Tips For New/Upgraded WordPress Users

Let’s say that you’re one of the approximately 13,000 people that downloaded WordPress 1.5 after its release. You’ve read the featuresets and changelogs and maybe even written a post or two.
Now what?
You may be interested in changing the look of your blog to something a bit more personalized, so check out BloggingPro’s WP theme section, WebLog Tools Collection’s WP theme news section, WPThemes.info (a site purely devoted to WordPress themes), the official WordPress Codex list of themes (not kept very up to date, unfortunately) or even Organic Shadow’s fairly comprehensive list of recently-released WP 1.5-compliant themes. (You could even hit squidfingers for some backgrounds as I advised before…).
Once you’ve got your blog up to spec, looks-wise, it’s time to start installing plugins. Plugins alter the way your blog functions, from simple things like live comment preview to comment spam fighters to dynamic contact forms. The list goes on and on. Two very good sources of plugins are the official WordPress Plugin Directory and the WordPress Plugin DB which has “One-Click Install” options for some plugins.
Now that your blog has been customized, you can keep up to date with WP-related goings-on by checking out Planet WordPress and the WP DevBlog, both of which will be excerpted in your WordPress Dashboard for your convenience.
That’s all for now, so log in, get blogging and have fun!