It was announced late yesterday night that WordPress 2.8 had been released. There have been improvements made to themes, widgets, and taxonomies. There were also over 790 bugs fixed.

The WordPress team also released a video tour of WordPress 2.8, where they go over things like the new widget admin area, as well as syntax highlighting in the theme and plugin editors (which I mentioned previously).

I’ll be upgrading the demo server to 2.8 later today to check if there are any bugs with the free WordPress themes, although I’m not expecting anything major.

Have you upgraded to 2.8 yet? How do you like it?

Elegant Themes never ceases to amaze me with their feature-packed, great looking, and affordable themes. eBusiness is the latest theme from the theme club. This theme is ideal for those looking for a WordPress CMS-style theme for their website, while still maintaining some blog functionality.

In this review post, I’ll be going over my experience with this theme, including setting it up and how to use it to run a business CMS site, as well as a blog.

And now onto the review…

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Another week has passed, which means more WordPress weekend resources.

10 Sites That Produce Quality WordPress Content – The title pretty much says it all. This post by Nathan Rice lists 10 sites that produce WordPress-related content on a regular basis. I can think of a few more quality WordPress resource sites that fit the bill, however it’s a good roundup nonetheless.

How to create a Simple Directory in Wordpress using Grandparent, Parent, and Child Pages – This tutorial by Rebecca Markowitz over at WordPress Garage goes over how to set up a simple directory on your site. Includes all the code you’ll need, as well as a live site using the code outlined in the post.

10 Ways to Speed up Your WordPress Blog – This post by Alex Denning over at Pro Blog Design goes over 10 easy to follow ways to speed up your WordPress blog. Some are relatively easy to implement (deleting unwanted plugins) while others are a tad more complicated (adding spammers to an IP block list) however following some of these steps will most likely make your WordPress sites faster.

5 Useful WordPress Functions You Didn’t Know Existed – Nathan Rice makes the list again with this post about five relatively unknown WordPress functions, hidden deep with WordPress’ source code. I admit I knew of a few of them already. These functions can do things like send e-mails, or parse RSS feeds. I wonder what other useful (but unknown) functions are lurking in the source code.

That’s all for this week. As always, be sure to let me know of any recently published WordPress resources and they may be included next week.