WordPress is a powerful and very extensible blogging engine that is gaining more CMS (Content Management System) features with each release. As anyone who has downloaded a copy can probably tell, the directory structure is pretty friendly to hacks and plug-ins, but unless you are your own WordPress coding ninja, you might be asking yourself: where exactly can all these themes, plug-ins and hacks be found? Thus the idea for a short roundup of WordPress download sites and communities was born. Following is a starter list of sites for themes, plug-ins, tips and tricks of all kinds, ripe for helping you take your WordPress-powered site as far as you need to go. Since we're sure we haven't found every site for WordPress goodness, feel free to add your favorites in the comments and we'll update this post with the good ones.

What will happen in 2007? Who knows what the future holds, right? I am willing to bet that you already have a good idea what will happen next year. Care to share? I want to hear what you are most looking forward to this year, are there any apps that you think will go critical and be the next big thing? Also, what was your favorite app of 2006? Let me know. In case you can't remember your favorite app, you can consult LifeHacker's roundup of the best apps of 2006. It is a good chance that their favorites were some of yours. Many of mine are on the list. Let me know what your favorites are!

Seeing a bunch of lean code jockeys building the next generation of web browsers is a reality TV show I'd watch. Since that's probably not happening any time soon, I'll take the next best thing: Read/WriteWeb's Web Browser Faceoff, by Alex Iskold. Iskold reviews six of the latest crop of web bowsers: Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 7, Safari, Opera 9, Flock, and Maxthon. I highly recommend reading his entire round-up, but in case your attention span ain't what it used to be, here's what he concludes about our trusty browsers:

• IE7: "Solid release, which is going to help Microsoft maintain the market leadership in the near future"
• Firefox: "We think that Firefox is going to continue narrowing IE's lead, but await with interest the next major version!"
• Safari: "It's a clean and simple web 1.0 browser, but needs a major feature boost in order to be a contender even on the Mac."
• Opera: "We can see why fans like this browser, but a bigger future depends on spicing it up and poring in the marketing dollars."
• Flock: "Great productivity browser for web 2.0"
• Maxthon: "Need to apply Occam's Razor (i.e. make it simpler), but definitely could be a contender because of solid service integration."

"Even though IE and Firefox are far ahead today," Iskold concludes, "we see that other browser like Flock and Maxthon are ramping up support for the latest web 2.0 services - making themselves stand out and attracting early adopters. ... Faceoff bottom line: This round of browser competition is going to be at least as interesting as the Netscape vs. IE ten years ago. And hopefully less one-sided!" Hear, hear!

Light Reading, a telecom magazine I'll admit to never having heard of before, is running a very thorough comparison of the web's many, many video sharing sites. If you're in a hurry you might want to skip to this table, which ranks 44 sites according to ease of use, upload and storage limitations, and "other stuff" including format flexibility, editing, distribution, and privacy options, but the site graces the Top 10 offerings with more thorough reviews. But in case you're as lazy as me, I'll just list the Top 10 with their scores (out of 100) here and the other 34 after the jump:

1. Blip.tv (95)
2. VideoEgg (94)
3. Dailymotion (91)
4. YouTube (90)
5. Veoh (87)
6. Google Video (86)
7. Grouper (85)
8. Jumpcut (80)
9. AOL UnCut (79)
10. Eyespot (78)

Blogger and web designer Christian Watson has posted a round-up and comparison of ten web-based image editing suites along with a very informative comparison table. The editors in question are Cellsea, ImageAuthor, LookWow, NetImager, nexImage, Phixr, Picture2Life, PXN8, Snipshot (formerly Pixoh), and VicImager. His ultimate choice is Cellsea, though in the comments Beau Hartshorne points out that Cellsea began its life as a ripoff of Snipshot's JavaScript code.

ExtremeTech is running the sort of round-up article I've been waiting to see: Opera 9 vs. Firefox 2 vs. Internet Explorer 7. While the latter two are both in beta, ExtremeTech gives them all a thorough go-'round. The review also includes some revealing benchmarks, testing their memory usage with and without a bunch of open tabs (spoiler: IE wins with one tab, Opera wins with a bunch) as well as their start-up time (Opera is the best, and Firefox is the worst by a wide margin) and Acid2 standards test performance (Opera). ExtremeTech gives all three browsers high marks and doesn't declare a "winner": Firefox wins points for security and extensibility, Opera impresses with its mature tab implementation, and IE7 seems to have done quite a lot of catching up.

