Whoa! No need to get excited! WordPress 3.0 hasn’t been released yet.

But, here is a sneak preview of the features that will be included in the upcoming release of WordPress on May 1, 2010. The expected features are pretty cool as they will make an already robust CMS more effective and efficient.

Wordpress Merged with WP-MU

As most of us already know that WordPress MU allows users to run multiple sites under one installation. In the upcoming release, WordPress MU will be merged into the WordPress Core. So, from now on, you will be able to run more than one site/blog from a single installation of WordPress. Here is a screenshot of what to expect :-

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Please welcome a brand new Premium WordPress theme from Blog Oh! Blog – Vanilla Sky! Vanilla Sky is a magazine styled theme created specially for bloggers who want to give their blog a non-standard website look. The theme sports a sleek color combination (black-blue-gray) which will fit almost any kind of blog and also has a very unique and original layout.

Vanilla Sky’s navigation menu arranges your pages & sub-pages into a smooth dropdown menu for easy accessibility. The dropdown menu is unobtrusive and integrates into the theme nicely.

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I’m glad to announce an all new WordPress theme from Blog Oh! Blog called Portfolio Press. This is a dark-colored theme suitable for anyone who wants to create a quick portfolio or wants to showcase his work through WordPress. The theme is fully CSS/XHTML validated, WordPress 2.6+ ready and comes with easy to modify code. The comments are nicely designed with Gravatar functionality.

The theme is very small in size (58Kb only) and loads very quickly. It is also SEO optimized and has been tested with Firefox, IE6, IE7 and Opera browsers.
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If you have allowed open registration for your blog readers, you might want to consider upgrading to the latest version of WordPress – 2.6.2. This new release of WordPress fixes some vulnerabilities and exploits which can be used by attackers.

Here is what WordPress blog says about this exploit :-

With open registration enabled, it is possible in WordPress versions 2.6.1 and earlier to craft a username such that it will allow resetting another user’s password to a randomly generated password. The randomly generated password is not disclosed to the attacker, so this problem by itself is annoying but not a security exploit. However, this attack coupled with a weakness in the random number seeding in mt_rand() could be used to predict the randomly generated password.

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Today I’ll teach you how top create tooltips purely using Cascading Style Sheets(CSS). Tooltips are basically little blocks of information that are used to inform users about certain attributes of your website elements. This is a tooltip example!Click on this link to see how a tooltip looks like.

Most tooltips are created with the help of javascript or some other programming languages. This can be cumbersome because not everyone wants to learn Javascript. But CSS tooltips are easy to create and can be loaded quickly without any delay.

Here is what you have to do:-

1. Make a blank HTML file and paste the following text in the BODY part :-

<a href="#" class="tooltip"><span>This is a pure CSS tooltip!</span>Tooltip 1</a>

This is the HTML part where we create a hyperlink with the text Tooltip1. In the next step, we are going to hide the text within the span tags which will serve as the tooltip text.
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Displaying Gravatars in comments

To refresh your memory, Gravatars are little user images from Gravatar.com that are displayed against your comments in the theme (if the theme is built to support Gravatars). A lot of WordPress themes are built without the support of Gravatars. So, here is some help for you to add Gravatars in your theme. Open up your comments.php file from the theme folder. Find this piece of code :-

< ?php comment_text() ?>

Replace the above code with the following code :-

<div class="gravs">
< ?php if (get_bloginfo('version')>=2.5)
echo get_avatar( $comment->comment_author_email, $size = '50', $comment->comment_author_link);?>
< ?php comment_text() ?>
</div>
<br clear="all" />

The above code will display the Gravatars. Now let us add some CSS to the style.css file for your theme.

.gravs {margin-top:20px;}
.avatar {float:left; margin-right:5px; margin-bottom:5px; padding:3px; border:1px solid #999999;}

When you check your theme again, you will see the Gravatar images against your comments.
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Theme Authenticity Checker

Scan all of your theme files for potentially malicious or unwanted code. Be aware of advertisements or dangerous JavaScript inserted into legitimate themes by third party theme download sites.

List Category Posts

List Category Posts is a simple WordPress plugin which allows you to list some posts from a category into a post/page using [catlist=ID], where ID stands for the Category Id.

Expanding Text Plugin

This WordPress plugin allows you to create sections of text in your post or page which expand/collapse when clicked on. You simply wrap the special tags around your text, and set the ‘expand link’ (the link visitors click on to show the text).

Actionable

Actionable allows the creation of a categroized list of action items for users to check off and track. It was originally developed for Share 350.0 – a plan for regional sustainability to help people track their actions and efforts to create a sustainable community. Read more

A lot of WordPress theme designers have asked me if they can submit their own wordpress themes to Blog Oh! Blog for free distribution. From now on, I have decided to accept public submissions. If you are a theme designer, you can contact me and tell me about your theme. If the theme is really good and I like it, it will be announced on Blog Oh! Blog. Here are some requirements which your themes need to incorporate to be eligible for selection.

• The theme should be CSS/XHTML validated (I will accept exceptions if there is a proper reason).
• The theme should be original and unique.
• You can only have your own website’s link in the footer. No sponsor links.
• The theme should include all the required files as per the WordPress theme format.
• You cannot sell the theme once its uploaded for free download.

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Many of you may already know all about RSS but a lot of Internet surfers and newly established bloggers are still not familiar with the three-letter acronym. In order to make life easier for them, here is a detailed article that explains the word. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary; syndicating means republishing an article that comes from another source such as a website.

RSS is a means of publicizing updates about websites. It may or may not include a summary and photos of the latest posting. But those that provide summaries (thus Rich Site Summary) allow users to skim through the article so that they could decide later on if they want to access the website source. The RSS feed usually contains the title of the update originating from the website. It is also usually the link to the website source.
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Do you publish daily on your blog? Here is a new WordPress theme from Blog Oh! Blog to help you in your blogging adventures. The new theme is called “DailyPress” and comes with widget-ready sidebars, tabbed content, banner ads, minimalistic color scheme and social bookmarking options. The theme is compatible with all versions of WordPress including the latest 2.6 version and has been tested with Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera.

I have included the logo.psd file with this theme so that you can edit it and make your own logo instead of the default one. The 125×125 banner ads are controlled separately through a php file called :- ad250×250.php
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