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??

Wow, I can’t believe it - I’ve just uploaded the latest update to my WP theme list and it now contains a mindblowing 615 free wordpress themes that wordpress users can download and use on their blogs for free.

Some of the themes have been tested on WordPress 2.0, and have been marked as such, and a few of the themes are actually specifically for WordPress 2.0 and won’t work with 1.5.x (also marked accordingly).

I’m super excited about the prospect of all the new themes to come down the pipeline now that WP 2.0 is out - and for all of the updates to current themes that theme authors might be lured into performing given the fabulous customization that wordpress 2 allows.

For those who don’t know, WordPress 2.0 has taken themes to the next level in a serious way, providing the ability for theme authors to actually allow theme users with options that can be easily customized through a panel in the adminstration area of WordPress. If a theme is customizable, there will be a tab under Presentation for “Current Theme Options”.

The Default theme that is packaged with WordPress 2.0 allows you to make changes to the theme’s header, including the font color and colors used for the background of the header.

But themes like Regulus 2.0 really take it up a knotch by providing checkboxes allowing the blog owner to change the header image, the color scheme, whether to show full posts or excerpts on the homepage, whether to display the post’s author on the homepage, as well as sidebar options such as ’show calendar’, ’show recent posts’, ’show all archive months’, etc.

You can also see a running demo of a new WP 2.0 theme called BloxPress which actually allows the blog viewer to change the layout of the theme, dragging and dropping theme sections around to change their order in the sidebar at will and adding and removing content as it suits them (something which I wish was incorporated into the WordPress core for the blog owners, at least). Seriously cool stuff.

It’s a beautiful thing, this level of customization. I sincerely hope that more WordPress 2.0 theme authors create their themes with these sort of theme options (and more!) in mind!

WordPress 2.0 also allows theme designers to include a screenshot as part of their theme package which will then display on the Presentation|Themes tab so it’s much easier to select a theme that’s suited to your blogging style.

I’m going to need a better way of managing my theme list now that some themes are for v1.5.x and others just for 2.0, etc which isn’t something I can easily due from within the constrains of TypePad. Which leads me to my next post: feeling like I’m stuck in limbo and with a conundrum on my hands.

Boy, theme authors have been busy during the month-plus while I was sick!

I just spent the entire day working on updating my comprehensive wordpress theme list, and it’s now up to a whopping 463 wordpress themes!

When I first started the list, I never guessed it would grow to be so large! I thought we’d hit a huge milestone when we crossed the 200 mark. Now we’re at 463 and growing — way to go to the wordpress community and all the theme authors that so generously have shared their work with us!

Color me blown away!

Update: The theme list now contains 615+ WP themes and growing!