Earlier this week we released a new shortcode on WordPress.com to help you embed Wufoo forms in your WordPress.com posts, pages and even sidebars. Our friends over at Wufoo wrote about it on their blog and we wanted to let you know here as well.

Wufoo forms are extremely flexible and enable you to create everything from simple contact forms to event invitations and mailing lists:

On their end, Wufoo integrates with other services as well. For example, a you could…

Nishita is a simple, minimally-styled photoblogging theme—now available for WordPress.com blogs. With a choice of dark or light color scheme, the muted design puts all the focus on your photos. Not only is this theme designed for photos, it loves big photos: the default layout is super-wide at 1024 pixels.

Nishita example, dark color scheme.

Theme options include two layout choices: “Photoblog” at 1024 pixels wide, or “Blog” at 768 pixels wide. For an even more reduced…

Earlier this summer we launched a few tools to make it easier for developers to create new apps for WordPress.com. Starting today, you can integrate your WordPress.com blog with Feedfabrik and Empire Avenue.

Turn Your Blog Into a Book

Have you ever wanted to publish your own book, or a collection of your favorite blog posts?

Feedfabrik makes it easy to convert your WordPress.com blog into a book format, and even allows you to customize the cover design and book contents….

Today we’ve got a treat for you — a new theme called Selecta. This might be the theme you’ve been waiting for if videos or images will be the primary focus of your blog. The design, originally created by Obox Design, fuses the modern with the retro — a bold, striking color palette (in six color schemes), rounded edges, and wider-than-usual frames around content.

Selecta is loaded with elements that highlight your images and videos. First, there’s the featured…

Keeping WordPress.com’s documentation up to date and accessible is one part of what the Happiness Team works on. We’ve long had lots of documentation, but we realized that the design and flow of the support site spoke more to us Happiness Engineers. How backward is that?

That all changes today. Before, you saw a long page filled with lists. Now you see eight content groupings on the homepage.

Before

After!

We looked at a lot of data about where people…

You already know that you can choose from over 130 awesome themes here at WordPress.com, but did you know that you can create a theme that’s entirely unique to you with the Custom Design upgrade?

To see just how powerful Custom Design is, take a look at this diverse collection of sites that are all using the exact same theme:

Today we’re pleased to introduce the latest addition to our themes, Skeptical. Originally released by WooThemes for self-hosted WordPress.org blogs, Skeptical has seen great popularity as a blog theme. Now, it is available on WordPress.com.

The Skeptical Theme

The WordPress.com version is designed with Post Formats in mind. Skeptical supports nine post formats – standard, quote, aside, image, gallery, chat, audio, link, and video. Just by looking at the screenshot above,…

Over on the WordPress.org blog, there’s an interesting story about the growth of WordPress, the software that powers WP.com here, and the ecosystem around it.

WP.com is different from every other social platform out there because in addition to giving you ownership of your data you get ownership of the code running your data as well, you could run the same Open source software yourself, and in fact we’ll even help you do it.

Open Source is like a Bill of Rights for software that…

Here at WordPress.com we care about making things look good. Automattic, Inc., our parent company, invests heavily in design: every engineering team has a full-time designer. We know making things look and feel great is important and we love making things people love to use.

Over the last few weeks we’ve studied the most popular features people add to their blogs. Things like Sharing, Likes and Ratings. Previously when you turned them on it made your blog look cluttered, defeating…

We have created a brand new theme meant to carry on the spirit of an old timer with kindness, and we are launching it today. The theme has an air of old-style appeal, semi-academic graciousness with elegant typography, while also offering an overall fresh look with room for customization and the power of the latest WordPress features under the hood. It’s called Quintus.

The Quintus Theme

Above all, whether you are creating a blog with plenty of pictures or a more…

I’m pleased to announce our newest theme — Next Saturday. That is, the theme called “Next Saturday” launches today (not next weekend). With its rich, bright colors, three-dimensional blocks, and subtle shadows, Ian Mintz’s Next Saturday brings a touch of childlike innocence to your blog.

The Next Saturday Theme

Next Saturday was designed especially with Post Formats in mind. The theme supports seven post formats — quote, aside, image, gallery, chat, audio, and video….

The number of beautiful themes that let you publish with visually distinct Post Formats grows by one today with Mathew Buchanan’s elegant and bold, Esquire. I think you’re really going to like it.

The screenshot above doesn’t really do justice to Esquire. You really need to check out the Esquire demo blog to get a good sense of how the design works in action. So, check it out. If you want to know more about blogging with Esquire we’ve made a page that describes all the…