Wordpress 2.7 has officially been in the wild for about 5 days now, and I have to say I LOVE IT. 

If you are wondering, “hey, should I upgrade”, here are some of the features now available:

• Whole new, AJAX based user interface – very sweet
• Quickpress
• Comment Threading (and replying to comments right from your dashboard)
• Sticky Posts 
• Built-in Upgrade Feature

Here is a word for you: Oxite

This is Microsoft’s “open source” blogging platform, supposedly aimed at developer – NOT aimed at other blogging platforms such as Wordpress or MovableType.  Not sure I believe that claim, but hey…

According to Microsoft, Oxite is a:

standards-compliant, extensible content-management system designed to support either blogs or larger Web sites, Microsoft said. The platform includes support for features such as pingbacks, trackbacks, anonymous or authenticated commenting, gravatars (globally recognized avatars), and RSS feeds at any page level

Why would Microsoft attempt to get into the blogging platform space at this point?  While I know nothing, to me this would be an easy way of introducing Sharepoint to a whole new world of developers.  

It turns out that Oxite was written in ASP.NET, much like Microsoft’s other “portal and blogging” offering – Sharepoint.  What better way of creating a demand than giving users a “teaser” product then saying “oh, you want to implement this on a large scale… it’s funny because we have this other product that will meet your needs”.

While executive management will not be aware of the both products, necessarily, the hardcore developer of an organization will.  This will have the ability to create a “demand” from within.

Smart move by Microsoft if that is their intent…

If you are looking for wordpress themes, chances are, one of the first places you head off to is wordpress.org (that and you do a Google search).  While wordpress.org has a huge database of themes and templates, you really have to search through a bunch of junk in order to find the quality themes.

As I had mentioned previously, I am looking for a new theme to fit my needs as my current theme – while there is nothing wrong with it – do not seem to be fitting my needs. During my search I happened to find a number of sites that link to some amazing templates that you may not have seen before.

Here we go.

100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes

The 100 excellent themes cover a wide range of styles, a number of which you may have run across, however, there are a number of clean and highly appealing options to pick from.

10 Unique Wordpress Theme

There is only one on this list that I had previously seen, the rest are new to me.   Visually appealing and practical, nothing here is too “artistic”.

18 Minimalist Designs

We have touched on professional, clean and unique thus far – time for some minimal wordpress themes.   Nice stuff.

The above links will help you on your way, no doubt.  As the above provide you with a number of options, I just want to point out one specific theme.  While not my style, it will work for some.  Check out “Bus Full of Hippies” – a beautiful theme.