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.

Fear not, my fellow blogging friends. We’ve got you all covered today with a theme that will make you want to stop time and write about everything in your lives until you can’t write anymore.

A Simpler Time, designed by Denise Chandler, is a theme that’s beautiful, bold, and memorable—pretty much exactly like the types of stories you’ll be writing alongside it on your WordPress.com blog:

A Simpler Time: Single Post

It’s a traditional blog theme in the sense that it offers everything you’ve come to expect from a WordPress theme—widgets, custom menus, and custom headers, and more—and it also looks incredible. If you’d also like to mix it up with different colors and fonts, try the Custom Design upgrade. You can do all of that and more.

A Simpler Time is a premium upgrade for your blog; read more about its features on the Theme Showcase or dive right into previewing it on your blog from Appearance → Themes.

Monster Widget provides a quick and easy method of adding all core widgets to a sidebar for testing purposes.

Updated plugins

Bad Behavior complements other link spam solutions by acting as a gatekeeper, preventing spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your site in the first place.

Yepty is yet another pay per click advertising plugin.

The design will also function great on tablets, such as the iPad. Furthermore, the design comes with formats for both portrait and landscape modes for smartphones and tables alike.

Mobile represents a huge shift in the way we consume the internet. I am happy that we can show initiative in  getting our customer’s websites ready, and I hope that all of our Nova users enjoy the update! Let us know what you think

Instead of the traditional meet up, which is typically attended by only the core developers and their chosen guests, the core team is now looking for your nominations to decide who will attend the first ever WordPress Community Summit. The Summit will allow the core developers to get to work with the best and brightest of the WordPress community (support forum volunteers, the Theme Review Team, volunteer documentation editors, community organizers, theme shops, etc.), and who knows what amazing things they’ll come up with when they put their heads together!

If you have any favorite community members or companies, even that lone support forum volunteer who rescued your blog, make sure that you leave a nomination for them right away. Sure, you can nominate yourself too, but do be a good sport and nominate at least one other person or company.

We made the initial changes last week and after great feedback from you we just launched an update. Here’s how it works:

• By default, posting a comment will now subscribe you to receive follow-up comments via email for that specific post, keeping you updated on the conversation. This is indicated by the checked box in the comment form.
• If you have a WordPress.com account, you now have a global setting to change this so that by default you will not be subscribed. If you don’t have an account, then you can create one over here.
  
• If you don’t want email notifications for a thread, just uncheck the box when you post your comment. If you’ve disabled the feature, you can also subscribe to a specific thread by checking the box in the comment form.
  
• There is also a link at the bottom of every notification email that will allow you to change your subscription options.
  

If you’d like to find out all of the details about how this works, we’ve also updated our support documentation about following comments.

Discover details about what each showcase blog is doing with WordPress.com themes and customizations by clicking a thumbnail to see a colophon-style list of credits on the left.

We’ve also updated footer links so blog owners can show off the types of customizations they’ve made and visitors can learn more by clicking the “Customized” link in WordPress.com footers. A “Customized” link will appear next to the theme name for blogs that are using Custom Design tools like fonts or CSS.

Things we like to see when looking for showcase-worthy customizations are blogs with good traffic, beautiful design, well-written articles or stunning images, recent content updates, and involvement helping out in our CSS Customization forum.

Be inspired, customize your blog and make it that perfect place for your creations.

Flourish is a lovely, simple, pastel theme with subtle decorative flourishes in the background and accents and features a vibrant, colorful image of needlework in the header.

Galaxy is a professional theme for corporate business websites and blogs.