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??

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!

Just a note that my comprehensive list of free themes for WordPress 1.5 and up has been updated to add 13 new themes, and now consists of a whopping 369 themes! (update - make that 616 themes!)

As always, tremendous props to the many theme authors for all their hard work in creating these themes AND for their generousity in sharing them with the wordpress community. If you’re using someone’s theme, I’d bet they’d love to hear about it so shoot them an email and give them the thanks they deserve.

On a more frustrating note, I’ve discovered at least two people who have stolen my wordpress theme list and reprinted it on their websites without my permission, one of them even claiming it as his own work (with the audacity of reprinting word-for-word all of the accompanying verbiage that went with my post!) Fortunately, I’ve resolved the issue in both instances, but this prompted me to remind everyone that my blog posts (and yours!) are protected under copyright laws and may not be reprinted without permission.

Much thanks to Tony at tonystreet.com for notifying me about the guy who stole my post in it’s entirety and helping me to get him to remove it (and also for all the wonderful wordpress themes he has created and shared with us!)

To my loyal blog readers - if you come across a site which has stolen my theme list, please let me know by emailing me at howtoblog @ gmail.com (remove the spaces - protecting myself from spammers). I’ve spent well over 40 hours in the months since March 2005 on both creating and maintaining my comprehensive list of free wordpress themes.

Also, thanks to everyone for the kind words (and patience) while I’ve been ill. Migraines are a real nightmare to deal with, and prevented me from being online for quite some time. But I’ve been feeling better lately, and while I’ll need to attend to some work in order to be able to pay my mortgage, I look forward to getting back to work on How to Blog!! I’ve missed you guys!

Update: the theme list now contains 615+ themes and will soon have even more — a huge update is on the way!

Tech Wench has created a great cheat sheet with the bare minimum of what you need to know in order to create a new wordpress theme. Thanks, tech wench.

Speaking of WordPress themes, I’ve been updating my comprehensive list of wordpress 1.5 themes and it now links to a whopping 330+ wordpress themes!! Theme designers in the wp community have been busy - and we thank you for your efforts and generousity!

Update: the theme list is now 695+ themes and growing!