A couple of my freelancer friends are often looking for photo gallery WordPress themes so that got me thinking that I should put together a collection. When I searched around the Internet, I found a ton of great options. Those of you that are looking for photo gallery and portfolio designs to use on WordPress, here is a gallery of 40 themes.

For years Automattic’s WordPress.com has allowed bloggers to make money with ads. The best option thus far has been Google AdSense. Now WordPress is saying “you deserve better than AdSense.” Now Automattic has launched a new service called WordAds. There are over 50,000 WordPress-powered blogs launching every day. These blogs will soon be able to place ads on their websites through Automattic’s partnership with Federated Media. [WordPress Blog]

People that use the WordPress platform knows about the eco-system built around it. Plugins are one of the most important aspects of running a blog that runs on WordPress. Below is a list of over 20 plugins available that would come in handy for WordPress admins.

Hackers have gained root-access to several WordPress.com servers this morning. Some of the VIP customers’ source code was accessible by the hackers. WordPress.com VIP customers were alerted a “code red” and passwords/API keys were changed.

WordPress is used by 13% of the 1 million biggest websites. In terms of competition, WordPress surpassed Movable Type, another blog content management system. Why is WordPress winning the battle? According to Byrne Reese, the former product manager of Movable Type and TypePad, there are several reasons why WordPress is winning.

WordPress has launched an application for Nokia Symbian^3. This is the fourth largest mobile platform that the blogging company launch an app for after launching on iOS, Android, and BlackBerry. The application was written in Qt, which means that it will work on the Nokia N8, The Nokia C7, and the Nokia C6-01. Features include the ability to post on the go, moderate comments, check statistics, and photo uploading. [IntoMobile]

Blog platform company WordPress.com has hit the 200 million blog post mark. WordPress.com has about 11.4 million hosted blogs and sees about 260 million visitors per month (Quantcast). About 13.8 million blogs used the self-hosted WordPress platform. WordPress parent company Automattic raised about $30 million in funding since they started in 2005. [Mashable]

One of the reasons why Google has grown at a rapid pace is of publishers.  Many publishers sign up for Google AdSense right away when they start a news website or blog.  The most popular open source blog platform is WordPress.  The nice thing about WordPress is that installing themes is very easy.  Some of these themes are optimized for AdSense insertion.  Below is a list of over 20 free AdSense ready WordPress themes.