WordPress.org

Black skyline is a black-based theme with custom menu, custom header, and post thumbnail support.

Blocks is a vivid, colorful and very cheerful theme that will suit any blog or website.

Green Hope is a fast and easy-to-browse green-based theme.

If you’re the kind of person who loves playing with statistics over the weekend, you’re going to love this! The anonymous results from the survey mentioned in this year’s State of the Word have been made available.

There’s a lot of fascinating info to collect from the data. The piece that interests me the most is already detailed in the post itself:

6,800 self-employed respondents were responsible for over 170,000 sites personally, and charged a median hourly rate of $50 . . . If each site took only 3 hours to make, that’s $29.5M of work at the average hourly rate.

Yes, that’s an impressive amount of money to be generated by folks using a free blogging platform. Which fascinating stats were you able to collect?

Over on WordPress.org we’ve released the raw data behind the survey.

This has been an exciting year for WordPress. We’ve grown to power 14.7% of the top million websites in the world, up from 8.5%, and the latest data show 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the US are running WordPress.

We also conducted our first ever user and developer survey, which got over 18,000 responses from all over the world:

We found a few interesting tidbits from the survey responses already, including that 6,800 self-employed respondents were responsible for over 170,000 sites personally, and charged a median hourly rate of $50. In tough economic times, it’s heartening to see Open Source creating so many jobs. (If each site took only 3 hours to make, that’s $29.5M of work at the average hourly rate.)

I talk about this data, and much more, in my State of the Word address which you can watch here:

We know there’s more good stuff hidden in there and we’re open sourcing and releasing the raw information behind it. If you’re a researcher and would like to dig into the anonymized survey data yourself, you can grab it here. (Careful, it’s a 9MB CSV.)

There has never been a better time to be part of the WordPress community, and I want to thank each and every one of you for making it such a wonderful place to be. Now it’s time to get back to work, there’s still 85.3% of the web that needs help.

New plugins

Color Manager adds an option panel to the front-page which enables your client or theme users to pick the colors and see the results live in the page.

Social Media Tabs allows you to add facebook, google +1, buzz, twitter and RSS profiles and feeds to any widget area with stylish sliding tabs.

WordPress Snap is a simple shortcode for displaying a thumbnail from any website.

Updated plugins

Humans TXT allows you to credit the people behind your website in your humans.txt file.

Slick Social Share Buttons adds facebook, twitter, google +1, linkedin, digg, google buzz, and stumbledupon social media buttons in a floating or slide out tab.

Top 10 tracks daily and total visits on your blog posts and displays the count as well as popular posts.

TwitterCounter integrates TwitterCounter.com badges on your blog to display the number of followers you have on Twitter.

In this series on managing multiple bloggers in WordPress, I want to now focus on the content, specifically managing the editorial voice and purpose of a site with multiple bloggers. There is a huge caveat to this topic. Every blog is unique, as are all the voices within it. It is often that uniqueness that [...]

6 of the 10 Republican presidential candidates are using WordPress, the other 4 are on Drupal, which means all 10 are on an Open Source CMS.

I am planning to use Gist to embed code snippets on this site and Takayuki Miyauchi has created a nice plugin to enable this in WordPress via oEmbed. I created a slightly modified version that adds NOSCRIPT support (for feeds, etc.).

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WordCamp Fayetteville – WordPress Blogger Track, video 02 -

Guest Blogging: How to find the best and avoid the pests.

A presentation on finding good/great guest bloggers. This talk includes:

- What makes a good guest blogger

- Methods of finding guest bloggers

Guest blogging is essential for anyone who is serious about running a blog.

Basically is a simple and clean theme which comes with custom menu, custom header background, custom body background, thumbnail, adsense spot ready, breadcrumbs ready and a custom logo & favicon uploader.

Mocha Latte is a beautiful, neutral coffee theme in brown, cream and beige.

SimpleMarket is a html5 responsive theme with a simple design to compliment content.

WordCamp Fayetteville – WordPress Blogger Track, video 01 -

The DIY Website: Using WordPress for Nonprofit Organizations’ Website

Jody Dilday and Angie Albright

Albright and Dilday are both Executive Directors of nonprofit organizations who use WordPress for their nonprofit websites, and they manage those sites themselves. They will discuss the many ways WordPress sites and blogs can be used to enhance the organization’s mission, use blogging to raise cause awareness and money, and connect with the community. They will also discuss strategies for managing website content.

WordCamp Fayetteville 2001 WordPress Blogger Track 03 -

Tom Hapgood and Bret Schulte, The Arkansas Angle, a student-run multimedia magazine.

The Arkansas Angle is a new publication by the Art and Journalism students of Tom Hapgood and Bret Schulte that uses WordPress as a publishing platform. We’ll discuss how we chose WordPress, how we’re using plugins, why we’re no longer using Flash, the relevance of WordPress to journalism students and other details about this online magazine by University of Arkansas students.

The New York Times recently unveiled their experimental project platform, beta620, running on WordPress. The New York Times has been on the cutting edge of using WordPress to publish and we can’t wait to see where their new experiments take them.

Ready to become a VIP Services Client? Some of the world’s biggest brands rely on WordPress.com VIP Services.

