My friend Nick of Pancak.es recently released a very cool free WordPress theme called Syrup and I thought I’d go over all of the features of it in a video. I’ll list a few here…

• Control the color scheme manually or with built-in presets
• Choose where your sidebar goes (left, right, footer)
• Choose which page links appear in the header

All controlled through a convenient theme options page in your WordPress admin panel. Watch my video review below…

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Another week over, another set of weekend resources. Let’s get started…

45 Free Premium WordPress Themes - A great list at WPZoom of some really amazing free WordPress themes, most of which with magazine or grid style layouts. Some of these you probably haven’t seen before. I know I saw a few that I didn’t recognize myself.

Creating a Featured Articles Section - This guide by WP Project goes over a simple method of listing “featured” posts in a certain category by creating a small loop and displaying the list. Interesting technique for intermediate WordPress users. Best part is, no need for any plugins.

Creating a YouTube Video Tabber - In this guide by Adii, you’ll learn how to create a YouTube video tabber. This is a pretty useful tutorial for those who want an efficient way to display videos on their blog.

That’s all for this week. If anyone has any other useful WordPress guides or information published recently, feel free to let me know in the comments.

Every week I’m going to start linking out to some interesting WordPress related articles, themes, plugins, and other worthy resources - starting today. Here it goes…

24 Ways To Contribute To WordPress - A great article by Jeff Chandler of Weblogtoolscollection, outlining several ways to contribute to the WordPress community.

10 Twitter Users You Should Follow - This article by Michael Castilla of WPCandy lists 10 users you should follow on Twitter, who frequently “tweet” about WordPress news. I’ve never really got into Twitter, but just in case…here’s my Twitter profile for future reference.

WP Freemium - A great free WordPress theme by Ptah Dunbar. Premium in quality, freemium in price. Looks like it’s great for ad space too.

Matt M To Be On WordPress Weekly - To those of you who don’t know, Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress, is scheduled to be on the WordPress Weekly podcast tonight at 9 PM EST.

Best Resources for WordPress - Round 1 - Pavel Ciorici of WPZoom has an excellent list of even more WordPress resources. Check it out.

That’s all for this week. If anyone has any tips for a Twitter newbie (such as myself), feel free to let me know in the comments.

To anyone that isn’t aware, Lester Chan (GaMerZ) is a WordPress plugin author that has released some very useful plugins that I use myself on this site, including the WP-PageNavi (for page navigation) and Download Manager (for tracking downloads on the free WordPress themes page).

He has just announced a few days ago a large portion of his plugins are now updated and compatible with WordPress 2.5 and above. The full list of updated plugins can be viewed on that link. For the remaining plugins, there are beta versions available on the Downloads page. These are supposed to work with 2.5, but have not been thoroughly tested and therefore, still in beta.

I thought I would take this opportunity to let you all know of my semi-new site, that has just opened up for business today at PowerTheme.

Yes, this is yet another one of those “premium” WordPress theme sites. At the moment it has only 3 themes, but hopefully I’ll be able to build up that number in the future, while still maintaining high quality. The two paid themes are priced competitively in comparison to other premium theme sites and offer a lot of extra functionality you would expect to see from a paid theme. There’s also a free one entitled Elegance you may want to check out.

Now, will I be spending less time on Theme Lab because of my new site launch? The answer is: not really. I’ll still post tutorials and release free themes here regularly, so don’t worry.

This is just a quick message to anyone using FeedWordPress, the subject of my previous article: Put your dormant domains to use with WordPress. It is not compatible with WordPress 2.5.1. The feed syndication will still work, but you won’t be able to edit any settings in the backend since a necessary WordPress function has been removed since version 2.5. I’ll be sure to post again when an update from the developer has been released.

As a follow up to my Wpdesigner for sale blog post (which was in turn a follow up to my membership giveaway), I’m here to announce that Wpdesigner has finally sold on SitePoint for a cool 66 grand. Yes, you read that right, $66,000 American dollars. I’m glad Small Potato got a great price for it, and I’m also glad that he seems to have found a good buyer, Pawel Ciszewski. On this post announcing the change of ownership, Small Potato states the themes club will continue, so no worries to those who got the free (and paid) memberships.

I know this post is a little late, but better late than never. As a follow up to my previous post about Wpdesigner’s $5 themes club giveaway, it came as a shock to me when Small Potato (owner of Wpdesigner) announced that Wpdesigner is for sale a couple days ago. With the possible sale of Wpdesigner, the future of the $5 themes club is uncertain as to whether the new owner would continue producing themes and providing support. If it does sell, I sincerely hope it goes to a good buyer that is familiar with WordPress and capable of maximizing Wpdesigner’s true potential. It is currently listed for sale on SitePoint, with the high bid at $16,500 at the time of this post. Either way, I wish Small Potato the best of luck in his future endeavors.

Okay, here’s the deal. Small Potato over at Wpdesigner recently launched a $5 Themes Club. What is a “themes club” exactly? Most membership-based template clubs will offer access to a collection of templates, along with access to any future templates added to the mix as well. Some have “membership levels” which may limit your use of these templates and may restrict you to a certain number of domains/sites. I know this sounds a bit complicated, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

What’s so great about Wpdesigner’s club is the simplicity of the program. The $5 gives you access for one year. You get at least 12 WordPress themes throughout the year, including these already made club themes. As long as you don’t give them out for free or resell them, you’re pretty much free to do whatever you want with the club themes - use them for your own sites, clients, whatever.

Hopefully you have a pretty good idea about what this theme club is all about. Small Potato is giving away 20,000 accounts to his $5 themes club. Let’s do the math: 20,000 accounts multiplied by $5 each equals $100,000 worth of accounts. He was nice enough to sponsor 50 free accounts just for Theme Lab readers.

So how do you get one? I’m going to make it very simple:

• Leave a comment on this post expressing interest in getting an account
• Make sure you leave a valid e-mail
• I will personally e-mail you a coupon code which you can use to sign up
• These free coupons will expire at the end of 2008
• I’ll continue this giveaway until all 50 coupons are spoken for

That’s about it. Comment away!

I’ll code your templates into WordPress for free. If you design free open source CSS templates and looking for a WordPress coder to port your template, I’m your guy. If you don’t know what WordPress is, it’s a powerful and very popular blog publishing software. This site uses it, along with countless other blogs and websites.

I’ll do this at absolutely no cost to you, the designer. All I ask is a link back to this site in the footer of the theme release, which I think is a small price to pay for the additional exposure both of us receive. I’ll also put it up for download and announce it on the site. I’ve worked with a couple other designers in coding their free templates into WP. Free WordPress themes such as Simply AIO, WP Stylish, Tech Blue, and Retro Green were all designed by others and originally coded in just XHTML/CSS before we ported them into WordPress.

Of course I prefer to work with well coded, good looking templates that will potentially attract a lot of downloads. Feel free to contact me through the contact form if interested. Thanks!