Looks quite possible that we’ll be using WordPress 3.3 before Christmas. 3.3 Beta 1 was released on October 11th so plugin and theme authors have had more than enough time to test their code against the latest version of WordPress. However, when a Release Candidate is offered, it’s generally the best time for testing as there is a very small chance that any major code changes will occur to the core. ∞
wpMail.me Newsletter Wants Your Feedback
wpMail.me is a free newsletter curated by Cristian Antohe. Once a week, subscribers receive an email letting them know about the good stuff they might have missed during the week within the WordPress community. The newsletter covers WordPress news and articles, theme specific news, theme releases, Plugin news and last but not least, tutorials. I’ve been a subscribed member to the newsletter for a few months now and I take pride in knowing that most of the articles that make the weekly roundup I am familiar with. However, there always seem to be one or two good ones that I missed. This is the primary reason why wpMail.me is a good resource for me because it highlights news bits that I may have missed. So far, Christian has lived up to his promise by not sending anything else to my inbox except the newsletter issue.
So far, the newsletter is at 23 issues after 6 months. While I highly recommend subscribing to the newsletter, Christian currently has all issues available in the archive. If you use this newsletter, consider giving Christian some feedback either to him directly or through the comments on this post.
Magazine/News Themes The New Black?
Earlier this morning, Brad Potter and I were engaged in a conversation revolving around the aspect that magazine/news type themes are on the rebound. I remember when they were all the rage but along with the news/magazine layouts came an increase in complexity. These types of themes decreased for awhile but when taking a look at the big picture, it’s easy to see that they are coming back. Just take a look at these released or soon to be released examples.
StudioPress News
ElegantThems eNews
WooThemes The Daily Edition
Darren Hoyts Dispatch
Darren Hoyt – The Local
Why is it that these types of themes are making a strong comeback? Is there a resounding market for them? I’m not sure. But part of the conversation this morning discussed how newspapers were going downhill. I made the prediction that there would be a strong market for these themes throughout this year and next as hyperlocal bloggers begin to get together and use their phones, netbooks, etc to write about their community without any overhead costs that the newspapers have. The definition of hyperlocal is as follows:
In journalism, local news refers to news coverage of events in a local context which would not normally be of interest to those of other localities, or otherwise be of national or international scope.
Sounds like the perfect market for these designs! I’m happy to say though that these types of themes are not nearly as complex or difficult to work with as the first round of 2008. Theme designers have come a long way and it shows.
Are you looking forward to these types of themes showing up everywhere or do you want to see more variety outside of news/magazines?
Working Hard Behind The Scenes
You might have noticed a lack of content on the site here in the past few days. This is in large part thanks to my trip to Chicago over the weekend and since I arrived back home, I’ve been stuck on a GO GO GO schedule. I spent the majority of last night working on putting together the special edition of WordPress Weekly which is now available and also fixing the RSS issue many of you were experiencing. So at least those two items have been checked off of my to do list.
I am still working on getting my WordCamp media onto the web and once that is finished, I’ll publish my WordCamp Chicago experience post. Until then, keep an eye out for WordPress 2.8 which if all goes well, will be released on June 10th.
WPInformer Launches – More WordPress Stuff
A few days ago, I was alerted on Twitter that a new WordPress News centric site had launched called WPInformer.com. The site was created by Aaron D Campbell and is part of the Xavisys brand. So far, there are a couple of posts on the site including a detailed look at the new widget interface that will part of WordPress 2.8, 5 minutes to improve the performance of your theme and a few others. So if you need another WordPress centric site to add you your feedreader, here it is. By the way, you can also follow WPInformer on Twitter. Good luck Aaron with the site!
100 Forum Members, New Design And More
Welcome to the WordPress Tavern Friday Happy Hour. Each Friday, this post will provide a summary of what is going on within the WordPress Tavern Community.
From The Forum:
Hosting Your Own Website – Community Member Conorp has been thinking about purchasing an old computer and setting it up as a webhosting server. There are pros and cons to this situation and the WPTavern community is filling in the gaps in order to steer Conorp in the right direction.
Displaying Categories In Themes – I brought up the issue earlier this week regarding why some themes are designed to show all of the categories for a blog. In most instances, a blogger has more categories than the space alloted for them so why bother? Check out the conversation that has ensued.
Premium Theme Business Models – With the Business section of the forum open for business, I took the opportunity to ask those in the forum to discuss ideas or business models that relate to premium themes and the GPL. We have a couple of great answers already, especially one by newcomer film_girl.
What Feature Do You Want In WordPress 2.8? – This thread is ongoing with a new entry made last night but a number of people have put their feature request in for 2.8. Have you?
Welcoming Party:
I’d like to thank the following new members for joining WordPress Tavern forum. Shepherd Jim pirandello HotSauceDaily Remkus dan13l cdlampl neovita film_girl Laura MadHatter maxhomebits StephenCronin mtuffin DebNCgal iRonnie Kathy berniesr RedDirtRanch joetek
Other News And Tidbits:
During this past week, the WPTavern forum officially reached 100 registered users. Also, 6 Ways WordPress Might Die became the first post on WPTavern to be submitted to StumbleUpon. Thanks to Ian Stewart for that one.
WordPress Tavern will most likely have a new redesign which is lighter in color and won’t be of such high contrast at some point next week. This means that the forum will most likely undergo a color change as well. If you know of any dark, or not so light color schemes I should go with, send me your ideas.
By the end of next week, WPTavern should be all set and ready to go as far as advertising is concerned.
Conclusion:
That wraps up the Friday Happy Hour. Come back next week for yet another overview as to what is happening around the Tavern. Remember, the drinks are always on the house!
Justin Tadlock Releases Hybrid News Theme
Just Tadlock (community member greenshady) has released a new child theme based on his theme framework ‘ThemeHybrid‘. If we were playing a drinking game which would be acceptable considering this is a tavern, you folks ought to be drunk by now. With that said, the Hybrid News theme features much of what you would expect a newsy type theme to have with a bit of Justin’s magic thrown in.
Hybrid News Theme In Action
- Featured post block which is animated
- Post thumbnails for articles on the front page
- Four widget areas in the footer
- Two right handed skinny sidebars
- Featured video block
- Four-level drop-down menu
- A Tabber that features Hot Tags, Random Posts, and your Archives
- Fully compliant with WordPress 2.7
Giving the theme a good look over from the demo which is located here, looks like Hybrid News could easily fit the bill for many of you still looking for a free, news layout type of theme. One thing I noticed which is really nice is that, the post thumbnails as well as the featured posts appear to take the first image which shows up in the post content and uses that as the thumbnail, scaling down or up in size automatically. This is a huge time saver, especially compared to the way in which I currently have to apply an image URL to a post_thumbnail custom field for it to work properly in the theme WPTavern is using.