we’re all been waiting for the new release of WordPress, version 3.0 which also called “Thelonious”.

in version 3.0 there are some excellent new features like custom post types, custom background and abilities to manage your own menu, to read more about these features you can click here: wordpress 3.0 surprises.

now in order to test and play with all these features, you need some supporting themes for wordpress 3.0, here’s the list:

Lemmus Theme

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

wp3theme

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

Twenty Ten Blogging Inside Edition

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

Twenty Ten Inverted

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

Minimal WordPress Theme

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

Unisphere Minim

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

Minibuzz

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

Open House

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

Twist of Ten

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

Popularity: 30% [?]

As we wrote before, the much anticipated wordpress 3.0 version, is now officially out.

read all about it here: http://wordpress.org/development/2010/06/thelonious/

Popularity: 19% [?]

This week I’ve downloaded and installed locally the much anticipated wordpress 3 version. the much talked about version where wordpress Mu will no longer exist and will merge into wordpress, it will be called WordPress Multi Site. apart from that feature there are numerous new and exciting features in wordpress 3.0, here are some of them:

New Registration Details, No More Admin and generated password

WordPress 3.0 is changing right from the very first stage, installation and registration, no more default admin user name and generated password, now the admin can set is own username and insert the desired password by himself.

New Default Theme – twentyten

finally the default wordpress theme is changing. there are lots of new features in the new default theme called “twentyten” (2010) like Drop Down Page Menus, 6 Widget Areas, Gallery Posts Styling, HTML 5 Validation, Header Image , Background changing support and much more.

Menu Manager

Now you can add menu manager to your theme and let your users create their own menu, not just by pages but also from categories, posts and custom links. excellent feature.

Custom Header Support

WordPress 3.0 supports changes in your header built in without any need of theme options. you can let your theme users upload new header images and use them, they can also choose the colors of the header and many more options.

Custom Background Support

In the new version you will be able to add your own background and change the colors of it. as long as the theme support it.

Network – the WordPress mu part of the story

When WordPress version 3.0 will be released (they talk about may 2010), wordpress mu will cease to exist and the two platform will merge into one will be called – WordPress Multi Site. there suppose to be a script to tranform your WPMu to reular wordpress. more details about this in the near future.

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Download wordpress 3.0 alpha !!! – http://wordpress.org/nightly-builds/wordpress-latest.zip

read about Custom Post Types – http://kovshenin.com/archives/custom-post-types-in-wordpress-3-0/1

more about the new default theme – http://2010dev.wordpress.com/ and here – http://blog.ashfame.com/2010/02/wordpress-3-new-default-theme-twentyten/

more about Background support – http://wpengineer.com/wordpress-3-0-custom-background-support/

Popularity: 33% [?]

a lot has been said about the new wordpress version and indeed there are some excellent new features, the post thumbnail, edit image, trash status, mass plugin upgrade, snd much more…

here is the official list from wordpress.org:

