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.

Today we have a very cool free WordPress theme, originally designed by DemusDesign, and ported into WordPress by me. This theme may look simple on the front-end, but the configuration file in the back-end gives you a nice selection of options that control color choice, column amount, among other things - which will be gone over below.

Live Demo | Download

And now on to the features…

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Did you know you can display a static page as your front page, instead of the usual blog? In this guide I’ll go over a little known way to do this within WordPress. No plugins or hacks needed (although they might help). You’ll learn the following:

• How to use one of your regular WordPress pages as your front page.
• How to keep a blog on a another page of your site.

It’s pretty simple, let’s read on…

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Today we have a long awaited 3 column WordPress theme, designed by our friends over at SymiSun (same designer of this theme) and ported into WordPress by me.

Both sidebars are widget-ready. The top menu (Page 1, 2, 3) will have to be hard coded with links as the current template would make it nearly impossible for me to integrate a dynamic page list.

Lucky for you HTML beginners out there, I’ve developed a handy tool to help you generate the necessary code. If you’re familiar with conditional tags you can use the “active” class for an additional style on active page items.

Live Demo | Download

Like the title says, upgrading WordPress isn’t as difficult as you might think. As long as you don’t have a lot of “core upgrades” i.e. direct edits to WordPress core files, it shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes. In this tutorial I’ll show you how in 3-4 simple steps.

• Take a full backup first
• Get the latest version of WordPress
• Overwrite core files
• Run the database upgrade script (if necessary)

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Here’s another great template designed by DemusDesign and ported into WordPress by me. This one actually has a separate stylesheet for 800px width, as well as 1024px width (the default). There is a style switcher script built in for this, which can be seen at the bottom of the right sidebar. The sidebar and footer are both widgetized and ready to go.

Live Demo | Download

Breaking news. It’s only been a month and WordPress 2.5.1 has already been released. It’s recommended to upgrade soon for “one very important security fix.” In addition, it also addresses over 70 other bug fixes including various fixes to the administration panel and media uploader.

Just a quick update to let you all know of the new WordPress Tutorials page which has a list of all of the tutorials on Theme Lab with a short description. Hopefully it will be a little easier to navigate than through the category archives.

Jeff Chandler wrote a review over at WPCandy of our Nature Blog theme a few days ago. One of the things he said in this review was the following:

I don’t immediately see support for tags but thats something that wouldn’t be too hard to add. However, I think tags should be a default quality in themes these days considering that it’s as simple as adding that function into the theme.

I couldn’t agree more, and since that review I have tried to make sure all of Theme Lab’s future releases have tag support, as well as working on tag support on previous theme releases. In this guide I’ll teach you how to add tag support to your own themes that may not have it. Like Jeff said, it really is “as simple as adding that function to the theme.”

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Here we have a beautiful and vibrant free theme titled Rainbow Dreams, great for any blog looking for a dreamy feel. The sidebar is widget-ready, including search box. It has been tested and working with WordPress 2.5. Many thanks to XHTML Valid for the coding (some other nice WordPress themes there as well).

Live Demo | Download