Trackbacks are the messages displayed in the comments list whenever another blog links back to one of your posts. If you use trackbacks on your blog, it is best if they are not mixed with the comments. The comments are a conversation between between real people. Having machine-generated links in the middle of that will only serve to disrupt the conversations.

ProBlogDesign has shared a method that will lift out all of the trackbacks, and then display them as a numbered list after the list of comments is finished. Once you have this done, customizing the trackbacks to appear however you want them to is simple.

P.S. Thank you Eli from Photoshopstar letting me know this lovely WordPress trick.

Source: Separating Trackbacks from Comments

How do you get your new site in front of thousands of people? The best and easiest way is to get featured on CSS galleries. Being featured on CSS galleries can give you traffic increases of up to 5,000 uniques a day that last for several days. Once the initial spike ends, you will continue to see several hundred visits a day. CSS galleries are quickly becoming one of the first places professionals look when trying to find talented web designers.

You could randomly submit your site to one gallery and more than likely end up on many more. However, if you take a more structured approach to your submitting, you end up getting featured on more sites. There are some galleries that want to be the first to feature you, and probably won’t feature you if you have already been seen on too many other sites. The key is to submit and get listed on these first, then follow with the less picky sites. DesignReviver has a great list of CSS galleries and the order of submitting it, please view Promote Yourself Through CSS Galleries.

Source: Promote Yourself Through CSS Galleries

A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times sound interesting? WordPress 2.5 will remain familiar to seasoned users while improving the experience for everyone. This isn’t just a fresh coat of paint, it’s very organized so that you can forget about the software and focus on your own creative pursuits. Here is a sneak peek of WordPress 2.5.

With the new design, the number of navigation options are cut in half, separating the primary functions (writing, managing posts and pages, editing the blog’s design, and managing comments) from secondary functions. This presents information at a more comfortable pace, revealing only the information that’s necessary. Everything you need is still there — just better organized.

The new write screen only displays the information that you’ll use most often. It displays the most common fields in a way that makes posting incredibly easy. Additional options are hidden away until you need them. The new Write screen anticipates the natural flow of the way you write, and is smart enough to remember the way you left it so that your preferred writing environment is always quickly available. The new visual editor even has a handy full-screen mode to help block out distractions while composing your newest post.

The Manage screens have been redesigned and unified so that now, managing your pages, posts, media, and comments all use similar, consistent interfaces. I am really looking forward to use WordPress 2.5.

Source: WordPress 2.5 Sneak Peek

Astereostudio has released his first Premium WordPress Theme titled simply “Market“. Market allows you to easily run your own Wordpress powered marketplace. There are many custom fields do much of the work for you – from setting a price to including that price, the name of the product, and other info and sending it all to Paypal for you. The theme can also easily be used as a way to showcase a portfolio as well. Below are some of the features found in this theme.

• Function over form – The market theme was designed to focus on its functionality as opposed to its design. The theme is intended to be customized to meet the needs of its specific store, so the design may seem fairly boring at first. But, with the power of css, you can do a lot with it.
• Hassle free integration – Using your admin email as specified in the Wordpress settings the buy now button will forward all payments to you.
• Custom fields working hard for you – The theme uses multiple custom fields including one for a large product image, additional product images, price, and specs.
• Thumbnail Generator – Code included and setup for you so thumbnails are all generated at the right sizes.
• Fancyzoom for thumbnail pop-ups – Fancyzoom is in use for product thumbnails on the single post / product view page.
• Multi-Pack Downloads – Download the standard Market theme install or a few other custom packages, such as one with the “buy now” option replaced with a “add to cart” option powered by FatFreeCart.

Market is available for just $40 USD in the form of a standard license. A Developers License is also available for $120 USD. Now, Astereostudio is very kind to give away 2 copies of Market standard license to us. All you have to do is leaving a comment under this post and tell us the reason you like using WordPress, and then you would have a chance of winning one of the 2 copies of Market Wordpress Theme immediately. The winners will be announced on 31th March 2008.

P.S. The Market theme now has a affiliate program with extremely competitive payouts of 50% per sale! This works on both the Standard License and the Developers License.

When we are designing and coding our blog’s template, it is always good to seperate the representation from the content using CSS. There are a lot of CSS tricks we have to learn. However, I found 8 Premium One Line CSS Tips by CSS Globe particular useful. It shows us how to:

1. Vertical centering with line-height
2. Prevent oversized content to break fixed width floated layouts
3. Prevent line breaks in links
4. Always show Firefox scrollbar
5. Centering block elements horizontally
6. Remove vertical textarea scrollbar in IE
7. Force page breaks when printing your document
8. Remove active link borders

Source: 8 Premium One Line Css Tips

ThemeShaper has asked 11 people who have committed to thinking creatively about WordPress themes and what they mean. These are some of the people who will carry and lead WordPress theming into 3.0 and beyond. Some of these people will set the agenda for the future of WordPress themes. And this is what they think The Future of WordPress Themes will look like.

The WordPress platform has a bright future. And that future needs to be themed. Premium WordPress theme designers, Web Developers building custom themes and enthusiasts releasing free themes are going to help change WordPress in the next year—just like they did last year and the year before that. Whatever the future holds it’s going to be exciting.

Source: The Future of WordPress Themes

WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms, is capable of being more than just a blog platform. It’s capable of being a full-blown CMS (Content Management System). As someone who has both written small, custom CMSes from scratch as well as evaluated million-dollar professional CMSes for large corporations, WordPress’ robustness never ceases to amaze us.

WordPress has a lot of community support, free themes and plugins, and is relatively easy to customize or to find someone who can for a fair price. Performancing has presented us 48 Unique Ways WordPress can be used.

Source: 48 Unique Ways To Use WordPress

You have a blog. You compose a new post. You click Publish and lean back to admire your work. Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web. Within minutes, if you’ve written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of bots will get the word out to anyone remotely interested, from fellow bloggers to corporate marketers.

“You just need to know how to type,” says Matthew Hurst, an artificial intelligence researcher who studies this ecosystem at Microsoft Live Labs. WIRED has presented us how the whole process goes down during the big game called The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits — to You.

Source: The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits — to You

WPDesigner has just launched a $5 Premium WordPress Themes Club. You pay $5 per year for unlimited access and downloads. Each year, you are guaranteed to have at least 12 themes. You may use your club themes on as many sites as you wish including your clients’ sites. There’s no copyright or credit removal to purchase or add on to the $5. You pay $5 for the whole year. The club themes come without copyright labels or links.

And also, you can also gain access to the forum and themes support. The quality of the themes are so good, you can have a look at the first released theme called “Gossip WordPress Theme“. What are you asking for more? You can view the full details about the $5 Premium Themes Club here.

Source: http://www.wpdesigner.com/2008/01/24/launching-themes-club-happy-5-year/

I am sure you have heard some of the popular blogs have been hacked by someone. When we are having a WordPress blog, we are scared that our blog will be hacked too. Matt Cutts has shared Three Tips to Protect your WordPress Installation.

• Secure your /wp-admin/ directory
• Make an empty wp-content/plugins/index.html file
• Upgrade or apply patches
• (Bonus Tips) Delete the line that contains bloginfo(’version’)

Source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/three-tips-to-protect-your-wordpress-installation/