We recently posted 9 WordPress admin themes, well it turns out WordPress 2.4 will have an updated default admin theme as well. The screenshots posted by Jordan look pretty nice. There’s also a live demo, apparently it’s only around 10-20% complete in the demo. But if you keep checking over the next few weeks you should be able to follow the progress as it happens. Now that’s what we call bleedin edge!

In my opinion the dashboard layout desperately needs a makeover, we would love to see something like the MyDashboard plugin integrated into the core of WordPress. Then there would be plenty of developers creating useful gadgets, to let us further customize the dashboard. How likely this is we have no idea! We are certainly looking forward to 2.4 and the future though.

2007 is over, we have compiled a list of 40 of our favorite WordPress sites added over the last year. We have received over 600 submissions since August! Please keep them coming, we can’t wait to see the beautiful designs people will produce over the next year.

In no particular order 40 of our favourites:

WP Board

This is a very small security tip, but it’s worth the attention. I have been doing this for a while across all my Blogs. I’m also very curious and often try this myself if I want to see the plugins a specific site might be using, and it’s alarming just how many sites/blogs don’t do this, especially some of the larger blogs.

When you install WordPress, it doesn’t block people browsing your directorys without indexes. This means if someone browses to; example.com/wp-content/plugins/ they will be able to see all the plugins you have installed. Same with example.com/wp-content/themes/ .

If you upload any zips, rars of any custom themes/plugins, anyone can potentially access and download them, as was the recent case with clazh.com whose template has sadly recently been leaked onto warez sites and forums.

Just a quick update, WordPress 2.3.2 has been released, it’s an urgent bug fix, otherwise your draft posts could be exposed (we had over 40 drafts so we upgraded quick fast!). An added feature lets you customise the DB not found message which im sure alot of you have witnessed sometime or another. Place the custom template wp-content/db-error.php and it will appear instead of the default error message. We wouldn’t be suprised if someone creates a plugin to be able to customize it within the admin panel in the not to distant future.

Download
Upgrade Instructions

Fixed Bugs
Version Changes between 2.3.1 - 2.3.2

It won’t be long until 2.4 is out and we have to do it all again. Just make sure you have a full backup of all the files and the database before upgrading. This will save you alot of frustration in the event something goes wrong in the process.

It’s a huge part of WordPress, yet not many have delved into creating custom backends for the WordPress Admin. This is an area we would love to see more people working on, there’s definitely room for improvements.

Here is a list of some of the WordPress Admin Themes available to download Wordpress admin themes:

As you know, we love WordPress and so does our Sponsor, Wordpress freelancer Adii Pienaar who has come a long way in a short time. Adii a rising light in WordPress/blogging circles has developed an inspiring website packed with useful information and some great interviews, with amongst others, Mr WordPress himself Matt Mullenwag.

You can tell by Adii’s commitment and the quality of the content on his website that he’s a determined & focused person who is definitely going places. Adii’s blog, as well as being refreshingly honest, is an integral aspect of his long term business strategy and a promotional tool that helps to generate traffic and potential client’s to his site.

Adii has a particular penchant for creative and fresh business ideas and as well as his custom made WordPress themes, he is currently developing premium Wordpress magazine style themes that you can check out here. The feedback on these new magazine style themes has been very positive and its not hard to see why. They are professional and sleek and definitely the way forward for Wordpress bloggers and designers.

If your an aspiring WordPress Developer you wont go far wrong in following Adii’s personal blog, which reads as a time-line of his progress over the last 12 months.

http://adii.co.za/

You have worked hard on designing and putting together a free theme to release to the community but where do you advertise it to make sure it gets maximum exposure? We have compiled an extensive list of sites that list free WordPress themes that you can submit to:

 

http://wpthemesplugin.com/
http://freewpthemes.info/
http://themeboss.com
http://themes.blogflux.com/
http://themes.mygreencorner.com/
http://themes-wp.com
http://wptemplates.org/
http://www.bloggeries.com/forum/
http://www.bloggingthemes.com/
http://www.forum.easywordpress.com/
http://www.freewordpressthemes.com
http://www.fresheezy.com
http://www.templates-free.com/wordpress-themes/
http://www.themebot.com
http://www.themes.iwebnet.org
http://www.themes.rock-kitty.net
http://www.themesbase.com
http://www.themevibes.com
http://www.veckd.com
http://www.web2feel.com
http://www.wordpressthemebase.com/
http://www.wpskins.org/
http://www.wpsnap.com
http://www.wpthemesfree.com/

We have seen some amazing things done with WordPress since running We Love WP and this is right up there, Tim Wilson from tvwonline.net Has integrated a WordPress Backend with a Flash front end. Tim has also released his XML Object Script called Press Connect with a guide on how you can do this aswell.

