WPBeginners has published their list of the best tutorials they have written in 2010. Over the course of the year, WPBeginner has covered everything from how to install a plugin to useful configuration tricks you may not have noticed. They end the list by linking to some other cool tutorials they have discovered on other sites. Looks like WPBeginner had a great year. Stay tuned to WeblogToolsCollection.com as I publish a two part series of our own showcasing WordPress news in review, WLTC style.

The first WordPress 3.1 Release Candidate has been released. A release candidate is the final stage between beta and final release, and the development equivallent of “we think we’re done.” Over 700 tickets have been resolved so far, and only a few have shown up in the last few hours. The final release of WordPress 3.1 is just around the corner, so it’s time for both developers and users to take it for a spin and try it with your favorite plugins and themes. If you run in to any problems, please feel free to discuss them in the Alpha/Beta section of the Support Forums or contact the wp-testers mailing list. If you run in to any bugs, please follow this guide to report them. Have you tried WordPress 3.1 RC1 yet? If you have, what do you think so far?

New plugins Disable Grunion Admin link removes the “Feedbacks” section added to your Dashboard by Grunion Contact Form. Plugin Organizer allows you to change the order that your plugins are loaded. Updated plugins Admin Bar Removal completely removes the new WordPress 3.1 admin bar. Haiku – a minimalist audio player is an exceptionally simple HTML5-based audio player that inserts a text link for audio playback. Now includes an optional graphical version of the player. Simple Social Bookmarks is an easy but powerful way to implement Social Bookmarking on your WordPress blog. It has links to over 200 Social Bookmarking networks and is fully XHTML standards compliant. Where did they go from here checks to see if the visitor’s referrer is another blog post on your site. If this is the case, then the referring post is updated with a reference to that post. WP Overview (lite) shows overview and memory […]

WordPress 3.1 is running just a little bit behind schedule.  The second beta was released ten days ago and more testers are needed to make sure that the final release doesn’t ship with any undiscovered bugs. The final release is hopefully not too far away, so now’s the perfect time to download the beta and make sure that your plugins and themes work. If you find any bugs with WordPress 3.1, please feel free to discuss them with the wp-testers mailing list. Have you tried WordPress 3.1 yet?

James Dalman gave his prediction for the future of the premium theme business on WPCandy yesterday and although he makes a couple of valid points, there are some others I’d like to expand upon as well as add my own thoughts. First, a little history on the semantics of the market. The word Premium was a term used about two years ago to define a theme that carried a price tag and contained some additional features and enhancements you wouldn’t normally find in a free theme. This lead to the question, What Is A Premium Theme? Premium was and always has been a marketing term. It’s funny because in the commercial theme market today, the rage is centered around theme frameworks. While theme developers in the WordPress community grabbed a hold of this term and gave it their own definition, we once again found ourselves wondering what a theme framework […]

Melville is a clean and simple journal theme for writers. No sidebars, no social buttons, just great typography and beautiful design. Minimal is a minimalistic theme with 3 columns. Picture Box is a photography theme that will show you how powerful the WordPress gallery feature really is and yet make it even cooler with jQuery awesomeness. WSC6 is a white and grey-based CMS theme.

BuddyPress 1.2.7 has been released to the public. This release is a maintenance version that fixes several problems and is considered an important upgrade for all BuddyPress users. Take note of the following before upgrading: Before upgrading your BuddyPress installation, make sure to back up your data and files, and deactivate BuddyPress-dependent plugins. Congrats to Boone Gorges and the rest of the contributors for continuing to develop and support the BuddyPress project.

The talented team behind WordPress.com has launched a major update to their built-in contact forms. The old built-in contact form system was in need of a major overhaul, and that’s exactly what it got in this update.  The new forms are not just contact forms, but fully customizable forms with the ability to add or remove fields, select from a variety of field types, and mark specific fields as required. The team also added a new “Feedbacks” section to the Dashboard, which is basically similar to the Comment management section, but specifically for managing the data collected by your new forms. As with comments, all form data is passed through Akismet to keep the spam bots from abusing your forms. Of course, the new custom form system isn’t just for WordPress.com users.  Users with self-hosted/installed WordPress blogs can enjoy the new system by installing and activating the Grunion Contact Form […]