Is 3D the future of the web? Well, if VRML is any indication... no. Still, there are a few web browsers out there that attempt to bring 3D worlds to the browsing experience, or vice versa, and ExtremeTech has a nice round-up review of three of them: 3B, Browse3D, and SphereXPlorer. 3B facilitates web browsing with an "airport" metaphor, which lets you travel to different "cities," or themed areas where you have access to different web sites. Browse3D is a bit more straightforward, offering a "three-walled room" design with the center wall showing the current site, the wall to your left showing the last page you visited, and the right wall showing outgoing links from the current page or pages you've "stickied." Lastly, SphereXPlorer lets you have multiple web pages open simultaneously, a la tabs, except scattered around a 3D environment. So, what's the verdict? None of the programs get high marks-3B comes out with a 6/10, Browse3D with a 4, and SphereXPlorer with a 5. Head over to ExtremeTech to read the full reviews.

Just counting all the feed readers out there would be a daunting task, much less actually choosing one. Fortunately we have people like Ryan Stewart and Richard MacManus, who've written a round-up of their picks for best-of-breed RSS readers over at Read/WriteWeb. Stewart and MacManus split the task into three categories: Web-based, desktop, and "rich internet application." The latter category is a bit hard to pin down. Stewart and MacManus' idea of an "RIA" is an app that takes the best from both the desktop and the web, i.e. the power of a desktop app with the locationless (and install-less) and social aspects of a web app. For web-based readers, MacManus chooses Rojo (which I recently praised here) and Bloglines, and for the desktop NewsGator and BlogBridge. For the RIA category they don't have any definitive picks, but MacManus tentatively taps Google Reader, FeedLounge, and Goowy. Head over to Read/WriteWeb to read the full article, or post your own picks in the comments.

Now that we've got the worst products ever out of the way, how about the best? PC World is running an article with the past year's 100 best tech products, and I'm tempted to copy-and-paste the whole thing into my wishlist. It's an even mix of hardware, software, and web sites, but since this is a software blog I'll give you a sampling of the latter two (spoiler warning): Adobe Premiere Elements 2, Apple's Boot Camp, Craigslist, Google Earth, and YouTube make up the software half of the top 10, with Firefox and Google following not far behind. The heavy hitters Adobe, Mozilla, Google, Apple, and even Microsoft make a few more appearances, but there's also plenty of one-off products from small vendors holding their own. Oh, and I should mention that Download Squad's sister site Engadget makes the list at #13, right between Firefox and Toshiba's HD-A1 HD DVD player. Congrats!

Awhile back we linked to a head-to-head comparison of music recommendation sites Pandora and Last.fm (to refresh your memory, Last.fm came out on top) . Of course, Pandora and Last.fm aren't the only fish in the sea, and ExtremeTech is running a round-up review of eight similar services: MusicStrands, Liveplasma, UpTo11.net, Audiri, Pandora, Mercora, Yahoo! LAUNCHcast Radio, and Last.fm. They ranked the services not only on the quality of their recommendations, but also on usability, diversity of their libraries, and community features. I'll admit that I haven't even heard of a couple of those services (though UpTo11.net gets points for the cheeky name), but ExtremeTech is nothing but thorough. In the end most of the services get high marks (excepting LAUNCHcast, that comes out with a score of 5/10 for ads and low sound quality), but in the end Last.fm beats out the others with a score of 9 and high praise: "by far the best out there, possessing a huge library of music, a great community, and a recommendation feature that will blow you away." Pandora comes in second, also with a score of 9, but falls short due to the lack of community and the songs-per-hour limit.

[Via Waxy.org]

Having trouble keeping track of all the companies that are building the current crop of web-based office apps? The Office 2.0 Database is a handy directory of all of 'em, broken down into categories. Need a web-based word processor? You've got eight to choose from. PowerPoint replacement? Five of 'em, and so on. There's even quite a few on the list that I hadn't heard of, like Calcoolate, a simple web-based calculator that stays out of your way but has some nice features like keeping track of all of your previous solutions and letting you give them names for easy access later on. The Office 2.0 Database has lots of columns of metadata and even links to TechCrunch's reviews of almost every single one.

A blog called Plasticsfuture has tests 17 different programs for making backups on a Mac and written up the results in an article called Mac Backup Software Harmful. Why harmful? It turns out that most Mac backup software will save your files but nuke some of the associated metadata. Of the 17 apps, only one gets a "Highly recommended" rating, and four get "Avoid at all cost." In the end, the choice is SuperDuper, a shareware app that's free for basic use or $27.95 if you need some extra features.

A lot flew beneath my radar last week, including, unfortunately, a great post by TechCrunch's Frank Gruber called Comparing the Mapping Services, in which he compares, with some nice screenshots and tables, the big five online map services: Ask.com, Google, Yahoo!, Windows Live, and MapQuest. Gruber praises all of the services, but in the end he says (spoiler alert!), "Overall, Yahoo Maps was by far the best application tested. Its fast Flash interface, multipoint directions, live traffic information, and easy send-to-mobile feature make it the hands down winner. It also features the most robust API options." What's the best online map service for your money?