Pyramid is a simple and clean theme.

Studio is a responsive 1-column theme that includes a static page layout as well as a blog page.

Teal is a responsive magazine theme.

Zen is drenched in white with some paintings in the header and footer.

New plugins

Emoji Emoticons provides support for Emoji Emoticons.

SuperCPT provides insanely easy and attractive custom post types, custom post meta, and custom taxonomies.

Updated plugins

Confident CAPTCHA is a clickable, picture CAPTCHA that stops spam and malicious bots, while remaining very easy for people to solve.

Font Emoticons replaces WordPress’ smileys with font-based emoticons.

HotSpots draws a heat map of mouse clicks overlayed on your webpage allowing you to improve usability by analyzing user behaviour.

Q2W3 Fixed Widget fixes positioning of the selected widgets when the page is scrolled down.

Earthen is a natural, neutral, earthy, and bright theme.

InfoWay is a clean, simple, and elegant responsive theme.

Photologger is a minimalist theme that is ideal for photo blogs, magazines, and portfolios.

WP StrapSlider Lite is a responsive bootstrap theme.

The new default theme for WordPress 3.6, titled Twenty Thirteen, is making progress. This year’s default theme is overseen by Matt Mullenweg, and built by Joen Asmussen, Konstantin Obenland, and Lance Willett.

The goal for Twenty Thirteen is to offer “a focus on blogging, and great support for post formats (which are getting attention on the backend in 3.6 as well).”

If you’d like to see the theme in action, a demo site is available. One thing you’ll notice immediately is that the strong emphasis on whitespace, which has become commonplace in the default themes, is long-gone. Twenty Thirteen is making very bold use of its colors, offering a different color for each post format. The theme also lacks a sidebar by default. It’s designed to focus on blogging after all, so the designers prefer that you leave your widgets to the footer area, but it still does support a sidebar widget area if you really want to put something there.

This theme won’t be for everyone, and really no default theme should. Default themes should showcase the strength of each release’s new features and inspire customization. If you aren’t a fan of Twenty Thirteen, don’t worry, there are still over 1,600 themes to choose from, including Twenty Twelve.

New plugins

Add featured image to RSS feed adds the featured image attached to your posts to the RSS feed.

Theme Mentor is a cousin of the Theme-Check plugin getting deeper into the code analysis.

Updated plugins

Achievements for WordPress gamifies your WordPress site with challenges, badges, and points.

Co-Authors Plus allows you to assign multiple bylines to posts, pages, and custom post types via a search-as-you-type input box.

Document Feedback allows you to get feedback from readers on the documentation you write.

Annotum Sans is a child theme of Annotum with a modern sans-serif style.

Chunk is a straightforward theme with bold typography.

Landscape is a simple responsive theme.

Techy is a simple 2-column, bold, high contrast theme.

Some of you may remember that Posterous was acquired by Twitter almost a year ago. At the time, the future of the service was in doubt, and they have just announced today that the service will be shutting down on April 30.

If you’re still with Posterous, it’s not too late to move your blog elsewhere. If you prefer hosted blogging services, like Posterous, you can move to WordPress.com following this guide and Squarespace following this guide. If you’d rather have more control over the hosting and permanence of your content, it might be time to find yourself a hosting provider so you can install and run WordPress yourself and use this importer to bring over your Posterous content.

Don’t delay! The service will be completely shutting down on April 30, which means that you will not be able to edit or even view your Posterous blog past that date.

New plugins

Debugger can be used to manually log data or to capture logging on WordPress actions. You can capture load time, memory, backtrace, data dumps, urls, and server IPs.

Feedback Extended enables users to reply to feedbacks from the admin panel, requires Jetpack.

Updated plugins

Facebook makes your site deeply social by integrating functionality from Facebook.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin displays a list of related entries on your site and feeds based on a unique algorithm.

Automattic wants you to have the best possible experience on WordPress.com, and to ensure that, all of the available themes go through a rigorous series of tests.

Each theme is carefully scrutinized by at least two, if not four, of Automattic’s Theme Team focussing on code quality, usability, and potential theme-specific anomalies. The result is a theme that “just works” out of the box, with no annoying bugs or usability quirks.

Traditionally, things like this have been closely guarded secrets, but Automattic has publicly released their theme guidelines so anyone can benefit from them. These guidelines, are not a requirement if you want to just develop a theme for WordPress in general, but they are still some great coding practices worth following if you want your theme to “just work” too.

BT Extended is a newspaper style with a responsive four column fluid layout.

Cocoa is a basic, simple, minimalist theme of browns and black with just a touch of cinnamon red thrown in for flavor.

Columbus is a real estate theme with a two-column layout and top-level page navigation.

Photogram is designed to integrate your WordPress site with Instagram and Pinterest in a few simple clicks.

Simplify is a responsive theme designed for small businesses.

New plugins

Facetious lets you add a faceted – often called an ‘advanced’ – search form to your website.

WP Snippets makes it very easy to reuse fragments of content (i.e. Snippets).

Updated plugins

Facebook makes your site deeply social by integrating functionality from Facebook.

Nav Menu Images enables uploading of images for nav menu items on the menu edit screen.

OSM displays maps in your WordPress blog using the OpenLayers technology.

W3 Total Cache allows you to improve site performance and user experience via caching.

Bubbly is an attractive theme with green and touches of white on a subtle background of light bubbles.

