The next upgrade will be adding the author pages which should be added shortly

The plugin adds a lot of extra options to your post editor including the ability to:

• Search your blog for posts, edit them or insert links to them into the current post
• Insert Flickr Images
• Insert Youtube videos
• Search and link to Wikipedia
• Search Google
• Search News
• Google Blog Search
• Insert a Google Map

Once installed, you will have a new Insights toolbar in your post editor, which you can use to add Flickr images, youtube videos and more.

Here is an example of how you can add a Flickr image to your blog post:

Adding a YouTube video:

You can see more screenshots at Vladimirs blog.

I think Insights is a great plugin and I am sure many of you will find useful. I recommend checking it out

Link : Insights

I came across a new plugin today from Thomas Teisberg called WP Chameleon. It’s a simple plugin which lets your readers choose which colour to view your blog in. You can see an example of this in action at Linux Loop

Please note that this plugin requires the visitor to have javascript enabled. If it is disabled they will simply see the default theme colour.

Link : WP Chameleon

The settings for the contact form (address to send the email to, where to redirect eg. a thank you page, and the subject line for th email) are all configurable in the theme options page to save you looking through the PHP.

We’ve also added the new WordPress 2.8 template tag body_class() which adds a number of classes to the body tag to allow you to control the styling of different pages depending on certain criteria.

We’ll be updating our Profectus and Invictus themes later this week. The Artemis theme already comes with these pages. We’re also going to be adding single and multi authors page templates to allow you to easily create an author page for your blog with your profile data on it, and for multi author sites, a list of their posts as well.

If there are any other page templates that you’d like to see available please let us know and we’ll do our best to add them.

Before being accepted we had to provide WordPress with a haiku, a strange request but one which we obviously adhered to. Here is our submission:

Themes for everyone,
Functional yet Beautiful,
One Price For Them All

What do you think of it? Considering I have the poetry skills of a drunk snail, I’m quite impressed that my haiku was accepted

Kevin

Yesterday a vulnerability was discovered: a specially crafted URL could be requested that would allow an attacker to bypass a security check to verify a user requested a password reset. As a result, the first account without a key in the database (usually the admin account) would have its password reset and a new password would be emailed to the account owner. This doesn’t allow remote access, but it is very annoying.

If you are using 2.7+ then you should be able to update WordPress directly from your admin area. If you are using an older version, I recommend downloading and installing the latest release.

Better safe than sorry!

Kevin

For the next 3 days membership prices will drop to:

• 3 months membership – $49 $29 $20
• 6 months membership – $79 $49 $35
• 12 months membership – $99 $69 $50

With 4 themes in our collection that works out at $5 per theme with our 3 month membership package however we are planning on releasing our 5th theme within the next few weeks and our 6th theme shortly afterwards so you really are getting great value with this promotion.

Please note, this promotion is only valid today, tomorrow and Friday. On Saturday 1st August prices will increase to $49 for a 3 month membership, $79 for 6 months and $99 for 12 months. So I encourage you all to take advantage of this great promotion before it’s too late!

If you have any questions about any of our themes please let us know

Kevin

This is where child themes come in handy. The main theme is in its own theme directory as usual, this is the parent theme, and then your modifications sit in a separate theme directory and will override the parent theme where necessary. This way if you just want to change the styles or perhaps the way the header is displayed, you just copy over the files you wish to modify, change those and the original theme stays intact in the parent directory.

As with any theme, a child theme will always need a style.css file with the typical header to specify the theme details, plus one extra line to tell WordPress what its parent theme is e.g.

/*
Theme Name: Blog Themes Club
Theme URI: http://www.blogthemesclub.com/
Description: Child Theme built off Profectus
Version: 1.0
Author: BTC
Author URI: http://www.blogthemesclub.com/
Template: Profectus
*/

This, as you can see, is the theme details for the theme on Blog Themes Club. We’ve got our Profectus theme as the parent theme and then our own child theme to override certain sections.

We need one extra line in this style.css file to import all the styles from the parent theme as these do not get imported over by default. This is a standard CSS import line i.e.

@import url("../Profectus/style.css");

Then any additional styles for your theme can just go below all of this, along with anything you want to override in the parent styles. To override code in one of the theme files simply copy the file over to your child theme and make your changes in that. WordPress will automatically look for the files in the child theme before then going to the parent theme.

Of course if you update a theme file that gets updated in an upgrade then you will need to copy those updates over, but this is a much simpler way to keep your changes separate and to be clear on what files you have changed and what you haven’t.

Unfortunately, by default WordPress lists all pages when you search a blog. Which means that pages which are hidden can be found by visitors by accident.

Thankfully, this is a plugin which can help with this. Simply Exclude lets you exclude pages, posts and categories from search results. It adds an option underneath every post and page to exclude it from the search archives.

The plugin also allows you to exclude posts from the home page of your blog, from archive links and even from your RSS feed.

If you are looking for a way of removing a post or page from a certain area of your site (without actually removing the article itself), I recommend checking this plugin out

Link : Simply Exclude

Here are some of the major changes :

• Certain themes were calling get_categories() in such a way that it would fail in 2.8. 2.8.1 works around this so these themes won’t have to change.
• Dashboard memory usage is reduced. Some people were running out of memory when loading the dashboard, resulting in an incomplete page.
• The automatic upgrade no longer accidentally deletes files when cleaning up from a failed upgrade.
• A problem where the rich text editor wasn’t being loaded due to compression issues has been worked around.
• Extra security has been put in place to better protect you from plugins that do not do explicit permission checks.
• Translation of role names fixed.
• wp_page_menu() defaults to sorting by the user specified menu order rather than the page title.
• Upload error messages are now correctly reported.
• Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed.
• Styling glitch in the plugin editor fixed.
• SSH2 filesystem requirements updated.
• Switched back to curl as the default transport.
• Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload.
• Stricter inline style sanitization.
• Stricter menu security.
• Disabled code highlighting due to browser incompatibilities.
• RTL layout fixes.

You can download the latest version through your blogs admin area or directly from the link below.

Link : Download WordPress 2.8.1