The focus for this release was making WordPress faster and lighter. The first thing you’ll notice when you log in to 3.2 is a refreshed dashboard design that tightens the typography, design, and code behind the admin. If you’re starting a new blog, you’ll also appreciate the fully HTML5 new Twenty Eleven theme, fulfilling our plan to replace the default theme every year. Start writing your first post in our redesigned post editor and venture to the full-screen button in the editing toolbar to enter the new distraction-free writing or zen mode, my personal favorite feature of the release. All of the widgets, menus, buttons, and interface elements fade away to allow you to compose and edit your thoughts in a completely clean environment conducive to writing, but when your mouse strays to the top of the screen your most-used shortcuts are right there where you need them.

Under the hood there have been a number of improvements, not the least of which is the streamlining enabled by our previously announced plan of retiring support for PHP4, older versions of MySQL, and legacy browsers like IE6, which allows us to take advantage of more features enabled by new technologies. The admin bar has a few more shortcuts to your most commonly-used actions. On the comment moderation screen, the new approve & reply feature speeds up your conversation management. You’ll notice in your first update after 3.2 that we’ll only be updating the files that have changed with each new release instead of every file in your WordPress installation, which makes updates significantly faster on all hosting platforms. There are also some fun new theme features shown off by Twenty Eleven, like the ability to have multiple rotating header images to highlight all of your favorite photos.

This new version looks amazing so far. The only problem I found was a message after I updated saying that I was running an old version of explorer (Image above). Quite strange, since I’m using the last version of Internet Explorer.

1) Blog-O-Folio

Blog-O-Folio is a free 2 column WordPress Theme suitable for any and all of your corporate, portfolio or personal blog needs. With a wide variety of tunable theme options and functionality to merge your portfolio with the blog, it is now ultra easy to maintain your blog and portfolio at the same time.

Download Here

2) Liquorice

A simple and clean vintage looking theme for you to build on using Google’s font API Lobster font. Custom background feature enabled.

Download Here

3) Agency

It is a magazine style theme that puts your content in a beautiful wrapper, complete with subtle page elements that is sure to add elegance to your pages.

Download Here

4) Adventure Journal

Adventure Journal is a powerful theme that lets you customize a wide variety of features from the comfort of your Dashboard – no coding required.

Download Here

           Download Theme

               Demo Theme

I designed this template in Photoshop, coded and edited it in Dreamweaver and Notepad++. Although this theme is visual attractive (which in many cases means “heavy”) it does not take a lot of resources like some other similar wordpress themes. Most of the visual attractive themes tend to be heavy for your host and slow loading for the user. Most of those themes load a lot of add-ons in their header.php, plus they have a very complex functions.php. I designed Director to be as “lite” as possible, yet visual attractive.

Many more features will be added in the next versions of Director. Some extra features like custom CSS, Analytics, Adsense and more. Custom CSS will let you modify the stylesheet and save the customization, so you don’t lose the changes when you update. Twitter, Facebook and Custom RSS can be added from the theme’s options. Enter the WordPress Dashboard, go to Appearance -> Director Options. You can also send suggestions here. This WordPress theme will be offered in Spanish (my native language) in the next few versions. Want to translate Director Theme to another language? You can contact me as well and I will add your credit (name and site) to the changelog!

Here are some stats of WpThemesPlanet first year:

20,000 downloads of Patagonia and 10,000 of Tandil

100 articles

800 approved comments

12,000 spam comments blocked by Akismet!

300 user Emails received.

450 Support emails sent.

3 Free WordPress Themes and 50 Theme Updates released.

Many theme customizations for clients of Patagonia and Tandil.

I want to thank everyone for using my themes and supporting the project. The first year is hard. Most internet projects collapse during this period. If you manage to survive the first year, you are good to go. During this period, I spent time adding content and supporting users, as well as updating and improving both themes. During the second year I want to take the whole project to the next level. Many good things will follow! Stay tuned!

Finally I want to quote a phrase from Thomas Alva Edison:

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

Never give up!

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Preview Theme

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Preview Theme

You can either install or update Patagonia and Tandil theme automatically from your dashboard. This is recommended if you didn’t change anything in the css or php files manually. Otherwise, make you sure to save your customization before upgrading.

Happy WordPressing everyone!

Creating the image

The first thing you need to do is to create the image that you want to use as favicon. Don’t make your image too complex because small detail tend to get lost when resized to a tiny 16 by 16 pixels.

If you want to easily draw your own favicon, there is a great online tool called Favicon.cc. It lets you draw your own icon while the Favicon in the browser updates in real time to reflect your changes. If you use this tool you can skip the next step as the tool will handle the conversion to .ico as well.

Converting your favicon to .ico format

If you draw your image with Photoshop or any other editor, you will need to convert your file to .ico format. Modern web browsers will generally let you get away with using a png, gif or even a jpeg for your favicon, but to be compatible with older version of internet explorer and Firefox, you’ll have to convert the image to .ico format.

To convert your image, you can also use the Favicon.cc website, only this time, click the “Import Image” button on the left side of the page and upload your image. The tool will convert your image to .ico format and let you download the final product.

Add the favicon to your site

Then make sure you store/save your favicon icon inside your WordPress Theme images folder. For example /patagonia/images/favicon.ico.

Then, assuming you save your favicon.ico file in your theme directory, add the following anywhere between the tags.

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<link rel="shortcut icon" href="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/images/favicon.ico">

Just copy that line and paste it in the header.php. In patagonia theme, you can paste this line right after the <link rel=”pingback”…> line.

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Changelog includes the following additions among other small improvements: Facebook Support was added. You can add your facebook profile and activate it from the admin panel. It will show up with Twitter and RSS. Another improvement is that options panel URLs were “sanitized” to avoid undesirable characters to display. This is to comply with the latest wordpress version security demands.

If you are upgrading Patagonia and your theme was manually customized, remember to save those changes before upgrading. WordPress will probably release a feature to make theme upgrades easier in a coming future, specially for users who customize themes. You can also update Patagonia theme automatically from your dashboard. This is recommended if you didn’t change anything in the css or php files manually.

Have a great weekend everyone!

First you create a blank page called “Blog” or whatever name you would like to use. (Dashboard -> Pages -> Add New). Then you create another page that will be your front page. I called it Parent Page for this example. Save the changes and you’re done. That is it. You will see a front page in “yourdomain.com” and your blog articles on “yourdomain.com/blog”. You can then customize your front page to fit your needs. For example, the sidebar can be removed to make it a full width page, insert tables, etc.