New features in this WordPress release include a new default theme called “Twenty Ten”. Let me add that it really looks like “Patagonia” Theme, so I guess less people are going to use my theme, time to “adapt and change” I guess. But in the other hand I can feel proud to work as inspiration to whoever designed Twenty Ten.

Theme developers have new APIs that allow them to easily implement custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus (no more file editing), post types, and taxonomies. Developers and network admins will appreciate the long-awaited merge of MU and WordPress, creating the new multi-site functionality which makes it possible to run one blog or ten million from the same installation. Also, I really don’t understand why would they merge WpMu into WordPress, since most people are going to use normal WordPress anyways.

It’s one of the most exciting features in the coming WordPress 3.0. It gives you full control over your site’s navigation menus. Users can easily drag and drop items, to create menus that include any mixture of links to internal pages, external URLs, categories, basically a customized widget. Then you can embed these custom menus as a widget, in the sidebar, footer, etc.

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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

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!

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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!

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WordPress is no longer known as “just a blogging platform”. The job of theme designers is to style WordPress for everyone and to make Internet sites look great and easy to browse. Amazing Free and Premium WordPress themes will be released in 2010. Version 1.6.6 of Patagonia includes excerpts in the category and tags pages which shows a resume of each post and a link to the full article.

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. Another great news is that I have partenerd with one of my colleagues to start offering free blog hosting to my theme users, but I will release this via Twitter and RSS first, so make sure to subscribe to the RSS and Twitter. Wish you a great start of 2010! Happy blogging!

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.