Theme Lab

I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 last night, everything seemed to go smoothly - or so I thought. Overnight I received several e-mails from people saying the downloads weren’t working. So I looked into it and realized the download manager plugin wasn’t working properly, returning 404 errors for all the downloads. I figured out a solution. It may not have been the best - but it works. If anyone finds any other issues with the site don’t hesitate to send me an e-mail. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Today we have another free WordPress theme, originally designed by DemusDesign. This one has a widget-ready sidebar, with 4 different widgetized areas for the top, middle (left and right), and bottom.

Live Demo | Download

Note: Welcome Weblog Tools Collection visitors!

Tags: black, dark, DemusDesign, gray, minimalistic, white

I’m not sure how many of you have used the tag cloud in the sidebar to find a certain type of WordPress theme here, but if you did you would have noticed the tag archive pages were pretty difficult to use, until now. Before it would just show an excerpt of the post content, which doesn’t do much good if you’re quickly looking for a theme. You probably want screenshots along with demo and download links. Well with the use of custom fields I created a new tag archive template. Take a look at the themes tagged with a left sidebar (for example) and you’ll see it’s much easier to navigate. Hope you like it.

This is literally breaking news. I was browsing through the WordPress.org website and was surprised to see the new design out of nowhere. I’m happy to announce WordPress 2.5 has been released. So far there have been 34,051 downloads and counting. You can download it here. Hopefully our installing WordPress tutorial is still up-to-date. If you saw my previous post you’ll know this is an especially exciting release.

So I was searching through Technorati, and came across a WordPress blog with a “Theme by Theme Lab” credit in the footer. I honestly didn’t even recognize it at first, but soon realized Peach-Autumn.net was actually using a highly modified version of the Featherlight theme. Take a look at the before and after (click to enlarge).

I’ve seen several WordPress sites using my themes but nothing quite like this. As you can see, it went through a pretty amazing transformation and looks great.

If you’re using one of my themes and think you’re worthy of being featured in the new Showcase section, feel free to contact me and I’ll see what I can do.

Just in case you didn’t see this screencast of WordPress 2.5 RC2, I suggest you take a look. Matt from WordPress created a video that demonstrates the new photo gallery feature in the new version of WordPress. RC2 is available for download now as well if you want to test it out for yourself. Like the last release candidate, it is not recommended for a live blog as there still may be a few issues that need to be worked out before the final release.

Today we have a zesty orange colored free WordPress theme, hence the name Orange Zest. It has a widget-ready sidebar.

Live Demo | Download

Tags: black, gray, orange, right sidebar, two columns, white

For those of you domainers who have a lot of unused domain names earning nominal revenue at old-fashioned domain parking services or simply collecting dust and not doing anything, read on. Developed domains will almost always outperform one-click landers at parking sites. One of the easiest ways to do quickly develop a domain is to set up an automated WordPress blog. In this tutorial I’ll go over:

• Where to host your WordPress auto blogs
• How to install WordPress and configure it with SEO in mind
• A free WordPress plugin you can use to set up an auto blog
• How to use use RSS feeds to generate relevant content
• How to monetize your website with Adsense and other revenue streams

Now is the time to dump those stagnant parked pages and start developing your unused domains into dynamic and content-rich websites.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s an interesting looking free WordPress theme. This one is another Rambling Soul template which I ported into WordPress. It has a widget-ready footer. The Menu sidebar isn’t expandable (just an image background) so it wouldn’t really make sense to widgetize that. Anyway, live demo link is here. Download it here. Screenshot is below.

Tags: green, left sidebar, Rambling Soul, two columns, yellow

I just stumbled upon this post about an exploit which allows a hacker/spammer to inject links and HTML into your WordPress installation. If you see a /wp-content/1/ directory in your FTP, you have likely been affected. Over 9000 other WordPress blogs are in the same boat.

As you can see, ringtones, gambling, the usual spammy stuff. I’m not going to directly link to these results as some of these links have been reported to be malware-infested. Definitely not a good idea to visit them. Google will likely penalize you if these spam links on your exploited site are crawled, so you should delete this directory ASAP along with all files under it if you see it.

As of yet, no official word from WordPress developers on this vulnerability has been released. Until then, it’s best to use good security practices (which should apply to all websites, not just WordPress-powered ones). Password protect your directories, don’t publish the version of the script you’re using, disable indexes on WordPress core directories - to name a few. I’ll be posting some general WordPress security tips up on Theme Lab soon.

Note: More information available on this WordPress.org support topic, where the exploit was initially reported.