When we think about the very basic fundamentals of blogging and expressing ideas we find the clear practice of writing. Today we are launching a new theme which tries to reflect precisely on that. Manifest is a wonderful theme for writers.

This is a theme that presents your creations in an elegant and powerfully clean way, offering your readers an intimate and direct experience with your thoughts.

The Manifest Theme

With content being the clear focus in Manifest, you can create different types of posts by choosing appropriate post formats. You can create image posts, link posts, asides, and Manifest will present them in the same neat, clutter free way it shows your regular text posts. You can even add a subtle header image to bring a personal touch to the design.

The Manifest Theme was designed by Jim Barraud. Go and learn more about it on the theme showcase, or activate it right away at Appearance → Themes. And once you are done, just start posting.

Last week, we introduced support for OAuth2 and launched develop.wordpress.com, as we’re eager to empower the developer community to extend WordPress.com in new and meaningful ways.

Today, we’re excited to announce the availability of our new oEmbed Provider API, yet another way to make it easy for third-party services and their respective audiences to share and consume content.

oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third-party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly.

Same post, multiple formats

The API supports any WordPress.com URL, any WordPress.com-hosted domain or subdomain (EG: http://techcrunch.com/, http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/) as well as WP.me shortlinks pointing to WordPress.com-hosted sites.

Hop over to develop.wordpress.com and see the oEmbed Provider API documentation for more information. Keep impressing the world with innovative ways to use the wonderful breadth of content created by our millions of talented bloggers!

Got lots of magazine-style content and need a stylish frame? Today we are introducing Lifestyle, a new colorful magazine theme that comes with ten content-friendly, soft color schemes.

Lifestyle Theme

As a premium theme, customization is at the core of Lifestyle. Choose from multiple layouts and menus, breadcrumbs, header image, or custom background. This theme is a great fit if you publish magazine or news style content. You can showcase multiple categories on the homepage and use featured images to make your site look stunning.

Developed by StudioPress, Lifestyle is available for the lifetime of your blog for $75. Read more about the theme features or preview it live on your blog from Appearance → Themes.

Today we’re excited to launch Matala, our newest theme. You might recognize this one — it was once the primary theme for ma.tt, Matt Mullenweg’s blog. Last year, Matala was released to the WordPress.org Themes Directory, and now we’re thrilled to bring it to WordPress.com.

The Matala Theme

Originally designed by Nicolò Volpato, Matala’s bright colors and dynamic shapes are suggestive of designs seen in Talavera, a pottery tradition common in Puebla, Mexico. Grungy textures, hand-scribbled icons, and whimsically titling text in the main navigation menu join the colors and shapes to give your blog a bright, playful look.

You can use Matala’s fun design as is, or create a look of your own with a custom background image and custom header image.

Matala comes with three widget-ready areas: the right-hand sidebar and two columns at the bottom of your post content column. In addition,  there is a full-width page for single-image pages, an option to display a small “Random Photos” gallery on single-image pages, and support for six post formats — aside, status, quote, video, image and gallery.

Learn more about Matala’s features on the Theme Showcase.

We love developers and the applications they build to help extend WordPress.com in new and meaningful ways. To continue providing support for developers who build applications that integrate with WordPress.com, we’re announcing support for OAuth 2, as well as a new developer portal, develop.wordpress.com.

Starting today WordPress.com supports a new method of authentication which makes it extremely easy for third party applications to connect with WordPress.com blogs. This new method uses an open protocol, OAuth2, to allow secure API authorization in a simple and standard way. OAuth2 allows applications to access a WordPress.com blog without ever asking for personal details such as a password or username. Connections from applications can easily be managed within the dashboard and connections won’t break when a username or password is changed.

In addition to supporting the new authentication feature, we’re also launching develop.wordpress.com. If you’re interested in learning more about OAuth2 and other ways to integrate with WordPress.com, then this developer portal is for you.

Develop.wordpress.com contains some handy documents and resources about how you can develop using WordPress.com technologies. The site also houses a channel where you can contact us directly regarding issues such as OAuth2 authentication, client access, and embedding new media types on WordPress.com.

These documents are only the beginning -  we’ll be adding more resources and tools over time as the developer ecosystem grows.

Memolane is one example of the many possibilities for integration of third party applications with WordPress.com. Memolane allows you to pull posts directly from your WordPress.com blog into a graphical time line with other elements of your online life. You can easily view, add to, and share this timeline online. As of today, you can also embed your personal Memolane on your WordPress.com blog using a new shortcode.

So, developers, what would you like to build with WordPress.com?