Wordpress has released version 2.6.5 which fixes three bugs and a security problem. With this update our attention has been brought to the fake version “2.6.4″, Wordpress has declared that there is and never will be a version 2.6.4.

You can read more on the wordpress blog at this post.

Weekly Features Post Image

As you may have noticed I have 4 weekly features on this blog which are:

• Theme of the Week
• Blog/Blogger of the Week
• Plugin of the Week
• and Site News, Link Love and Announcements

The weekly features column is devoted to any fantastic theme that I run across, great articles, magnificant plugins as well as amazing blogs & bloggers. To be featured all you have to do is simply subscribe by email or comment on any post and I will always check out your site and pick a theme to feature. Featured theme is picked by random.org and if you both subscribed and made quality comments then you’re name will be put in twice.

All the best!

This weeks Theme of The Week is “Revolution Church.” This is the theme that I am currently using on Unofficial WP School.

This theme was released by the Revolution Two website which is the brainchild of Brian of Brian Gardner.com and Jason of WPelements.com.

Here is a screenshot:

Revolution Church-ScreenShot by RevolutionTwo.com

Revolution Church comes with the following features and benefits:

• Featured Content Gallery-ready
• Widget-Ready
• Magazine-Style Layout
• 3 Columns
• Feedburner Email integrated
• Themes Options Page
• Ad-Ready
• Google-Adsense Ready (You can even replace this with other ad codes.)
• It’s Free.

There are two plugins required for the full use of Revolution Church and those plugins are Featured Content Gallery and BreadCrumbs XT which are included with the theme in a folder called “Plugins.”

What do you think of this theme and which theme do you think I should write about next week?

And coming up posts-wise, I will be explaining how to install themes and plugins, how to sign up for Entrecard, as well as a post on the pros and cons of Entrecard. I am also planning to do a post on how to create a plugin so look forward to that.

Throughout the blogosphere there have been ramblings about Blogging Idol. To qualify you must have less then 2000 subscribers and you can find more information on the Blogging Idol posts.

What other articles would you like to see?

This weeks featured plugin is called “CommentLuv.”

CommentLuv was developed by Andy Baily who blogs at FiddyP as well as the official CommentLuv website.

CommentLuv enables the owner of a blog to allow their commentators last blog post to be displayed underneath their comments. I have this installed on almost all my blogs, including this one. For added functionality, you can register on the CommentLuv website and receive stats on the comment love that you have both given or received. There is also an option to enable click tracking so you can see how many times that link was clicked.

The plugin also autoconfigures itself so all you really need to do is fill out the settings page.

Visit the about page of commentluv for more information on configurations.

Your commentluv id is made available on the settings page of the commentluv website when you are logged in.

Many beginner bloggers may have no idea how to install Wordpress so these articles would be beneficial to read.

How to install via FTP
How to install via Fantastico.

For beginners, I would recommend installing via Fantastico. (Please be ware that there may be some problems with this, so please do your best to learn the manual installation of Wordpress! There will be less problems if you do-Thanks to the commentators for sharing their issues with Fantastico. I have never had any problems so it helped to see the side of people who have had problems with it.).

Free themes are nice but it is good to have a premium theme because there may be less people using that theme. Also, some premium themes come with support so you an figure out how to use it.
Listed below is the prize list and the sponsors. To get a chance to win all you need to do is either comment on the official contest post or blog about it with links to the contest post, and you must also list the prizes with all the links intact. For a better chance at winning, do both!
So visit Hack Wordpress, and enter for a chance to win a premium theme! Best of luck!

