That’s right the theme in use on wpcore.com (simply named Rough) has now been released for free and is available to download from Blogalized.com under a Creative Commons License.

More Info & Download

Enjoy

Quick roundup of WordPress related stuff’s that happened this month in no particular order:

Weblog tools collection announced the second plugin competition.

WordPress celebrated it’s 5th ‘Birthday’ on the 25th May.

WordPress Garage wrote an interesting post about WordPress being a CPU Hog

Hack WordPress wrote a tutorial on featuring posts from specific categories

Lester Chan updated a bunch of his plugins

Matt updated his blog design with a beautiful new layout

& Woopra still hasn’t activated my analytics account.

Ozh has done it again, this time he has a created a fantastic plugin that uses colourlovers API to let you modify the colors of your WordPress admin. You can even generate a random pallette, modify and rotate colors until your hearts content and then save multiple styles.

Best of all anyone can use it without touching a line of code! Get the full low down and 3 minute video of the plugin in action HERE

I want to know what you the readers think makes a great theme. What do you look for in free and premium themes? Is there a specific theme style you have been looking for but hasn’t been covered. What elements make a great theme?

Help me create your ideal theme all you have to do is participate by sending me your suggestions. It’s that simple

Wordcamp uk is progressing nicely with a confirmed date of 19th-20th July in Birmingham. Now it’s just a matter of picking a venue.

From Automattic Inc Sam Bauers will be attending and discussing WordPress scaling and integrating bbpress into your blog.

If your interested in attending or participating here are some useful links:
Official Site
Wordcamp UK blog
Wordcamp Mailing List
Wordcamp UK Wiki

Also if anyone from Bristol is attending and wants to car share please let me know.

“internet is serious business”

So WordPress 2.5 has been out for a few weeks now, have you taken the plunge and upgraded yet? Well if you still haven’t there’s a useful plugin that will do it for you automatically. If you use a lot of plugins it’s always a good idea to test them on a separate installation. Failing that Backup, Backup & Backup your blog before proceeding.

WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin

Or if you prefer to do it manually there’s a simple guide here:

Upgrade Guide

If you didn’t backup and are now experiencing problems/issues with your install try the support forums:

Support Forums

Finally if your feeling brave you might want to consider switching to the SVN. WP Core is currently running a version of 2.6-bleeding.

Subversion Access

Smashing Magazine has released some beautifull looking RSS Icons for freshening up your blog.

Great for users wanting a unique theme but lacking the knowledge in coding or design skills, I have compiled a list of all the WordPress Theme Generators I could find:

WP Pal

WP Pal looks very impressive unlike the others this one has multiple theme layouts to choose from that you can use as your base theme to begin customising. With options of suggesting additional themes.

WP Theme Gen

Possibly the first WP Theme Generator, comes with a simple base theme to get started with many options for customising, well laid out and very easy to follow.

WordPress Theme Gen
This one is a stand alone application for Windows, I personally haven’t tried it yet, but it looks very interesting.

Out of the above I’m most impressed by WP Pal, in the fact you can choose from multiple layouts for your base theme, although limited at the moment, once they get the ball rolling this could be an invaluable source for creating quick and easy custom themes for the novice.

Matt appeared on the Best Damn Tech Show, they discuss Microsoft, Open Source and some random s^%t.