“PressConnect is a PHP Script I have developed to connect my Flash

Website to my Wordpress Content.

The Code intergrates the Database and Returns Posts, Pages, Categories, and Creates Menus in XML”

You will still need to create your own flash and WordPress sites, this script will help you integrate them together.

We have been playing with this for a couple of weeks now in our spare time, and we think it’s fantastic. Great work Tim.

This is a Windows Guide to setting up a localhost server with xampp, to develop WordPress offline. Why might you want to do this? Because you make changes much quicker, theres no need to use FTP, you can keep your favourite text editor open, hit save - refresh your browser and see the changes instantly.

Full instructions after the break.

Here’s a video from the old bookmark section. A little cheesy but still entertaining. Enjoy!

So your fed up with the over-used feedburner chicklet, we were as well so we went in hunt for alternatives, and here’s a couple of the best methods we found:

With PHP, this should work for any site using PHP and feedburner:

Place the following code in your template before where you want to display the count. This will get your feedcount from feedburner. Replace rss4real with the name of your feedburner feed.

//get cool feedburner count
$whaturl=”http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=rss4real”;

//Initialize the Curl session
$ch = curl_init();

//Set curl to return the data instead of printing it to the browser.
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
//Set the URL
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $whaturl);
//Execute the fetch
$data = curl_exec($ch);
//Close the connection
curl_close($ch);

$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
$fb = $xml->feed->entry['circulation'];

//end get cool feedburner count
?>
Now we’ve got your feedcount in a variable called $fb. Wherever you want to output your feedcount simply drop in the following code:

This method is by 45n5.com.

Another way the lazy-ish way is the feed count plugin by: mapelli for WordPress users. It’s easy to install and easy to customise with CSS, viewthe link for full details.

Ok now you know how to display your feedcount with plain text, you might want to add an rss icon near it. Here are some good resources:

Feed Icons
Glass Style Icons
3D RSS Icons
Circle RSS Icons
Nyssa Brown 3D RSS Icon Pack

If you know of any better methods, or other RSS Icon resources worthy of mention, let us know in the comments.

Random bits latest Podcast has an interview with lead WordPress Developer Matthew Mullenweg. They discuss the Theme Marketplace, the next version of WordPress (2.4 now delayed for a month). Some of Automattic’s plans and it covers several other related topics, definitely worth a listen for anyone interested in WordPress. We also reccomend several other of the podcasts from Random bits including an interview with Alex King (Developer of several popular WordPress plugins and themes).

Another WordPress podcast worth checking out is the unnofficial WordPress Podcast.

We recently posted about a WordPress help sheet, this seemed to get alot of attention from around the blogosphere. While idling in #WordPress on freenode.net (IRC) I stumbled another help sheet released by headzoo, it contains more functions than the previous help/cheat sheet posted and theres an additional one for plugin developers aswell as theme developers, there even the perfect size for setting as your wallpaper :P.

QUICK UPDATE (21/11/07): New site is live, theres still a few tweaks that need to be made. If you notice any errors, let us know in the comments and we will have them fixed asap. We have been reluctant to add many new sites or blog posts until this design was ready. so expect a flurry of updates over the coming days

We have been in the labs designing theme after theme for the last two weeks. We have a bunch of new high quality free themes for release. As well as a brand new design for welovewp. We finally settled on a design we really like and it’s going to be coded by next weekend. There’s a new addition of a homepage this will show the most recent entries as-well as the most recent blog on the front page. We have done away with the random post for now. Usability should be better. There’s some nice new features. In the mean time there is a massive backlog of submissions we need to get up asap.