Tumblr () is becoming an increasingly popular platform for blogging and personal publishing, thanks to its growing collection of themes, simple posting style and plethora of mobile options.

Although Tumblr has continued to beef up its feature-set, adding support for pages, user questions and user submissions, the platform isn’t as extensible or customizable as something like WordPress () or Drupal (). In a perfect world, there would be a way to combine the simplicity of Tumblr’s posting types and styles with some of the deeper customizations and options of WordPress.

We might not have reached the Holy Grail of Tumblr Meets WordPress harmony, but we’re a lot closer, thanks to a new plugin and iPhone app from WooThemes, a WordPress theme development firm.

Earlier this year, WooThemes started experimenting with bringing Tumblr-styled themes to WordPress. Tumblr-inspired design is taking off on lots of platforms, but what made Woo’s approach unique was the addition of a special QuickPress widget seated on the WordPress dashboard that made posting specific types of content — a la Tumblr — very easy.

Over the past few months, Woo has released more Tumblr-style themes using this QuickPress widget. Even better, WordPress 3.0 was released with support for custom post types, which makes adding special elements like a category icon or post-specific styling more automated.

This is great if you are starting a new site or want to redesign your blog – but what if you already have a pretty established site and a design you quite like? Wouldn’t it be great if you could add some of that microblogging functionality into your existing WordPress site? Read on for details on how to do that.

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The Woo Tumblog Plugin

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Last week, Woo introduced its free Woo Tumblog plugin. This plugin makes it possible to turn an existing theme into a Tumblr-like tumblelog.

You will need to do some editing of your theme files to get the Woo Tumblog plugin to work, because the plugin changes the way post title, thumbnails and post types are displayed. WooThemes has provided extensive documentation showcasing what you need to edit and add and has also included contextual help.

Woo also includes specific examples for what you need to do to add support for the plugin to the new TwentyTen theme included with WordPress 3.0.

You’ll need to change your permalink structure and add a few lines of code. It’s actually pretty straightforward. Our hope is that in the future, more theme developers will consider adding these hooks into their themes automatically.

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The QuickPress Widget

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Once you’ve enabled the plugin and made the changes so that different post types will appear a certain way, you can then post these types using the QuickPress widget on the WordPress dashboard.

This is what that looks like:

The end result is this post:

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Express: The iPhone App

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Beyond the plugin, WooThemes has also released Express [iTunes link]. The app is $4.99 but it is far and away the best WordPress mobile experience we’ve had to date.

You can use the app with any of the Woo microblogging themes or with your own theme if you install and enable the Tumblog plugin.

The app is super simple to use and you can easily post various types of content. It doesn’t support video uploading — something that the latest version of the WordPress iPhone app recently added, but it does make it easy to post various types of content and to moderate comments.

The app has already generated a lot of excitement in the WordPress theme community and lots of developers are signing up to add support for the app to their themes.

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What’s Missing

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As awesome as the new Woo Tumblog plugin and Express iPhone app are, there’s still a missing component that prevents true WordPress Meets Tumblr bliss from taking place. The bookmarklet.

I would argue that the bookmarklet is a huge reason why Tumblr and Posterous () are so accessible. It’s just so easy to quickly post a link or an image or a brief comment when you can auto-generate that content from your web browser. Furthermore, the iOS bookmarklets make it possible to do this from within the Tumblr iPhone apps too.

WordPress has its own bookmarklet — Press This — but frankly it’s not very good. It’s buggy, it doesn’t give you all the options you have in the main editor and it certainly doesn’t easily support custom post types.

There are rumors that better Press This and QuickPress functionality will be coming to the next version of WordPress, but at this point, users are on their own. I’ve become so despondent with the lack of a real bookmarklet solution that I’ve toyed with creating something myself that will also work with WooThemes’ plugin. Sadly, I just don’t have a ton of time.

I’m not alone. I’ve received e-mails based on comments I’ve left regarding the need for a bookmarklet from others indicating that this is a must-have killer feature.

We’re so close — we just need this next piece to really make microblogging on WordPress viable and enjoyable.

WooThemes has done a lot of the heavy lifting by releasing the free plugin and also creating the iPhone app. Wouldn’t it be great if the open source spirit could help come up with a bookmarklet solution?

Some do web design for the exposure. Some do it for the clients. Some do it in a less than inspiring fashion, while others are absolutely brilliant at it.

Web designers who also take the time to blog have their own little hierarchy on the tubes. While we don’t dare comment on who’s right, who’s wrong, or who’s “right now,” we can tell you who has built a following and just might have something to say that’s actually worth a listen — or a read, as the case may be.

Check out the portfolios, Twitter streams and blog posts of these 10 fascinating gents, and if we skipped your favorite designer-blogger in our list, be sure to let us know with a link in the comments.

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1. Dan Cederholm

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Twitter: @simplebits
Images: Dribbble
Blog: SimpleBits Notebook
Employer: Principal/Founder, SimpleBits

Cederholm might be best known these days for his work on Dribbble, the invite-only site where designers show off tiny slices of their work for comment and approval. The “invite-only” veneer of exclusivity is just one factor that makes the app red-hot; invitations are often seen being auctioned off (or begged for) on Twitter.

But Cederholm is no johnny-come-lately. He’s written three books on standards-based web design and coined the phrase “bulletproof web design,” referring to the need for flexibility in the event of worst-case scenarios. He also founded Cork’d, a popular site for wine enthusiasts.

