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.

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

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.

I’ll be doing a mini interview with Matthew Mullenweg founding developer of WordPress soon, and decided to open it up to wpcore readers, so if you have any specific questions you would like me to ask Matt, either leave a comment with your question or email the question you would like me to ask to contact[at]wpcore[dot com].

I’ll be accepting questions for 7-14 Days from this post before interviewing Matt so get your questions in

Here are some great firefox extensions for increasing productivity for WordPress users and developers:

Codex Search addon
Adds a codex search option in firefox for quick searching

OneClick Installer for Wordpress
OneClick is a companion extension for the OneClick plugin for WordPress. It allows you to install any wordpress theme or plugin from the context menu of firefox.

WordPress Post
This extension lets you post the text you select in your browser directly to your WordPress blog.

WordPress Helper
The Firefox extension WordPress Helper helps you working with WordPress by providing useful help and tools.

Firebug
Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page…

YSlow
YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on Yahoo’s rules for high performance web sites.

IE View
Adds a tab for quickly switching a tab to use internet explorer, great for cross browser testing.

Did I miss any other useful extensions? Let me know if there is any others you think should be added to the list

Theres several options for tracking how many visitors you have on your blog from server side apps such as Awstats and Webalizer, to stand alone apps such as haveamint (for a $30 premium), aswell as integrated stats from google analytics. Down to plugins such as Wass Up.

On most of my sites I use a combination of Awstats, Mint and Google Analytics. Currently on WP Core I only use the Wass Up plugin.

I just got wind of a new stats app called Woopra Apparently debut at the recent WordCamp dallas. Just from checking the screenshot and demo’s this looks like a fantastic application and a possible mint killer?

At the moment it’s in beta and invite only. If anyone is in the beta program and would be kind enough to send me an invite to contact [at] wpcore [dot com] So I could give it a more thourough review that would be greatly appreciated.

Geekbrief.tv have a nice video review up of Woopra:

http://www.geekbrief.tv/introducing-woopra-youre-gonna-want-it

Stating the obvious here, but as you can see I just switched to a custom Design for WP Core. This theme is actually a filler while another design is being worked on. I’ll probably release this one for free once that one is ready