Today is Unofficial International WordPress Day, an event sponsored by WPCandy.com that is being used as a way to show appreciation to Automattic. If you are a WordPress lover, the folks over at WPCandy are inviting you to post about WordPress today! (e.g. why you love WordPress, thanking Automattic, etc.) They’ve also prepared a giveaway and all you need to do to participate is publicly express your love for WordPress either by writing a post or leaving a comment on the official page.

Thank you WordPress and thank you Automattic!

I love WordPress because of its open source nature, its online documents, and its community. WordPress’ versatility and capabilities always amaze me. You can learn so much through its online docs and if you want to learn even more, the community is out there to help you. I hope I’ve helped a few people through this blog and I’ve also used to help people over at WPDesigner Forums, which is now dead. :/ Would it be a good idea for me to create support forums here at WPThemesGallery? What do you think?

Checkmate

CheckMate is a classic blog style template with a minimalist design packed with features and customizing options. This is one to definitely download and try out and includes a quick start guide to show you how to use some of the features.

Natural Power

Natural Power is a two column theme, widget ready, that comes with four different coloured header graphics that can easily be changed in the options panel included with the theme.

Also, the header text can easily be changed through the options page as well. You won’t find a crazy, unholy options page, but instead just two options relating to the colour and text for the header. Simple is always better in my opinion.

DarkZen

DarkZen comes with a dark header and a gray background, packed on a clean and minimalist design.

(Every now and then, I would like to write make money online posts)

TNX, pronounced “thanks”, is a text link advertising system that started only a few months ago and that already has more than 50,000 members! If you don’t know much about text link advertising, read the following paragraph:

Availability of unique and useful content on your site is definitely a must, but it does not guarantee good rank of the site in search engines. The more quality pages of different sites have links to your pages (the text of links is especially important), the higher will the rating of your site in search engines be. (source: TNX)

The main advantage of the system for publishers is that it allows them to sell links on any page of their websites, instead of just the main page. Publishers can even choose the advertisers themselves, placing only relevant links on every page of their websites. Information about this feature can be read in this thread.

The main advantage for advertisers is the price of the links and the ability to promote hundreds of keywords with just a few clicks. TNX also offers a free tool for advertisers to make paid links look natural for Google and some simple tips which help their advertisers to rank #1 in Google for highly competitive keywords. More features about the system can be found at TNX’s main page.

TNX also offers an affiliate program. When you refer a webmaster to TNX, you will receive 13.3% of all TNX points earned by that person.

Another difference is that TNX’s system is based on points. So, links are sold and bought with points instead of real currency. Joining TNX is pretty simple and you can do so through this link and you will automatically get 2,000 TNX points upon sign up. TNX also has a promotion which you get an additional 5,000 points by posting on this thread.

Overall, it seems like a good system, so you should definitely give it a try. However, if you are new to text link advertisement or don’t know much about it, I would recommend you to try to learn more about it before you start selling links on your blog or website. If used improperly, Google might penalize your blog or website, but if used properly, you could earn a good sum of money from this.

Hey everyone, I apologize for the lack of updates. It’s been a month since I wrote my last post, but it seems that not much has changed over at WPDesigner. By the way, I haven’t sold this blog and I don’t plan to anytime soon. However, Moses, founder of WPThemesPlugin, has sold his and it looks like the new owner is not doing much with it. Hopefully this won’t turn into a trend.

I’ll be honest with you, I haven’t been following too well what has been going around in the WordPress community this past few weeks, but I did pick up a few things:

• Weblog Tools Collection described 24 ways to contribute to WordPress;
• Quommunication released a new WordPress theme for videos;
• WP Elements released and added TV.Elements, which is another video theme, to his collection of amazing themes;
• Adii posted a tutorial on how to create a YouTube Video Tabber.

Another thing that I think is worth mentioning is Smashing Magazine’s post: 40 Professional Icon Sets For Free Download. Circular Icon Set by Pro Theme Design, which I wanted to mention before but didn’t, is listed in that post along with other great icon sets.

About this week, WordPress will turn 5 years old on this Tuesday, May 27th! There will be a birthday party in San Francisco and other locations.

Another version of WordPress (2.5.1) is now available for download and it includes a very important security fix. In addition to the security fix, version 2.5.1 focuses on fixing the most annoying bugs and improving performance. Here are some highlights:

• Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages.
• Better performance for those who have many categories
• Media Uploader fixes
• An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7
• Widget Administration fixes
• Various usability improvements
• Layout fixes for IE

The Live Wire Series was released last month by Premium News and it consists of three different themes: Live Wire 2.0, Live Wire Edition, and Live Wire Style. Adii worked with Mark Forrester on these themes and according to Adii, Mark was the lead creative “director” for this project.

Adii and Mark packed these themes with a lot of features and they also spent a considerable time testing and troubleshooting it prior to release. The features included are:

• Automatic Image Resizer (requires PHP GD Library to work)
• Custom Page Templates for Archives, Sitemap & Image Gallery
• Built-in Gravatar Support for Authors & Comments
• Author Profiles & Archives
• Featured news section
• Video Panel (for use with Flash videos)
• Navigation Dropdown Menu’s
• Sidebar Tabbed Box
• 2 different homepage layouts (featured section)
• Widgetized sidebars
• Integrated Banner Ad Management (easily switch this on / off)
• Integrated Flickr & Feedburner

If you want to know more about the features included, Adii wrote a few details about some of the features in his blog.

For easy customization and management, the themes have a full page of options, which are separated in three sections: General Settings, Front Page Layout, and Banner Ad Management.

On the left, it’s a screenshot that I took of all the options for you to take a look at (Click on it and zoom to make it readable). As you can see, all the options are well explained, making the options page very easy to use.

Under General Settings, you may have seen that you have the option to select a stylesheet, which is something that I still haven’t mentioned. Every theme includes 4 different color schemes! Screenshots of all the different color schemes can be found at Premium News.

Licenses

Single Licenses ($99.95) - This package is for the person who intends on using this theme on a single website. Included in this package, is the full theme with all of its features and modules. The credit link is not required to stay in tact.

• Live Wire 2.0 - Single License - Buy Now!
• Live Wire Edition - Single License - Buy Now!
• Live Wire Style - Single License - Buy Now!

Live Wire Package - Single License ($149.95) - Buy Now! - This package contains all three of the above themes and allows you to use the Live Wire Theme on 2 websites (domains) concurrently. The credit link is not required to stay in tact.

Live Wire Package - Developer’s License ($249.95) - Buy Now! - This package contains all three of the above themes and allows you to use the Live Wire Theme on unlimited websites (domains) concurrently. The credit link is not required to stay in tact.

Preview

• Live Wire 2.0
• Live Wire Edition
• Live Wire Style