Today, Code Poet features free eBooks from WordPress professionals, interviews with WordPress professionals, useful resources from the WordPress community, and a handy quiz to test your WordPress knowledge. As you can imagine, Code Poet is gearing up to be a massive resource build by WordPress professionals for WordPress professionals and aspiring power users.

If you’re still looking to hire someone, the Code Poet Directory still exists, and aspiring Code Poets can still apply to be part of the prestigious directory.

Head over to the new Code Poet, grab a free eBook for the road, and take the quiz right away. How did you do on the quiz, and what do you think of the newly relaunched Code Poet?

Art Blogazine is a simple and minimalist theme with HTML5 markup.

Outline is a beautiful, simple, elegant, monochrome theme for blogs or websites with a simple floral motif in the header.

Phire is a modern and easily customizable dark theme.

WPstart is a simple parent theme allowing you to create any type of website you want.

The customizer provides a live preview as you play with Appearance settings, and can be used to customize a live preview of a new theme before you activate it, or to make changes to your existing theme. It allows you to edit the site title and tagline, custom headers and backgrounds, navigation placement, front page selection, and other options that vary by theme. It works with both free themes and premium themes. Shall we take a test drive?

Imagine you want to change themes. As you are browsing on the Themes screen, notice the new “Live Preview” link and click it.

You’re taken to the customizer. As you make changes, the preview in the right-hand part of the screen updates live so you can get things just right.

When things look the way you want them, click the Save & Activate button in the lower left (or Save & Purchase if it is a premium theme) and boom, your new theme and custom settings are live!

You can also use the live preview feature to customize your existing theme. On the themes screen in your dashboard, you’ll now see a “Customize” button that launches the previewer.

And don’t worry, you still have access to the regular screens for adjusting these and other features. Just use the navigation for the Appearance section like you always have.

So, please try it out, and let us know what you think in the comments! I hope you like  it as much as we do. If you hit any snags, let us know in the forums so that we can help.

But wait, there’s more!

Yes, more! Here are a couple of smaller additions also aimed at making it easier to customize your site and make it look just the way you want it.

• When choosing a custom header image, you can now choose from your Media Library. I looove this, because I have uploaded the same header image at least a dozen times to re-use it when I changed themes.
• For themes that support it, custom headers now have a recommended size rather than a fixed required size, so you can be flexible with the height and width of your header images. I love this too, because sometimes I really like a theme but the header image I want to use is taller or shorter than the theme design allows. Now, the power is in your hands to decide! The goal is for as many themes as possible on WordPress.com to support this feature, but you can see if we’ve added it to yours yet by checking the list of supported themes.

And one last thing…
If you know HTML, you can now add links and a little bit of formatting to your image captions. This is great for people who want to link a photo credit to the photographer’s blog or to a Creative Commons license, or want to make some text bold or italicized. At some point in the future we may add a WYSIWYG option, but for now you’ll just need to learn some basic HTML tags if you want to use this one. Just type the HTML right into the caption field in the image uploader, and your links will appear like magic. So this:

becomes this:

You can adopt adorable kittens at your local Humane Society.
Make a new friend and save a life today!
Photo by Jane Wells, saver of kittens

I’ve been wanting this feature for four years now, so I’m really excited.

Have fun with these new features!

*Fun Fact: While this feature was in development, it was originally conceived as a wizard, or guided walkthrough. We codenamed it Gandalf.