A week ago, Wordpress announced that WordPress 2.5 RC1 is available for download. 4 days ago, another released known as the RC2 has been made available. The Wordpress development team is really getting their hands fast on this. Today Wordpress 2.5 is finally released to public, the stable version.

I believe a lot of blogs will be mentioning about this, however, I would still like to inform all my readers about the release of Wordpress 2.5. A list of plugins have been tested for compatibility with Wordpress 2.5. Before updating your Wordpress, please make sure that all the plugins that you are currently using is compatible.

I’ll download version 2.5 and install in my local machine and test it out before uploading the new bunch of codes to my host. Are you ready for Wordpress 2.5?

Also check out how to update Wordpress.

Tags: release

To distinguish your blog with other blogs, you ought to have unique quality contents. However, the outlook of your blog design is also another issue to give good impression to your readers, especially first time visitors.

There are plenty of free themes available for downloads and most themes allow you to modify to suit your own taste, but giving credits back to the creators (at the footer), which is pretty fair.

Here, is a collection of 10 elegant Wordpress themes that you may consider using them.

Olive Theme by Chris Niedojadlo

I personally like this design. It’s a 3 columns design and widget ready. The default colors is well blended into the theme.

[Download Olive Theme]

Danika by Cyberwire LLC

This theme is similar to the previous Olive Theme. 3 columns and widget ready.

[Download Danika]

Office Theme 1.0 by Greg Ponchak

I like the stationery theme and wood texture behind, really looks like on your working desk. 2 columns and widget ready.

[Download Office Theme 1.0]

RedBlue by Themey

This is a 3 columns, widget ready theme. Red and blue blended nicely.

[Download RedBlue]

iTheme Clear Blue

This is a very “Mac” feel theme. I like the smoothing blue theme. 2 columns and widget ready.
[Download iTheme Clear Blue]

PinkLove

This is a very pretty theme which is suitable for girls. 3 columns and widget ready.

[Download PinkLove]

Div Ice

Looks similar to the previous PinkLove theme but in cool ice blue. Suitable for boys, well, of course girls can use it too. 3 columns and widget ready.

[Download Div Ice]

Div Black Theme

If you are a fan of dark theme, this is quite a nice one. 3 columns and widget ready.[Download Div Black Theme]

Notes

This is really a plain white theme with little colors here and there. Looks like using a highlight pen. Yup, it has a notebook layout. A 2 columns theme. The original theme is not widget ready, however, I’ve converted it to a widget ready theme.[Download Notes]

TV 6Th Feeling

A very contract theme, light comfortable background with dark foreground. 2 columns and widget ready.

[Download TV 6Th Feeling]

Hope you enjoy these themes. Happy pimping your blog.

Not enough, hunger for more options? >> Check out TopWPThemes

Extra reading >> Skin Your Blog

Tags: theme, Wordpress

The RSS button, usually in orange can be found in almost every blog. Many newbie will just ignore this wonderful tool just because they don’t really know what does it mean. Here is a simple explanation on the RSS feed.

We only have 24 hours a day, which we need to spend time on our daily routines, accompanying our family members, as well as reading blogs or blogging. We wouldn’t want to waste extra time by checking updates from our favorite blogs one by one - the so called “blog hopping“.

Some people may argue that they prefer blog hopping, visiting their favorite blogs one by one just to check for updates. Some claim that if there isn’t any updates, they will still leave a message in the chat box. The real intention behind the message usually indicate the owner something like “Oh! Hi there, I was here before and hope you can hop over to my blog too.” I used to do that too for a short period of time. It did boost up some traffic. In fact, that’s what most blog hoppers really want. They may not even read your blog content but just leave a “hi hi” message and hoping that you will head back to them. Most of the time, it works. [...more]

Tags: feed, freeware, rss, traffic

The biggest difference between a Blogger (blogspot) and a Wordpress blog is the use of custom plugins. These plugins have made Wordpress blogs better in terms of functionality. Believe it or not, a lot of Wordpress blog owners depend a lot on plugins. If you understand the structure and the codes, you can even make your own Wordpress plugin.

How flexible! This additional piece of codes can benefit both you and your readers.

There are a lot of custom ready made Wordpress plugins available to feed your needs. Here is a list of 16 great plugins which I think is really useful (however some are optional) for enhancing your Wordpress blogs.

[1] Adsense Manager

Control and arrange your AdSense & Referral blocks on your Wordpress blog. With Widget and inline post support, configurable colours. If you monetize your blog with Google Adsense, this is a good plugin that allow you to add your Google Adsense ads using widget.

[2] Akismet

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments”. By deafault, this plugin is included in every Wordpress.org blogware. All you need is the WordPress.com API key to activate this feature. Signup an account in Wordpress.com to obtain the API key. Without this plugin, you will receive a lot of spam comments when time pass by.

[...more]

Tags: plugins

Sometime ago, if you ever notice the announcement from Wordpress.org, they stated that version 2.4 will be skipped and will be focusing on version 2.5 development. Normally, the Wordpress development team will release a new version in every 5 months time. Because of time constraint, 2.4 is skipped and 2.5 is now almost available to the public.

If you refer to the roadmap, Wordpress 2.5 was planned to be released on 10th March 2008. However, Matt from the development theme said:

The software is basically done and stable, and could be released today, but we’d like to incorporate feedback from a wider audience before making it available to the general public. After a few days of your feedback we’ll set a final release date.

If you are interested to be a tester of Wordpress 2.5 and have feedbacks, you can join the testers mailing list. [...more]

Tags: release