New Features

User Features

• Trash status for posts, pages, and comments (includes restore and permanent delete)
• Add support for ‘include‘ and ‘exclude‘ to (Gallery Shortcode)
• Allow user registration to be enabled by an XMLRPC client
• Add support for sticky posts to the WXR exporter and importer
• ‘rel=canonical‘ for singular pages
• Scroll back to the same location after saving a file in the Plugin and Theme editors
• Correct comments and remove unnecessary echos from the default themes sidebar template file
• Enable the APP (Atom) attachment file download to work correctly
• Support location of category templates based on ‘category-slug’ as well as ‘category-id’ (Ticket 10614)
• Support location of tag templates based on ‘tag-id’ as well as ‘tag-slug’ (Ticket 10868)
• Support location of page templates based on ‘page-slug’ and ‘page-id’
• Set “Allow my blog to appear in search engines” to checked in installation
• Don’t offer to make a category its own parent
• Remove Sphere from search list
• Minify admin CSS
• Show correct max upload filesize error message
• Add ‘rel‘ attribute to next/previous post links
• Make the default and classic themes comment textareas valid XHTML
• Clean up ‘.button‘ and ‘.button[disabled]‘ CSS classes, add ‘spinner‘ and ‘gray-out‘ buttons after clicking Publish or Update post
• Fix race condition with autosave when clicking Publish immediately after entering post title
• Add Comments for Pages in the WordPress Default theme
• Define ‘$content_width‘ for Kubrick
• Better feedback on publishing of future posts and pages
• Display comments in descending date order, consistently
• Add means of automatically repairing tables
• Press This bookmarklet fixes
• Give plugins and themes simple control over the text displayed at the end of an autogenerated Excerpt
• Don’t show “Change Permalinks” button when editing the page set as “Front page”
• Image editing
• Retire BunnyTags importer
• Retire Jerome’s keywords importer
• Explain that the permalink is temporary for autosave generated permalinks
• Update SimplePie to 1.2
• Eliminate the redundant and confusing comment threading depth of 1
• Easier Embeds with oEmbed support (see Ticket #10337) (oEmbed discovery disabled by default, use plugin to enable it)
• TinyMCE 3.2.7
• Remove rel=’tag’ on links in Tag Clouds
• Add a title to the Home link output by wp_page_menu()
• Adjust comment moderation keyboard shortcut keys ‘d = trash‘ or delete depending on the screen
• Show “Draft updated” instead of “Post updated” when saving draft
• Show the login form in a popup when autosave hits the login grace period
• Open View/Preview post in a new window from the link in the Saved/Updated message
• Separate fields for ‘image alt‘ and ‘image caption‘ in Media uploader
• Display better information about broken themes when there is no stylesheet
• Improve situation when tables such as wp_options table were ‘corrupt‘ new installation message was offered. Add means of automatically repairing tables
• Export and import custom taxonomies
• Admin copy improvements
• Don’t show page templates in the drop down if they are in a subdirectory

Development, Themes, Plugins

• Added ‘excerpt_more‘ filter to wp_trim_excerpt() function, which allow developers to change excerpt ‘[...]‘ more string (Ticket 10395)
• Add ‘smilies_src‘ filter so plugins can better add smilies
• Canonical redirects for post name queries
• Allow _wp_get_comment_list() to handle custom comment types
• Return an empty array instead of false for get_children() when no children found
• Add some filters so that HTTP requests can be filtered
• Move plugin update notice output to the plugin specific hook
• Limit wp-mail ‘blog by email’ checks to every 5 minutes
• Make it much easier to filter contact methods from user profiles
• Allow filtering of get_edit_post_link for custom post_type
• ‘get_sample_permalink_html‘ filter
• Enforce activation key to be a string, reject activation keys that are arrays
• Support for new post types
• Respect custom post_type in queries
• Send Retry-After header when in maintenance mode
• Various WP Filesystem related fixes and documentation
• Add constants for ftp connections timeouts
• Increase timeout on cron-based requests when checking for upgrades
• Don’t use has_action() before do_action() in http.php
• Speed up jQuery based scripts
• Use the current user as author for autosave
• Show My Posts as default view on the Edit Posts screen for users without ‘edit_others_posts’ cap
• Ensure that drafts viewed over XMLRPC have a correct gmt date set
• Pass user id to ‘get_’ the_author_meta filters
• Move _wp_get_user_contactmethods() into the registrations functions file
• Machine parseable db error codes
• Add global JS vars and actions to the media uploader iframe
• Add JSON compat for PHP < 5.2
• Make option_name the primary key for the options table
• Allow a plugin to do a complete takeover of Post by Email
• Logarithmic scale for tag cloud
• Pass Post ID to the ‘get_comments_number‘ filter
• Always filter the url in the media upload form
• Add a ‘the_terms‘ filter
• is_blog_installed() improvements
• Allow force_ssl_admin() to properly accept false as a value
• Pass logged_in cookie to async-upload and filter the cookie scheme in auth_redirect()
• Add more actions around database add/delete/update operations
• phpDoc for wp_”check|set”_post_lock functions
• Use the old strings which are more translator friendly and add a generic default string to aid re-use by plugins adding post_types
• Filter fields through kses upon display and introduce sanitize_user_object() and sanitize_user_field()
• Use null instead of 0 when setting content length
• Include ‘hidden’ directories in filesystem dirlist by default
• Pass args array to ‘wp_list_pages‘ filter
• Actions for taxonomy updates
• Key should be ‘comment_id‘ not ‘post_id‘ in comments table
• Add get_delete_post_link () to retrieve delete posts link for post
• Add ‘separator‘ parameter to wp_tag_cloud() and wp_generate_tag_cloud() functions (Ticket 10315)
• Added add_comment_meta() family of functions
• Use a post_parent of 0 instead of -1 to indicate unattached posts
• Improve get_page_hierarchy() function
• Deprecate the_content_rss(), add the_content_feed() and get_the_content_feed(). Convert places that called the_content_rss() with an excerpt length to the_excerpt_rss(). Remove the rss_excerpt_length option. Use the_content_feed() where the_content() was previously used in feeds.
• Add ‘pad_counts‘ argument to wp_dropdown_categories()
• Remove codepress
• Remove the php-gettext library
• Canonical post thumbanils
• Add a filter to the_author_posts_link()
• Merge post.js with page.js and slug.js, optimize categories and tags JS, standardize postboxes IDs and JS
• Introduce register_theme_directory() which takes a wp-content-relative path and will additionally scan it for themes. Plugins can use this to add themes without requiring copying by the user
• Add set_user_role action hook
• Allow theme devs to change attrs (like CSS class) of thumbnail images
• Add wp-post-image CSS class to post images
• Allow for plugins to enhance the number of metadata fields captured from plugin and theme headers
• Merge updated pomo code
• Switch to using NOOP_Translations for untranslated sites
• Improve wptexturize performance
• Provide context to the strings in the Plugin and Theme installers to allow for different grammatical gender
• Fixes for theme subdir support
• Introduce wp_kses_post() and wp_kses_data() for filtering unescaped data
• Add ‘orderby=comment_count‘ argument to query_posts()
• Honor Post Type for Sticky Posts
• Allow querying multiple post types
• Introduce add_theme_support(feature) and current_theme_supports(feature) for announcing and checking theme support for various features
• Introduce require_if_theme_supports()
• Add number of Embed related filters
• Add ‘IMAGE_EDIT_OVERWRITE’ constant to control edited image save or replace, most useful for setups that have dynamic image resizing
• Add load_child_theme_textdomain() to allow child themes to have their own translation files
• Add sidebar descriptions to sidebar settings and widget admin screen
• Make option_id primary. Add uniques for option_name and autoload
• Allow plugins to override the behaviour of load_textdomain() in a variety of flexible ways
• Mark _c() as deprecated. The new _x() function should be used instead.
• Allow plugins to change the redirect on post/page publishing/submitting
• Standardize on ‘user_id‘ instead of ‘user_ID‘ when passing comment data. Accept either ‘user_id‘ or ‘user_ID‘. Remove ‘user_id‘ global.
• Filter imported comments

