find some obvious numbers in this graphic, but I’m pretty sure you will find some cool facts about the most famous blog engine available.
Here are some of the facts:
WordPress holds up to 8.5% of the entire CMS population.
Akismet spam service caught over 17 billion of spam messages (with 18 million averages per month).
Over 1200 free themes available in WordPress.com
“All in one SEO pack” is the most popular plugin with nearly 6 million downloads.
New York Times, Pepsi, TechCrunch, BlackBerry, National Geographic are some of the top sites which are using WordPress.
WordPress 3 has nearly 14 million downloads and still counting.
Smashing Magazine introduced us a new set of high quality WordPress Themes, all for free. This collection took the best of 2010, and is organized in categories for you to make your pick a lot faster.
The categories we can find are: gallery and portfolio themes, themes for bloggers, e-Commerce WordPress themes, clean themes, magazine-style themes, minimal themes, mobile themes; pre-launch themes; and finally “Themes That Take WordPress Beyond.”
Take a look to the complete list here. More samples:
Since version 2.7, WordPress includes the “Automatic Update” option, which works smoothly. But if you need a manual update you can always follow this guide.
In case you were wondering about the WordPress counter, the number is over 11 million downloads now.
WordPress.org is very proud about the latest stable release of the most famous blog engine: 3.0. That’s why they’ve created a simple counter to keep track all the download activity.
Today’s counter says over 6 million downloads, and increasing really fast.
Stiqr is a very simple web app that allows you to create your own website with no programming experience; you don’t even need graphic design experience. This is a 5 mins video with the step by step explanation about how to create your own web sites in just a few steps.
“A simple tool for a simple job” says the home page from Stiqr (which BTW was created with the web app under an hour); where you don’t need to code anything just “stick it!” Is currently in a beta period but you can sign up now to start creating your own web apps.
And since is working as a beta for now accessing this online service is completely free. It works perfectly with WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr.
VaultPress is a new web app tool (beta stage) that will shield and protect your WordPress blog, providing some interesting backup and restore features; and also maintaining the security of your site.
VaultPress offers a complete backup solution for your entire blog: articles, database, files, images and more. Giving you the chance whenever a disaster occurs, a fast and reliable restore can be executed. Also VaultPress will be in charge of monitoring the blog health against any possible security risks, applying the last updates.
Another remarkable point is that the people in charge of developing and maintaining VaultPress built it using the automatic grid from which over 10 million blogs from WordPress.com rely on.
VaultPress is only available as a private beta for now, and when the final version is released, this will be a paid service (around U$S15 or U$S20).
If you were wondering about a free possibility, we’ve already evaluated BlogBackupr.
Tumblr is a very simple blogging platform in which users can make a blog in minutes. Tumblr is the perfect tool for users who want to have a blog with photos, videos, and other content embedded, but simply hasn’t got the time or the will to struggle with a complex blogging platform.
How is this working out for them? Well, according to the neat infographic which they’ve sent us (see below), their traffic and user base is growing fast, and they’ve recently hit some major milestones.
You probably know that the WordPress community is a very significant one, and they are continuously improving the blogging experience; and they didn’t use so much time to develop the WordPress plugin for Google’s new toy: Google Buzz.
The Google Buzz impact maybe wasn’t as they expected; no surprise there, so far is representing a mix of a social network with micro blogging; both fields currently being dominating by Facebook and Twitter. But still, some of the features included are interesting to evaluate, and possibly the Gmail integration is one of the engines that will keep this app alive (even though there are already people hating it).
The configuration of this plugin (created by Ivan Lazarevic) is quite simple; just use your Gmail account that you want to associate with Google Buzz and the number of updates to be shown.
Don’t like having the same theme as everyone else on your WordPress blog and can’t find one just right for you? Well then just create your own – no coding necessary. WPTheme Creator is an online web app that allows you to generate your own custom WordPress theme by simple entering in things like how many columns you want and what colours you would like certain aspects to be.
As you can see in the screenshot, the options are fairly basic but they return good results when you really put some thought and effort into creating your new WordPress theme.
The generated themes will run on Worpress programs up to the most recent one – 2.8 right the way from the fairly ancient 2.1 WordPress release. One you have finished creating your theme you simply click ‘Save’ and then download it as you would any other theme. Then, go to ‘the Appearance tab in the wp-admin screen of your WordPress blog and upload the theme, then click Activate once it has finished installing. Your new generated theme will be active on your blog.
WordPress dev team 
VaultPress
