In case you didn’t notice the message on top of your WordPress dashboard, WordPress 2.8.6 is now available. The release fixes two security problems that can be exploited by registered and logged in users with posting privileges.

Basically if you have untrusted users on your blog with a user level of “Author” or above, upgrading is highly recommended.

I’m sure you know the drill by now, make sure you backup before you upgrade. I haven’t heard of any upgrade issues with this release so it should be relatively painless.

Last Friday in WP Chat I had the opportunity to chat with the owner of Premium Mod, a site which offers modified versions of commercial GPL themes for free. For more background information, be sure to check out this launch announcement post to get a better idea of what they offer.

We agreed to do an interview that was to be published here, which is below. In the interview we discuss the various feedback received as a result of launching the site, future plans for possible monetization and support, among other things.

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There has been some discussion recently on child theme inclusion in the official theme repository. Child themes are WordPress themes that latch onto a parent theme to do something a little extra, whether it be adding additional styles or functionality.

There are a lot of great child themes out there that do some amazing things on top of frameworks like Thematic and Hybrid, but unfortunately those who don’t look for themes anywhere but WordPress.org will probably never hear about them.

I made a site over at Themelets to list all of the child themes you won’t see on the official theme directory a while back, but nothing will beat the promotion of child themes than on the official WordPress website.

Great designers who support WordPress deserve to have their themes listed in the official theme directory. Not only is it a disservice to them, but also to WordPress users who miss out on these awesome themes, such as these free Thematic child themes from Cozmoslabs.

I think as long as the child themes are designed for parent themes already listed in the WordPress.org theme directory, there shouldn’t be any reason why they’re not included. Be sure to vote if you think they should be included.

It was just announced yesterday that WordPress 2.8.5 has been released, which is considered a “security hardening” release. Here are some of the updates and fixes:

• A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
• Removal of areas within the code where PHP code in variables was evaluated.
• Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including admins.
• Retiring of the two importers of tag data from old plugins.

If you’re wondering what the difference between a “hardening release” and a “security release” is, I don’t think there is any. The only difference to me seems that people don’t seem to complain as much about hardening releases as they do security releases.

Anyway, I’m sure you know the drill by now. Make sure you take a backup beforehand (which you should be doing regularly anyway, and use the automatic upgrader or upgrade manually if necessary.

I just upgraded to 2.8.5 yesterday with the automatic upgrader and everything seems to be running smoothly.

Slidefolio is a free gallery WordPress theme, with posts displayed in a slideshow format. The theme was developed by Nick Berlette.

Read on to find out how to use this theme, along with my thoughts…

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Today we have an awesome news theme, originally designed by DemusDesign, which I then ported to WordPress. This theme requires at least WordPress 2.8 to function properly, and includes some standard features such as threaded comments and comment pagination. There are also over 10 widget-ready areas, including a widgetized footer, plus a custom widget for ad management.

Live Demo | Download

And now onto the features in more detail…

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Alex Denning over at WPShout brings up an interesting point in his post titled Free WordPress Themes? Forget it. It’s Over. Basically, he argues that free WordPress themes aren’t getting the love and attention they used to, mostly due to commercial themes taking all the spotlight.

So do I think free WordPress themes dead? No, not necessarily. I’ll tell you what kind of themes are dead though, at least as dead as themes can get. Old, stale, and boring blog themes. Themes like this are a dime a dozen. The sheer quantity of these themes do make it hard for a “diamond in the rough” theme to stand out.

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Elegant Themes, one of my favorite commercial WordPress theme clubs, have just announced they’ve released a new theme options page dubbed ePanel. Nick has been hard at work on this for quite a while now because he wanted a streamlined version of his theme options page to use on all of his themes.

Read on to find out more about ePanel…

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In case you don’t follow me on Twitter and/or missed my tweet, I was interviewed on WPTavern yesterday, a well known WordPress community site run by Jeff Chandler. If you ever wanted to know…

• How long I’ve been a part of the WordPress community
• The process of releasing a theme on Theme Lab
• Some of the lessons I can share when dealing with outside collaboration
• What my daily routine consists of
• With ThemeLab being responsible for over 90 themes, how much freelance work I have managed to undertake
• Why I’ve decided to work with WordPress rather than other software
• Some of the pains and tribulations of being a WordPress theme developer

…then be sure to check out the interview at WPTavern.

Ice Breaker is a free WordPress domain parking theme that I just released over at Custom Theme. It has four different color options, custom widgets, among other interesting features.

I know this isn’t the typical WordPress theme you see around here, mainly because it’s not made for content. The main purpose of this theme is to have a page up while your blog is in the planning stages, and collect subscribers at the same time.

The idea behind the theme is inspired by Ian Stewart’s LaunchPad theme which is another “domain parking” theme for WordPress.

Head on over to Ice Breaker WordPress theme page to download, and leave your feedback in the release post. I’d be very interested in hearing your feedback.