Picking a WordPress theme is like buying a car. It feels like a big decision, and there are lots of shiny options available. Themes, of course, are much less expensive than cars, but to date they've also been more difficult to find. Most sites list themes by name, with little or no rating system and very few sorting options. I found this to be less than a little helpful and more than a lot aggravating. But that all changed on June 17th with the launch of the WP Theme Viewer.
Theme Viewer allows you to sort by any number of options, including number of columns, color, widget-readiness, width style, and even sidebar side-preference. You are also shown a thumbnail of the theme, the number of times it's been downloaded, and the average rating. The accompanying blog is handy for keeping up to date on changes, additions, and theme news.
Of course, if you're not that interested in searching and installing a theme yourself, updating to WordPress 2.0.3 offers fifty included themes, all washed and polished and ready to drive home today. This theme was one of them, and I'm quite fond of it so far.
While I'm talking about WordPress:
The WordPress Widgets Blog has updates and downloads of the newest widgets that you didn't know you needed.
Archivist is a plugin that allows you to post a selected number of random archived posts on your front page.
WP-Alexify pulls website thumbnails from Alexa.com and previews them when people scroll over your links.
EditorMonkey is a huge plugin that replaces the default WordPress text editor with a TinyMCE or FCKeditor WYSIWYG editor. It integrates spellcheck as well as find/replace and advanced link options, and is very customizable. (Evidently WordPress 2.1 will incorporate spellcheck as well, but why wait?)
The Feedburner Feed Replacement plugin allows you to route your RSS feed into Feedburner, which gives you many more options regarding your feed, as well as keeping track of feed statistics and making your feed universally readable. Note that while this plugin streamlines the process a bit that it isn't strictly necessary for setting up your WP blog with Feedburner. If you do end up using the Feedburner service, you should probably update your feeds autodiscovery links, as described here.
Google Sitemaps creates a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog.
Last but not least, Ultimate Tag Warrior, which has been around forever and may be the most well known plugin (after Akismet), lets you tag the holy hell out of your posts, and gives you plenty of options for how to display those tags (or not, as the case may be).
I may be a little plugin happy, I admit, but those are the ones I use and I love them all. I'm also planning on adding a "nicer archives" plugin, once I can find one that says it works in WordPress 2.0+, and I'd like a stat tracker as well. If you have suggestions for either, please do tell.