My WordPress Theme List has been updated — and while I wasn’t sure if we would cross the 900 mark, turns out we’re more than halfway to 1000 free wordpress themes available for download!!!

Way to go to all of the wordpress theme authors!!

Now if only WordPress wasn’t giving me a blank page when I went to publish my updated theme list…if I can’t get it sorted out so that you can actually access the updated list at the old URL by tomorrow, I’ll create a new page for the theme list..

Well this news is two weeks late, but better late than never. The winners of the WordPress 2.0 Theme competition hosted by arenawp.com have finally been announced:

The Wordpress 2.0 Theme Competition Winners:

Best Overall Designs
1st Place - Durable by Andy Peatling
2nd Place - Kurtina by Gail Dela Cruz
3rd Place - Ambiru theme by Phu Ly

Most Creative Design
Foliage by Derek Punsalon

Best 3 Column Design
Tiga by Shamsul Azhar

Best 2 Column Design
Disconnected by Adam Freetly

Best Use Of Colours
Dapit Hapon by Gail Dela Cruz

Best Liquid Design
DarkPad by Sreejith Krishnan

Best Use of Wordpress Theme Options
TBD by People’s Choice and Sponsor

Best AJAX Integration
TBD by People’s Choice and Sponsor

Congratulations to all of the winners, and thanks to all of the participants for all of their hard work in creating innovative wordpress themes. I’ve obviously got a lot of updating to do to my comprehensive wordpress theme list — hopefully I will be able to get it completed within the next day or so. How exciting! New wordpress themes! I can’t wait to go and check them all out!

ArenaWP has officially closed the doors to new entrants to its theme competition and so the judging process has begun! Terry (the creater of ArenaWP) says that

I know everyone is anxious to see the new designs, and they’ll be available in two weeks for download after the judging panel has reviewed all the entries. A screenshot of each design will be available later this week for a sneak preview of the designs that have been entered. I’ll also complile a list of all the new partcipants and come up with a final number of theme entries within the next couple of days

As of April 17th, there were 34 Theme Participants listed and I’m sure that list has grown as the competition deadline drew nearer. A big thanks to everyone who participated, and best of luck to all of you in winning some of the great prizes being offered up!

Personally, I’m uber excited to see all the new WordPress 2.0 themes that have been created! I hope that some designers really went to town with incorporating WordPress 2.0’s new Theme Options, which allow wordpress bloggers to customize the theme without touching (or knowing) a single piece of code.

I also can’t wait to see how much larger my comprehensive wordpress theme list will grow once all of the themes that were submitted to the contest are made available to the public. We’ve recently crossed the 800 themes mark — think there’s a chance we can make it to 900??

Way to go to all of the wordpress theme developers out there! I just finished the latest update of my comprehensive list of wordpress themes, and we have now officially crossed the 700 mark and are almost halfway to the 800 mark with a whopping 744 wordpress themes available for download!

Much thanks to Terry/Kineda for reviving the spirit of the WordPress 2.0 Theme Competition that was intended by the original competition (that was later discovered to be a hoax) by launching a new one at wordpressarena.com with trusted, named judges like Terry aka Kineda, James aka Shadow, Bryan Veloso aka Avalonstar, and Dan Cameron.

The hoax competition had a lot of juicy prizes associated with it (likely because none of them were ever actually going to be awarded to anyone seeing as how it was a hoax). Theme designers worked their butts off creating new WordPress 2.0 themes in an effort to win some of those excellent prizes. While the new WordPress Arena competition is offering an iPod shuffle to the overall winner, the runner up prizes of a year’s worth of hosting (which people aren’t necessarily likely to take advantage of, generous as it may be, as changing webhosts is quite a production) and a book on the Zen of CSS Design aren’t quite as tempting as the electronic and cash goodies these designers were originally promised as prizes.

So I ask the community: if you have the means, please help reward the designers for all of their hard work and sponsor the WordPress Arena 2.0 Theme Competition by donating some enticing prizes to be awarded. This would then allow for more categories for themes to be judged upon and more winners, as was promised in the original competiton that sadly turned out to be a scam.

These theme designers who submitted their hard work to the hoax competition must feel really scammed and taken advantage of. Let’s make them feel appreciated - honor them for their work. Surely there must be some companies or individuals who have the means to donate some more prizes (cash or otherwise) and be proud sponsors of the new WordPress 2.0 Theme Competition.

WordPress Arena has graciously extended the deadline for submission of themes to May 1st to a) allow for the time for more sponsors to get involved and then decide on judging criteria for the new prizes, and b) provide extra time for the many theme designers who got scammed to learn about the new theme competition so they can all get their submissions in and for the rest of us to spread the word about the new competition. Winners will be announced on May 15th, 2006.