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2. Joshua Blankenship

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Twitter: @blankenship
Images: Flickr
Blog: Joshua Blankenship | Blog
Employer: Design Director, NewSpring Church

This guy’s blog is a well-rounded mix of videos, images, quotations and spot-on advice. He also posts atBlankenship a Go Go, on Tumblr.

One of Blankenship’s coolest projects is Prom Night Fist Fight, a Tumblr blog of stunning typographic Illustrator designs. You can seriously kill hours flipping through the 200 or so pages — and you’d probably be a more inspired person for doing so.

In an industry characterized by aggressive agnosticism, Blankenship is refreshingly open about his faith, elements of which permeate his work.

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3. Dustin Curtis

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Twitter: @dcurtis
Images: DustinCurtis.com
Blog: Dustin Curtis is a superhero
Employer: Freelance Startup Consultant

Dustin Curtis might not be so well known if he hadn’t gotten a hapless airline employee fired.

The pathos-fraught saga began last spring when Curtis did an unsolicited redesign of American Airlines’ website. Not too long after Curtis published his ideas, an AA employee sent the young blogger an email, which Curtis then published. And not too long after that, the AA employee was fired. The Internet resounded with every colorful adjective in the book, from arrogant to brilliant and far beyond, in its dissection of the events.

Controversy aside, Curtis’ work stands on its own. The guy creates some beautiful pages and his commentary on web design both ruffles feathers and creates small tornadoes of discussion on Hacker News.

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4. Andy Rutledge

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Twitter: @andyrutledge
Images: Portfolio
Blog: Design View
Employer: Principal and chief design strategist, Unit Interactive, LLC

Andy Rutledge tells it like it is. He calls himself a curmudgeon; others just call him realistic, honest and blunt. He’s been blogging since the early-mid-2000s, penning phrases like: “This is commercial success we’re talking about, boys and girls. In commerce, if your product sucks, you suck.” Ah, brisk!

When he’s not delivering his characteristically no-BS sermons on web design, he runs Unit Interactive in Plano, Texas. An interesting thing about his company is that they do no marketing. None whatsoever. All their clients come to them through word of mouth or organic discovery. This is where Rutledge’s reputation and experience come into play.

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5. Ryan Carson

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Twitter: @ryancarson
Images: Flickr
Blog: Think Vitamin
Employer: Founder, Carsonified

Ryan Carson is now best known for his event production skills. He recently put on Chirp, Twitter’s April 2010 developer conference. Carson certainly left his imprint; from the colors to the typography to the trees and beanbag chairs. Carsonified is also responsible for the Future of Web Design and Future of Web Apps conferences.

Carson is the guy behind MATT, or “multi-account Twitter tweeting,” which is exactly what it sounds like. He does some personal blogging at RyanCarson.com.

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6. Jacob Cass

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Twitter: @justcreative
Images: Flickr
Blog: Just Creative Design
Employer: Junior Creative, Carrot Creative

This Brooklyn-based design blogger is a logo, web and print designer. How he finds time for his full-time job at an agency as well as part-time freelance work and prolific posting, we’ll never know. His posts span a gamut of fields including resource-laden typeface lists, useful how-to’s, Q&A’s and editorial commentary on processes and trends.

Cass also runs Logo of the Day, a blog about logo design, of all things.

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7. Chris Pearson

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Twitter: @pearsonified
Images: Portfolio
Blog: Pearsonified
Employer: Self-Employed Web Designer

Pearson is best known for his WordPress theme design, Thesis, which took off like a rocket in 2009. Hailed as the last word in functionality and elegance, one user even said: “If God had a WordPress theme, he’d use Thesis.”

Pearson runs DIYThemes, a WP design site that exclusively focuses on Thesis. He’s also created Cutline, PressRow and a few other popular WP themes.

When Pearson blogs, his compositions (which focus on web design and SEO) are thorough and thought-provoking. Though he may blog less frequently than other luminaries in the scene, his archives run deep and wide and are easy to access.

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8. Chris Coyier

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Twitter: @chriscoyier
Images: Flickr
Blog: Chris Coyier
Employer: Chatman Design Wufoo, as of this week

In terms of creating valuable content, Coyier is one designer who gives back to the community in spades. More than just pretty colors and cool fonts, Coyier is a leader in the technical side of the community’s ongoing discussions about web design.

He runs CSS Tricks, a full-featured resource site with code snippets, forums and even screencasts. He also posts articles at Digging Into WordPress, where he shares tips and tutorials from his many years of experience in building sites with CMS. Digging Into WordPress is also the title of a book Coyier co-authored with Jeff Starr. Another resource he’s handed down is Script and Style, a wonderful curation of tutorials for web designers. If you run multiple sites for clients, you’ll definitely want to check out Are My Sites Up?, a monitoring system that aims to optimize for uptime.

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9. Graham Smith

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Twitter: @imjustcreative
Images: Flickr
Blog: Logo Design Blog
Employer: Freelance Logo Designer

Smith is all about logos, as well identity design and typography. A veteran designer with 25 years in the field, Smith is also a maddeningly prolific blogger. Smith is a self-described minimalist who’s into black-and-white photography and Helvetica, natch. In addition to those sites, he also runs Posterous and Tumblr blogs featuring frequent design finds.

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10. Chris Spooner

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Twitter: @chrisspooner
Images: Flickr
Blog: Spoon Graphics
Employer: Freelance Designer

Spooner’s primary blog is a “digital playground” where he’s been sharing tutorials and techniques since 2007. You won’t find much editorial commentary here but you will find plenty of inspiration and practical knowledge. Spooner also posts at Line25, where you’re more likely to find interviews and opinions along with tutorials. Of course, like every good netizen, Spooner also maintains a personal blog on Tumblr.