Popularity: 19% [?]

Now it’s offiicial WordPress 2.8 – baker is released with a whole new exciting features.
Major improvements are:
- WordPress 2.8 is much faster
- Themes directory with new options like browse, install and preview.
- Redesign of the widgets area. all widgets on the same page.
- new Screen Options on every page.

Some more links are here:

2.8 Release Jazzes Themes and Widgets – From the official WordPress.org blog

WordPress 2.8 Tips and Tricks Collection From our favorite weblogtoolscollection.com

And we also talked about it a few weeks ago – Exciting New Features In WordPress 2.8 and also here.

Popularity: 5% [?]

On May xxth, 2009, WordPress Version 2.8 will be released. some interesting new features will be included:

Custom taxonomies in WordPress 2.8 – http://justintadlock.com/archives/2009/05/06/custom-taxonomies-in-wordpress-28

More About Exciting New Features In WordPress 2.8 – http://xavisys.com/2009/04/exciting-wordpress-28/

All the full details from wordpress.org – http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.8

Popularity: 16% [?]

WordPress 2.7.1 RC1 released

following bugs fixed on this new release:

• URL column in Edit Links removes www. from domains that end in www
• Theme preview fails when theme in subdirectory
• ‘Draft Saved’ current_time not reflecting timezone setting in the edit area
• Revisions do not respect time zone offset
• Canonical redirect of feed URLs with suffixes is wrong
• index.php file in the plugins folder makes the Dashboard fail

more info at boren.mu and here at weblogtoolscollection

Track WordPress Blog Visitors in Real Time

recommended plugin of the week – Now it’s really easy to Track WordPress Blog Visitors in Real Time. There is no need to have any additional Java Scripts and HTML Codes.

more about the plugin here and on the official homepage

Some new Elegant themes from elegantthemes.com

egamer

excellent theme for games portal.

evid

great theme for video bloggers.

