Another week has gone by, and here’s another week of WordPress weekend resources.

20+ Must-Have WordPress 2.5 Compatible Plugins - As the title says, this list at Mashable gives you over 20 “must-have” plugins for WordPress. It’s quite a nice list, although most I have already heard of. Maybe you’ll find something new though.

WordPress Template Tags Reference Guide - This performs a similar role as the WordPress template tag lookup tool here at Theme Lab, although formatted a bit differently. This reference has the tags sorted by category. An interesting way to learn template tags you may not be familiar with.

Alex King On WordPress Weekly - This week’s episode of WordPress Weekly will feature a one hour interview with WordPress developer Alex King. He is well-known for his development of popular WordPress plugins such as Popularity Contest - which by the way, is not compatible with WordPress 2.5.

Today we have a very cool looking free WordPress theme, originally designed by DanNisbet.com. This theme has all the regular features of a normal blog layout, including a widget-ready sidebar, Gravatar support for comments, and native WordPress tag support. It also has a dynamic color switcher, so users can change the color to red or green on the fly. This color switcher is also included as a custom widget, in case you’re using the widgetized sidebar.

Live Demo | Download

Like the title says, I want to know how you feel about sponsored WordPress themes. If you don’t know what a sponsored theme is, basically - it’s a theme with one or more “paid links” included, usually located in the footer.

One of the most authoritative sources for WordPress theme releases, Weblog Tools Collection, will not allow sponsored themes to be featured on their main blog. WordPress’ official theme viewer dumped sponsored themes near the same time, about a year ago.

On one hand, sponsored themes sort of defeat the purpose of the free and open WordPress community spirit. On the other hand, theme authors need to pay the bills - and sponsoring themes is an easy way to help do that.

In the comments, I’d like to know what you think of them - sponsored themes that is. Would you use a sponsored theme? What if the links were too “spammy” in your eyes?

Today we have a very cool free WordPress theme, originally designed by growldesign. It may look like a normal blog layout (with Gravatar-enabled comments) from the front end, but with a little WordPress tweaks - this theme is suitable for business website or portfolio. These features will be gone over below.

Live Demo | Download

And now on to the features…

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First of all, happy 4th of July (to my US readers)! We have a few weekend resources today which I’ve collected over the past week. Here they are:

What Plugin Coders Must Know About WordPress 2.6 - If you’re a WordPress plugin author, then you should probably read this article. With WordPress 2.6 allowing you to change the location of your content directory and config file, there are some important things you may need to know.

WordPress Parent-Child Themes - I have to admit this is something I didn’t realize you could do with WordPress. This tutorial goes over how to use a WordPress child theme to redesign your blog. If you have no clue what a WordPress child theme is (like I did) I suggest you check out this interesting article.

Using Sliding Doors with WordPress Navigation - This post at Hack WordPress goes over how to use sliding doors navigation with your page and category lists, as well as offers a “hack” to make use of the wp_list_pages and wp_list_categories functions with it.

Thanks for reading, and if you know of any other recently published WordPress resources, feel free to let me know in the comments.

Today we have another great design from Styleshout, ported into WordPress by me. This is just a standard blog layout, reminiscent of a previous Styleshout theme, Colourise.

This theme has a completely widgetized sidebar including search bar and a styled calendar, as well as tag support and comment Gravatar support (WordPress 2.5+ only).

Live Demo | Download

Today, July 1st, is officially Unofficial International WordPress Day, sponsored by the people over at WPCandy. I hope it’s not too late in the day for my post. I just wanted to make a quick “thank you” to Automattic, because:

• WordPress is a great blogging platform and CMS
• It has an excellent community, of which I’m proud to be a part of
• I run pretty much all of my sites with WordPress
• Akismet is an invaluable spam fighting service
• bbPress is a great forum script, the perfect complement to a WordPress blog

I really can’t thank Automattic enough for making WordPress what it is today.

In the comments, why don’t you say why you love WordPress? Would you ever consider switching away from WordPress if a bigger and better platform came along?

It may also be worth making a comment over on that WPCandy post to be entered in their competition.

Happy Unofficial WordPress Day!

There are certain WordPress plugins you hear about all the time. You see them repeated across multiple blogs as the “best” WordPress plugins like a broken record. Who ever looks back and tries to find underrated WordPress plugins though? These are plugins that don’t get much publicity, but are very useful in one way or another.

• Search Regex - I know this plugin has come in handy for me several times. What this plugin will do is search and replace data stored in your site. For example, if you wanted to change the directory path to images (from /wp-content/uploads/ to just /uploads/) throughout all your posts, all you would have to do is type it in once. Be careful with this powerful plugin though. Make sure to back your database before using it.
• WP DB Backup - This brings us to our next underrated plugin - a database backup plugin. This can automate the process of backing up your database by sending you an e-mail attachment at a defined interval. It was briefly gone over in a previous article of mine: The Importance of Backing Up Your WordPress Site.
• No Self Pings - This is more of a personal preference than anything. I personally don’t like how WordPress “self pings” when you link to another page of your blog. If you’re like me, you can install this plugin and not have to worry about moderating your own pingbacks.

And those are my three. Thanks to the WordPress Expert and Kyle of Hack WordPress for this post idea.

Today we have an interesting WordPress theme, originally designed by growldesign. This theme only has one column, with category and page navigation in the header and footer. On the homepage template, there is room for your latest blog post and an area for your latest 3 portfolio entries below. More information on how to use this will be gone over below.

Live Demo | Download

And now onto the theme features. It will require a few code hacks to get it working perfectly on your new portfolio site…

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Only a few weekend resources this week - both related to customizing the WordPress administration panel.

Four Alternative WordPress 2.5 Admin Themes - While I use the default WordPress admin panel, these alternative themes may be useful to those who want a branded look for their WordPress-powered sites.

For the Love of 2.3 - James Dimick, author of the Easy Admin Color Schemes Plugin, has released a new color scheme for the 2.5 admin panel resembling the old 2.3 admin panel.

That’s all, thanks for reading! If you know of a quality WordPress resource published recently, feel free to let me know in the comments.