Forever makes it easy to wrap your wedding up in a neat little blog.

Quintus has an old-style appeal with semi-academic graciousness and elegant typography.

Reddle features a minimal design which elegantly adapts to how you want to use your blog and what you want to use it for.

Vertigo is a stylish and fun theme with one column, a custom header, and a custom accent color.

New plugins

Mobile Content allows you to use shortcodes to display different content, in your posts or pages, depending on the device it is being viewed on.

SB RSS feed plus adds post thumbnails to RSS feed items.

Shop On Page provides an easy and simple affiliate ad program for bloggers.

Updated plugins

Authy Two Factor Authentication helps you proctect your WordPress site from hackers using simple two-factor authentication.

Fast Secure Contact Form lets your visitors send you a quick e-mail message and blocks all common spammer tactics. Additionally, the plugin has a multi-form feature, optional extra fields, and an option to redirect visitors to any URL after the message is sent.

Jetpack allows you to supercharge your WordPress site with powerful features previously only available to WordPress.com users.

VideoPress allows you to manage and embed videos hosted on VideoPress.

There’s no denying it, WordPress is a big thing, so are WordCamps, and 2012 was bigger and better than ever for the popular WordPress conferences!

There were a total of 67 WordCamps this year, up from 52 last year, with 34 in the US and 33 outside of the US, serving over 17,000 attendees, with 967 sessions and 877 speakers, all made possible by 498 generous sponsors!

The amount of WordCamp videos published to WordPress.tv this year almost doubled to 445, probably due to the expansion of WordCamp Central’s video camera kit program, which does its best to make sure that every WordCamp has an affordable way to record every session. The program now holds 8 kits in the US, 3 in Canada, and 2 in Europe, so there’s probably a good chance that there’s a kit available for your WordCamp if you need it.

To kickoff 2013, the WordPress Events Contributor Group was launched, and is looking for volunteers for WordPress.tv moderation, materials for event planners, new WordCamp organizer mentorships, making it easier for organizations to sponsor multiple events, improvements to the WordCamp Base theme, and reviewing the current WordCamp guidelines.

WordPress is your blogging platform, and WordCamp is your event, so please feel free to pitch-in if, when, and wherever you can this year!

Paradise is an all-purpose clean and minimalistic theme.

Placard is a bold, bright, and colorful professional or business theme that is somewhat inspired by the Windows 8 desktop.

Sukelius Magazine is a magazine theme with theme options and a content slider.

New plugins

Authy Two Factor Authentication helps you proctect your WordPress site from hackers using simple two-factor authentication.

Developer helps WordPress developers develop.

Updated plugins

Achievements for WordPress gamifies your WordPress site with challenges, badges, and points.

Ad Code Manager allows you to manage your ad codes through the WordPress admin in a safe and easy way.

Custom Javascript Editor allows you to add custom Javascript to your site from an editor in the WordPress admin.

Document Feedback allows you to get feedback from readers on the documentation you write.

Edit Flow gives you custom statuses, a calendar, editorial comments, and more, all to make it much easier for your team to collaborate within WordPress.

Exploit Scanner searches the files on your website, and the posts and comments tables of your database for anything suspicious. It also examines your list of active plugins for unusual filenames.

Fast Secure Contact Form lets your visitors send you a quick e-mail message and blocks all common spammer tactics. Additionally, the plugin has a multi-form feature, optional extra fields, and an option to redirect visitors to any URL after the message is sent.

P2 Resolved Posts is a lightweight GTD plugin for WordPress and the P2 theme which allows you to mark a thread as “unresolved” when there’s something needing to be finished, and mark it as “resolved” when it’s been finished.

Slingpic is an image sharing tool that allows your users to share images from your site quickly and easily.

WP Missed Schedule Fix finds missed schedule posts and republishes them correctly.

Appliance is a clean and minimalist theme.

Childishly Simple is a multiple-layout theme with a variety of theme options.

Lush is a bright, cheerful, and definitely colorful responsive theme using Google fonts.

New plugins

Cross-Promotion Content Recommendations drives a fresh new audience to your site by cross-promoting your posts with other related bloggers.

Upload Photo to Facebook uploads photos to your Facebook profile.

Updated plugins

BFT Autoresponder allows scheduling of automated autoresponder messages and managing a mailing list.

HyperDB is an advanced database class that supports replication, failover, load balancing, and partitioning.

WP Marketplace is a full-featured shopping cart/e-commerce system that is extremely easy to install and even easier to maintain.

Classic ChalkBoard is a whimsical theme emulating a classic school chalkboard, complete with a bottom-resting eraser and chalk.

IceChimp is a free “coming soon” theme.

Sleek is an attractive, clean, and professional theme.

WordPress 3.5.1 has been released. This is both a security and maintenance release, fixing 37 bugs.

In particular, this release fixes a bug which could cause HTML elements to be unexpectedly removed by the Editor, fixes a bug which caused HTML elements to be unexpectedly removed from scheduled posts, provides workarounds for certain misconfigurations which could prevent JavaScript from loading in the Dashboard, and fixes three cross-site scripting vulnerabilities and one server-side request forgery vulnerability.

If you have trouble automatically updating to WordPress 3.5.1, you may be on an IIS server and will need to follow these instructions.

This is a security release, so it is recommended for all users. If you run into trouble with WordPress 3.5.1, stop by the master list of known issues and post to the support forums if your problem isn’t covered there.