iThemes is doing their part to support WordPress by offering a free t-shirt with every WordPress Foundation donation in excess of $50. According to the official instructions, simply donate to the WordPress Foundation, send a copy of your receipt along with a mailing address and shirt size to giveback (at) ithemes (dot) com, and patiently wait 2 – 4 weeks for your shirt. Well, what are you waiting for? It’s time to support your favorite blogging platform and get a free shirt!

Miriam Schwab of WPGarage.com has a neat little tip that explains how to install WordPress without using a domain name. The trick involves editing the Hosts file on a Windows machine to specify a domain name for the server address the site is hosted on. Mike Little who published a comment on the article made note that it’s not a Windows only trick but can also be performed on Linux/Unix and Mac OSX. This trick enables the previous site to stay online until the last minute where a simple DNS change will switch to the new site.

Chip Zero is stylish, customizable, flexible, readable, and professional with a custom menu and background. Color Shading is a clean and content-focused theme for bloggers with a customizable color scheme. Global News is 1000px wide with 3 columns. It comes with 10 widget areas and about 40 theme options. Modern Blue Style is a modern and simple style layout, with a left menu, strictly optimized code structure, and widgetbar. Optimizare is a light and clean business theme with custom options.

The WordPress developers have just clarified its license as “GPL version 2 or later,” putting an end to some frequent confusion. WordPress contains libraries which are licensed under the GPL “version 2 or any later version,” which obviously excludes version 1 of the GPL. Here is the reality: the GPL version 1 is effectively irrelevant. It hasn’t been a commonly used license since before Matt Mullenweg was in third grade! Clarifying WordPress as being licensed under the GPL “version 2 or later” resolves these niggling library licensing concerns or ambiguities, and clarifies where WordPress stands. As with any licensing discussion, the post has generated some interesting comments, which makes for some entertaining (if not educational) weekend reading.

New plugins Simple Front End Edit Buttons adds functions for adding edit buttons on the front end of your website. With these icons you can change the order/priority of a page without the need to change the order manually within WordPress. Slickr Flickr displays photos from your Flickr account either as gallery, a galleria, or as an unbranded slideshow in posts, pages, or sidebar widgets. You can place a large number of slidehows on the same page. WP Linkblog filters the permalinks of WordPress posts to look for a link URL and sets that as the permalink for posts. Updated plugins Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen. Custom Contact Forms is a highly customizable and intuitive contact form plugin for WordPress. InComment Comment Referrer […]

If you’re thinking about signing up to WordPress.com or are a brand new user, head on over to LearnWordPress.com. Announced by Erica Johnson on the WordPress.com blog today, LearnWordPress provides a step-by-step tutorial that includes lessons to start a blog, customizing your site, and connecting with other bloggers on the WordPress.com network. The tutorials that I browsed through were media rich with images and videos outlining exactly where to go and what do to. If you know someone that recently signed up to WordPress.com or is having trouble using the service, definitely pass this link on to them.

Why You Should Never Search For Free WordPress Themes in Google or Anywhere Else: Siobhan on WPMU.org has a nicely illustrated, researched and explained article on why users should never search for “Free WordPress Themes” in Google or any other search engine. Not enough can be said to avoid the malicious theme hawkers on the Internet and I appreciate the work and the explanation. The problem is that most users, who are new to the ways of WordPress, will still use Google to search for themes and will download the first link that provides them with a free theme that catches their fancy. I would go so far as to say that somewhat knowledgeable users might still be tempted to ignore any possible bad effects from these themes; e.g. users continue to flock to sites that provide collections of serial numbers online in spite of being riddled with porn and adware. My […]

The new year is here, so what are your blogging resolutions for 2011? Are you going to try posting more often? Are you going to replace your outdated theme? Perhaps you’re finally going to take your blog to the profressional level, or maybe you’re considering starting a blog in the first place? No matter what your plan is, we want to know! Please let us know in the comments below how you plan to change the way you blog or just change your blog itself in 2011.