WordPress is certainly increasing in popularity these days, and now it has its own board game. BoardPress premiered at WordCamp Indonesia and is briefly described as follows: [BoardPress] can be played by 2-4 players with playing time up to 45 minutes. In the game, each player takes a role as a web developer who works on a team to set a new blog by implementing the WordPress engine. Each player needs to set the optimal combination of plugins. Of course, it’s not as easy as it sounds. The game includes a few obstacles, include a pair of dice, that (much like web design) could either help you along or quickly destroy your work. The game is being developed by Kummara and should be available soon. If you’re planning to order it the second it launches, head over to BoardPress.org to sign up for announcements.

New plugins jQuery Vertical Accordion Menu allows you to easily create multiple jquery vertical accordion menus using the custom menus function. Logged Out Admin Bar makes that admin bar always visible even for logged out users. (requires WordPress 3.1) Photographer Connections connects photo related API’s to WordPress. It launches with Pictage, SmugMug and ShootQ integrations and will act as a framework for easily adding future API’s as well. WP Customer Reviews allows your customers and visitors to leave reviews or testimonials of your services. Updated plugins Bad Behavior complements other link spam solutions by acting as a gatekeeper, preventing spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your site in the first place. Login Logo allows you to customize the logo on the WP login screen by simply dropping a file named login-logo.png into your WP content directory. WP-Stats-Dashboard displays your blog’s stats graph plus […]

So, you’ve just installed WordPress for the very first time, but you still see your hosting provider’s default “coming soon” page. Two things could be at play here, but they are fortunately very easy to resolve. More than likely, there is an index.html or home.html file in the same directory as the WordPress index.php file. Remove the index.html or home.html file, either via FTP or your hosting provider’s file manager, and all should be fine. If that didn’t help, your server isn’t configured to recognize index.php as a valid index file, which is thankfully very rare. Access your server via FTP and try adding this to the top of your .htaccess file with a plain text editor: DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.htm Both of these should work to cure your generic home page woes, but if they do not, stop by the WordPress Support Forums for further assistance.

Nanoplex is colorful simplicity. It lets you add a touch of color to your blog. Pujugama is a clear design with light tone colors for your blog. Tyler is a black and white multi layout theme with custom header, custom navigation menus, widgets ready sidebars and footer widget blocks.

It’s been almost a month since we asked for your 2011 blogging resolutions. Though the response was low, we did collect some solid data.  The majority of commenters have made a resolution to blog more often, followed by a tie between finding a new theme and increasing integration with social networks. If posting more often is your thing, head on over to WordPress.com’s The Daily Post, where you can find new topics, challenges, and helpful musings every day as part of their Post a Day initiative. As for a new theme, finding free themes has never been easier or safer thanks to new changes made to the official Theme Directory. If social networking is your thing, try Simple Facebook Connect and Simple Twitter Connect. If you’re after better Facebook and Twitter integration, these plugins do just about everything. Well, what are you waiting for? Don’t wait too long on this […]

New plugins Make Filename Lowercase sets uploaded media filenames to lowercase as a filter on sanitize_file_name. Hotfix provides fixes for selected WordPress bugs, so you don’t have to wait for the next WordPress core release. WP YOURLS Tweet sends status updates to Twitter when selected post types are published, and uses a custom YOURLS private URL shortener to generate a short URL for your post/page. Updated plugins Facebook Like for Tags allows you to automatically share to Facebook when posting new articles with specific tags or categories. WP-QuickLaTeX allows you to insert formulas and graphics in the posts and comments using native LaTeX shorthands directly in the text.

The article How did WordPress win? has certainly been making its rounds the last two days, but all eyes seem to be (for the most part) on this comment by core developer Mark Jaquith, who sums up the state of WordPress security quite well. It sure is hard to avoid quoting the entire thing here, but here are a few key points: I haven’t seen an up-to-date WordPress install get directly exploited in around five years. Seriously. Every time I investigate a compromised WordPress install, it is either because they were running an old version (usually not just a little bit old, but really old), or because their web host was compromised. […] When you’re paying $5 a month for hosting, three things will usually suffer: Stability, Security, and Support. […] Two big priorities right now are: (a) making it super easy to stay up-to-date and (b) pushing web hosts […]

Bamboo is 1000px wide with 1 column. It comes with 9 widget areas and about 40 theme options. Weaver allows you to make your theme look just how you want by starting with one of over 20 predefined themes. Use the simple “check-box” interface to easily change colors, fonts, header and footer, menus, sidebars, theme width, and much more. XS comes with pretty much every feature you will need (except that which there are great plugins for) for a cool news or regular style blog. XS includes many premium-like features and a theme panel for easy deactivation of main site elements.