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With blogs becoming more and more user-friendly everyday, the need for a “Featured Post” display became a necessity. Say, for example, you begin a free giveaway on your blog on Monday. By Friday, if you had posted everyday during the week, that giveaway post from Monday may be on page 2, never to be seen again. This is where a “Featured Post” display comes in most handy. It appears that the use of jQuery to implement a very eye-appealing animated “Featured Post” display is becoming more and more in demand in the world of Wordpress themes. Here are some of the most popular javascript plugins to get the job done:

1. s3Slider – One of the most common types of “Featured Post” displays (and the one I use).
2. JSGallery – Maybe you want no words and only the post thumbnail images to display.
3. Agile Carousel – Another powerful jQuery slideshow-like plugin.
4. jCarousel Lite – Very lightweight javascript carousel plugin.

Wordpress is getting an iPhone-native WordPress client! It supports WordPress.com blogs as well as self-hosted WordPress.org blogs running version 2.5.1 or newer.

Timing wise, with the launch of Apple’s iTunes App store this morning, they expect to see this showing up very soon. You can check out their screencast here.

Alternatively, you can go for WPTouch. Simply put, it’s a complimentary theme installed as a plugin on your WordPress blog or website that will format your content with this Apple-inspired, full-featured theme when your visitors are using an iPhone or iPod touch. The entire package for WPtouch is only 660kb. It was designed to be as lightweight and speedy as possible, while still serving your blog’s content in a richly presented way.

You can grab WPTouch here.

Straight from SmashingMagazine.com comes this awesome list of wordpress themes. Dang, now this just means I’m going to be trackin down a new theme for my site again!

High-quality WordPress themes always come in handy. Whether you are looking for some design inspiration or professional coding solutions — in both cases you can learn a lot, you can apply them and you can build customized designs upon them without reinventing the wheel all the time.

In this article (snagged from smashingmagazine) they present 100 free high-quality WordPress themes. Together with hundreds of other designs, these themes have been manually selected, installed and tested over the last weeks. They all can be downloaded, customized and used for free in both personal and commercial projects. Links to demo-versions provide a direct preview of a theme.

Please notice that the listed WordPress themes are presented in 8 sections: vibrant themes, simple & minimalistic themes, magazine style, grid-based, clean and legible, advanced, experimental, photoblog & videoblog.

The full list can be found at  smashingmagazine, below are a few of the ones I found most impressive.

Read the rest of this entry »

WTSI has 350+ Wordpress themes that you can sort by:

• Last Added
• Most Downloaded
• WTSI (Wordpress Theme Sparkling Index)
• Most Viewed
• Most Tested
• Most Voted
• Top Rated

In addition to that you can drill into themes based on 38 different categories and 24 different theme properties (color, number of columns, fluid vs fixed, widget or plugin ready, etc).

WTSI was created because lots of people are ordering the themes by most downloaded to find out which themes are most wanted by people. Some choose most downloaded themes for their sites and some look unique themes for their sites to prevent web duplicates. But most visitors don’t check out the themes’ added dates so a counter-affect happens. The top 10 most downloaded themes do not change at all! The listing is always the same. We thought this is unfair to most of the great theme designers. Very very… great themes get lost in mass without getting noticed by the majority of people. Thats why we created the WTSI. We did several tests and it is working great on the other hand you are very welcome for additional ideas.

How WTSI is calculated, What is the formula?

If you’re looking for new WP themes, this might be a good place to start. Check out WordPress Themes Free.