Every year the WordPress team proudly unveils a new default theme, increasing by one the collection now known affectionately as the Twenty Somethings. Serving as the flagship theme for a year, it has big shoes to fill. The theme should work well for a blog or a website, be carefully crafted under-the-hood to support essential WordPress features, and—of course—it should be aesthetically pleasing and exciting.

Say hello to the new default WordPress theme for 2012.

Twenty Twelve is an elegant, readable, and fully responsive theme that makes your site content look its best on any device.

A key component of this theme is a special homepage template. Recently, it’s become even more evident that WordPress is heavily used as a content management system (CMS) with many more sites now using it to organize any kind of content rather than purely as a blog. The homepage template meets this need by…

We’ve just released two improvements that will make WordPress.com even more efficient for you, leaving you more time to create content.

Site Stats

If you get a lot of traffic to your blog, your stats were sometimes slow to load.  We know you like to look at your stats often, think about how all those seconds added up.  Now, your main stats page loads all of its data in parallel:

This loads your whole stats page two to three times faster, which means less time spent staring at a spinner and more time for interacting with your readers and creating content.

Of course, if you’re a Jetpack user, you can partake in the speedy stats goodness on your WordPress.com stats page as well!

Toolbar Notifications

We’ve made your Toolbar Notifications faster to interact with also. Now you can navigate the Notifications menu from your keyboard.

Keys:

• n : Open/Close the…