Wordpress themes and plugins for the week

Here are the best plugins and themes for wordpress blogs, we found interesting. We have hand picked them based on their utility and ease of installing. They are quick and should not run into installation errors. If one of them does, do let us know.

PLUGINS

• WP – Custom Title Colour plugin
  This plugin gives you the ability to customise the title colour for any post via a panel in the sidebar of the write page. Handy for creating alerts, or drawing attention to a particular post.
  It’s easy to install and works like a breeze.
• WP-Spam Free
  This is yet another wordpress plugin that will help you to fight the automated bot spam war. The author promises - “This plugin will allow you to have a virtually spam-free WordPress blog.”
  Features
1. Virtually eliminates automated comment spam from bots. It ensures that your commenters are in fact, human.
2. No CAPTCHA’s, challenge questions or other inconvenience to site visitors — it just works.
3. The beauty of this plugin is the simplicity. Sometimes the best solutions are the simplest ones.
4. The code is has an extremely low overhead and won’t slow down your blog. (No database reading or writing.)
5. Completely compatible with all cache plugins, including WP-Cache.
• YouTube Favourites
  This plugin / widget for Wordpress allows you to display, in a very configurable manner, your latest favorite videos from Youtube. This plugin requires a little bit of manual code editing, so installation may be a nit difficult, but it’s works like a charm.
• Internal Links plugin
  This plugin helps you to link to other pages or articles in your blog, without having to type in the full URL.
  Very easy to install.
• Comment Luv plugin
  This plugin allows you to include the commenter’s recent blog post to be linked from his comment. The plugin automatically detects the commenters latest blog post from his feed, and posts the link near his comment.
  Easy to install, but requires some code editing in comments.php. Very good to increase visitors stickyness to your blog.

THEMES

• Curved – Is a three column theme from Felixker. It has rounded corners, tabbed navigation and is widget ready. This one is good if you plan for placing square ads on the right hand panel. The web 2.0 sleek look is pretty cool.
• Simpress – is a clean, sleek looking SEO friendly theme. The layout is a bit different and catches the eye almost instantly.
• Newspaperize is a modern looking theme from Justin Tadlock. It has the recently popular newspaper like look with double large sidepanel, where you can add the ads as well as subscription elements.
• RedWave is a web 2.0 styled wordpress theme that has a great colour combination, of red and black. It’s a three column template with curved edges and gradients.
• FotoSky - is a three column wordpress theme that has a fairly simple layout, but very appealing with it’s gradients and arrangement. 

Stay tuned…next tuesday we’ll be featuring cool web 2.0 styled themes, which are rare to find, so watch out.