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this is for this week. have a great weekend.

wpfeed.com

Popularity: 9% [?]

There are many ways of using wordpress not only as a blog platform. here’s a collection of the top unusual uses of wordpress with links to other posts who already gathered the best uses also. comment here if you want…

CMS

10 Downing Street – http://www.number10.gov.uk/

twistnshout – http://twistnshout.com/twist/

here are top examples, a post by wpfeed.com

Magazine

A list of nice uses of wordpress as a magazine

Another nice example

Job Board

The Job Poster

ShowCase / Gallery

http://welovewp.com/

Portfolio

SharpFolio – http://webrevolutionary.com/sharpfolio/

here is a list of some portfoilio themes we collected for you, here

Real Estate

http://themeforest.net/item/real-estate-theme/17730

PhotoBlog

http://codex.wordpress.org/Photoblogs_and_Galleries

WordPress Photoblog – http://www.wordpressphotoblog.com/

Game Reviews

http://themeforest.net/item/gamepress/17397

Trailers Portal

http://www.press75.com/demos/ondemand/

Twitter

http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2008/01/28/introducing-prologue/

E-Commerce

http://www.markettheme.com/buy

you can also read our post about the plugins and themes of the WordPress E-Commerce here

Link Directory

Website , and Download the theme here

——————

Here is a list of other posts collected unusual uses of wordpress

http://performancing.com/blogging-tools/48-unique-ways-use-wordpress

http://bloggingbits.com/5-odd-and-unique-uses-of-wordpress/

http://impresslab.com/wordpress/11-ways-to-use-wordpress/

http://www.jasonunger.com/2008/08/28/5-unique-ways-to-use-wordpress-not-as-a-blog/

http://blog.themeforest.net/wordpress/the-flexibility-of-wordpress/

Popularity: 17% [?]

How To Install WordPress A Visual WordPress Guide

If you are somewhat technically challenged and have tried to install WordPress yourself you may find that the “Famous 5 minute install” takes much longer. Depending on what hosting account you choose you may experience database issues, if you can even figure out what a database is. You may need to add some code to your. htaccess file, or create one if you don’t have one.

How To Install WordPress A Visual WordPress Guide

Step by Step WordPress Installation

Although the WordPress installation is much easier than most people realize, you will save yourself a lot of frustration if you take some time to prepare first.

If you can host multiple domains with your hosting company, I recommend using a totally separate domain for your blog. At the very least you will need a subdomain.

Verify that your web hosting company supports the following programs.

• PHP version 4.2 or greater
• MySQL version version 4.0 or greater
• The Apache mod_rewrite module

You must also have an FTP program of some sort for uploading your files. This will also allow us to change permission on files as needed.

Step by Step WordPress Installation

How to install the latest version of WordPress

So you see a theme you like on our free wordpress themes page, but have no clue how to even install WordPress in the first place? Not to worry, we’ve written a little tutorial, complete with screenshots, so even a total newbie can figure it out! After five easy steps you’ll have a freshly installed WordPress installation, ready to start blogging.

There are a few ways of installing WordPress using autoinstaller scripts such as Fantastico, but in this tutorial we will be focusing on installing WordPress the old fashioned way – manually. This tutorial assumes you already have hosting configured for the URL you plan on having your installation of WordPress set up.

How to install the latest version of WordPress

Installing WordPress (the Official wordpress guide)

WordPress is well known for its ease of installation. Under most circumstances installing WordPress is a very simple process and takes less than five minutes to complete. The following installation guide will help you, whether you go for the Famous 5 Minute Installation, or require the more detailed installation guide.

Installing WordPress

How to Install WordPress

Ok … now you know what a blog is and you’ve been thinking of starting your own. You also heard of the term ‘wordpress’ but you don’t know exactly what is it all about. In just few words, wordpress is the most used blogging platform on the planet. It is a free open source platform that lets you create and publish your blog. You just install it on your website and you’re good to go.

How to Install WordPress

you can always buy an hosting plan which has a one-click install of wordpress, soon we will write a post about this.

Popularity: 7% [?]