The State of the Word is given each year at WordCamp San Francisco. It’s basically an address to the entire WordPress community from Matt Mullenweg, sharing some favorite moments from WordPress’s past and some looks into its future, and this year’s State of the Word did not disappoint. Fortunately, the video was published rather quickly this year, so those of you who missed it can enjoy it now.

Here are some highlights in no particular order:

• A survey was issued to the community, and out of 18,000 responses, 2,800 make their living through WordPress, and consultants charge an average of $58 per hour.
• This year, 22% of newly registered domains are running WordPress.
• Future versions will include a responsive admin interface which resizes perfectly on all screen sizes, even smart phones.
• Drag-and-drop media uploads are planned for a future version.
• Upcoming releases will feature a more guided experience for new users.
• All plugins and themes which have not been updated in the past 2 years will be hidden from search results on the official directories.
• This year’s community mission is to stamp out the Fauxgo.

Just in case you missed yesterday’s State of the Word presentation, it’s now available on WordPress TV:

Here are some key takeaways from yesterday:

• We had over 1,000 people attending WCSF and many more watching the livestream, making it the biggest WordCamp yet.
• The survey of 18,000 WP users revealed some interesting data, like a median hourly rate of $50 and that 6,800 of the self-employed respondents were responsible for over 170,000 sites personally.
• WordPress 3.2 had 500,000 downloads in the first two days, representing the fastest upgrade velocity ever.
• WordPress now has 15,000 plugins and 200 million plugin downloads, and we’re doing a lot of work to make the plugin experience more seamless.
• 14.7 percent of the top million websites in the world use WordPress.
• 22 of every 100 active domains created in the U.S. are running WordPress.

In true WordPress fashion, we’ll be open sourcing the raw survey data so people can slice and dice it their own way to find interesting trends or patterns, like breaking down the hourly rates by geography.

Special thanks to Pete Davies, who was responsible for the survey and helping craft the narrative of the keynote, and Michael Pick who did the same and also designed all the slides and animations you saw. Michael is going to prepare a blog post with all of the inspirations and allusions in the slides for those of you curious about the story behind the design.

Earlier this year we decided to add an option for individuals to be able to contribute to the running costs of Akismet. We believe that it’s really important that personal bloggers continue to have access to Akismet for free. But, for those that really value Akismet’s spam filtering, we wanted to provide a way to pay something.

So we added a ‘pay what you want’ option to free accounts on the signup page. While the overwhelming majority of people still choose a free account, we’ve seen a good number of people opt to pay, too.

We decided that the easiest way for users to pay something would be to use a slider. From day one this had a smiley face to the right of it. When you move the slider, the smiley changes based on how much you choose to pay. While we’ve tested a lot of things related to our pricing, we’d never tested the effect of the smiley face by itself, until now…

Of those users that chose to pay, here’s how the payments break down:

With smiley

$6 – 20%
$12 – 13%
$18 – 4%
$24 – 33%
$30 – 7%
$36 – 19%
$40 – 2%
$48 – 2%

Without smiley

$6 – 25%
$12 – 33%
$18 – 10%
$30 – 5%
$36 – 27%

Can you spot the huge difference between the two?

It turns out, the $24 mark is the last smiling face position before switching to a slight frown ($18).

Looks like a simple frowning face can get people to double their payment from $12 to $24. We found this data super interesting, what do you think?

New plugins

Social allows you to broadcast posts to Twitter and/or Facebook, pull in items from each as comments, and allow commenters to use their Twitter/Facebook identities.

Social Graph Protocol is a quick and easy way for you to integrate all of your websites content into the open graph developed by Facebook.

Updated plugins

Adsense Float shows Google AdSense ads at a prominent position on your site, which maximizes the CTR and revenue of your site.

Ban Hammer prevents people from registering with any email that is listed under your comment moderation blacklist.

Easy Modal allows you to easily add a Modal window with just about any content.

The past two days I’ve been at WordCamp San Francisco and the presentations have been amazing. For the first time ever for San Francisco we’ve had a really fantastic live video stream going from both rooms. It’s a pretty economical way to get all of the content of the conference without the cost of coming to San Francisco. We even had someone streaming from Pakistan! My talk on the State of the Word, will be tomorrow at 11 AM PST so get a ticket on the WordCamp SF site.

If you are customizing the GUID value of a post in WordPress, make sure you maintain the format of the GUID as a valid URL format. There are security checks on the value that enforce the URL format.

If you pass in a UUID as the GUID value when creating a post, your value will be discarded and the standard auto-generated GUID will be used. If you try to force in your UUID afterwards (say, with a direct SQL update), your GUID will be turned into an empty string the next time you edit the post via the admin.

Using your own GUID format is easy and well supported, as long as it’s a valid URL.

Minimal is a warm gold, basically simple, professional theme that would be ideal for blogs or websites of any kind.

Radio is a clean, shiny, and perfect for blogs or websites related to radio, broadcasting, news, public speaking, etc.

San Kloud is a blogging theme focused on typography and content.

Twenty Eleven AJAX is an AJAX-powered Twenty Eleven child theme.