• 6 Month Developer Subscription - The winner of this prize will receive a 6 month developer subscription to Woo Themes (Courtesy of the Adii and the Woo Themes team)
• 2008 Theme Club Subscription - The winner of this prize will receive a copy of all themes released by iThemes in 2008, valued at over $1400.00 (Courtesy of Cory Miller of iThemes)
• 3 Revolution Single-Use Licenses - All 3 winners will get their choice of which Revolution theme they want their license to be for. (Courtesy of Brian Gardner of Revolution Themes)
• 5 One Theme Single-Use Licenses - All 5 winners will receive a webmaster (single-use) license of the extremely popular One Theme (Courtesy of Lee Cooper and Karl Forshaw of One Theme).
• 2 Gabfire Single-Use Licenses, 2 Multiple-Use Licenses, and 2 Developer’s Licenses - Winners will have a choice of which of Mehmet’s 3 different themes you would like your license to be for. (Courtesy of Mehmet of Gabfire Themes)
• 2 TV Elements Single-Use Licenses - Winners will get a single-use copy of the extremely popular TV Elements video theme. (Courtesy of Jason of Press 75)

What prize would you like to win? As for me, I am vying for the WooThemes club membership.

The way I explained it to my classmate was that “it is like a diary or journal except that anyone can read it.” But there is actually a bit more to it then that, although starting an online journal is a great start for wetting your toes in the blogging ocean.

Unlike conventional websites, blogs have archives which display all your posts for certain periods. They will usually have comments after each post where people add to the discussion or voice their opinions.

While blogs may be likened to online journals, they aren’t personal. You need to be more wary about what you write and who you write about.
Here is a video that can explain what a blog is in simpler terms:

Blogging isn’t too scary and there are plenty of blogs designed to help you such as this one.

Sound Off
Is there anything else you would like to know about blogging and blogs?

Then go to Settings>Feedburner and enter your feedburner URl which is usually http://feeds.feedburner.com/YOURFEEDTITLE, click “Save” and you’ll be all set! If you don’t know how to install plugins yet, stay tuned because in my next post I will be explaining the different ways to install plugins.

If your theme isn’t feed-ready, which basically means that it doesn’t have a place to place your feed you can simple add in the RSS widget by going to Design>Widgets and click “add” on the blue box that says “RSS”. You may need to add in other widgets that get erased by the widget override.

To put in the email subscription form go to the same place that you activated your email subscriptions and take the code you want and put it into a “Text Widget”. You should be ready to go, but of course there are ways to customize the look og your email subscription form, but that is a post for another time.

Burning Your Feed

First off, sign into Feedburner with your username and password. Once you are logged in, you will see the My Feeds page, there should be a textbox with bold words over it stating something along the lines of “Burn Your Feed”, this is where you will be burning your feed.

In the textbox, enter your blogs feed URL, for Wordpress this is most often, “http://www.yourblogurl.com/feed”, you can also just enter the URL of your blog and Feedburner will find it for you. If your blog doesn’t have any posts yet then there may be some difficulties. If you have at least one post, then things should be fine.

Unless you are a podcaster, just ignore the tickbox but if you are a podcaster, click it so that a checkmark appears in the box. After all that click “Next“.

This will take you to a screen where you can name your Feed and set up the url. All thats left to do for the burning process is to click “Activate Feed”.

After that you can check out the various services, but all you will really need is the Feedburner email subscriptions.

Setting Up Email Subscriptions

Setting up email subscriptions with Feedburner is actually quite simple. On your My Feeds page, there should know be a link to your Feeds dashboard. Its not hard to miss as the link is the title of your feed. Click on it and you should be on a page with tabs such as “Analyze, Optimize, Publicize, etc“.

To activate your feeds email subscriptions, click on “Publicize“, on the site there will be a menu titled “Services“, click on “Email Subscriptions“.

This will open up a page where you can choose the service you want to use. I recommend that you choose the Feedburner one, then click “Activate“. This service requires a valid email address be used, if you didn’t enter a valid email address you can do this through the “My Account” page.

You can choose which language you want to use from the drop down box, and then copy and paste the HTML output it gives you. You can do this in a text widget or by editing the sidebar, in a later post, I will show you the ways you can do this. I will also share with you ways that you can modify the form so that it looks nice.

Sound Off
Do you have email subscriptions set up on your blog? Would this tutorial be better if I added a video?