Elegant themes just released their latest WordPress theme Aggregate, a magazine style theme with tons of features, and as usual they’ve done a great job!

The theme described by the creators:

“Aggregates comes packed with tons of content and widget-ready areas, and manages to display everything in a clear and readable manner. We have also added some handy new widgets, as well as many new advertisement areas. If you have been searching for a feature-rich Magazine-style theme for your blog, then look no further!”

Basic theme features

Unlimited color schemes

Aggregate comes with various background textures and the ability to adjust the background color and font colors.

Optional blog-style structure

Even though Aggregate was created to be a CMS with a page-based structure, you can also run the theme like a normal blog instead.

Dozens of fonts

Aggregate comes with various font options, allowing you to adjust the header and body text independently.

Custom widgets

Aggregate comes with some cool new widgets, such as the Recent Videos slider, Photostream and Popular Posts.

Automated thumbnail resizing

Like any good magazine theme, this theme utilizes timthumb to automatically resize your thumbnail images. Because of this, only one thumbnail images is required per post, despite the various thumbnail sizes used in the theme.

Advertising management

With Aggregate you can place 125×125 banner images in your sidebar and 468×60 ads to your post pages.

For advanced features, demo and download – visit the Aggregate info page.

Source: New WordPress magazine theme: Aggregate

WordPress has come a very long way (especially since v3) in terms of its image or media management system, making it extremely easy for you to add custom image sizes, featured images, cropping etc.

Theme developers are now spoilt for choice when it comes to adding image management capabilities to their themes, and users have more control than ever before on how they add and manipulate the images they upload.

These improvements however, bring a level of complexity that can only be understood through hours of research and practice to get the perfect balance in terms of how images are added and manipulated from an extension or theming perspective.

Fortunately, Ade, over at www.studiograsshopper.ch has come to the rescue and done all the hard graft for you already.

Ade has meticulously studied and documented every aspect of how wordpress’s media system works and how best you can approach its implementation.

We were amazed at the level of detail Ade went into in order to make this topic extremely clear for everyone and are sure you will be as well.

Source: How to work with WordPress featured images

WordPress 3.1.2 is now available and it’s a security release for all previous WordPress versions.

According to wordpress.org, this release “addresses a vulnerability that allowed Contributor level users to improperly publish posts”.

The WordPress team suggests you update to 3.1.2 promptly, “especially if you allow users to register as contributors or if you have untrusted users. This release also fixes a few bugs that missed the boat for version 3.1.1.”

Download WordPress 3.1.2 or update automatically from the Dashboard > Updates menu in your site’s admin area.

(Image: Creative Commons)

Source: New WordPress security release is out: 3.1.2

On most wordpress stock themes, you will find that when the user clicks on the comment author link. It opens directly in the same page, taking the user away from the site.

Ideally when the user clicks, it should open the commenters site in a new window. After all, they are being directed to a new website.

Amazingly it seems most suggestions you will find on Google for this is to modify the wp includes core files. This is never ideal and the better approach is to use WordPress’s filters instead. After all, this is exactly what they are for!

What we are going to do is add a new function that includes the link structure how we want it, using the original structure as a base, then run a filter on the “get_comment_author_link” to change it with our new function.

So open up your themes functions.php file and somewhere at the bottom, add the following. I have added comments on each section of the function so you can easily understand whats happening.

function comment_author_add_blank() {
	global $comment;
	//get url
	$url    = get_comment_author_url();
	//get author
	$author = get_comment_author();
	// check if user added a url or not
    // if no url, return author
	if ( empty( $url ) || 'http://' == $url )
		$return = $author;
	// if has url, return url with new format and _blank
	else
		$return = "<a href='$url' rel='external nofollow' target='_blank'>$author</a>";
	return $return;
}
// now run the filter on our new function
add_filter('get_comment_author_link', 'comment_author_add_blank');

Thats all folks!

Source: How to open the comments author link in a new window

Knowing when a new version of WordPress has been released is easy thanks to the automatic update notifications in your WordPress admin. The simple upgrading process really leaves you with no excuse to run your site on an old version – just a click or two and you’re done (after backing up, of course).

WordPress 3.1.1 was released earlier this month, and here’s the low-down straight from WordPress HQ.

This maintenance and security release fixes almost thirty issues in 3.1, including:

• Some security hardening to media uploads
• Performance improvements
• Fixes for IIS6 support
• Fixes for taxonomy and PATHINFO (/index.php/) permalinks
• Fixes for various query and taxonomy edge cases that caused some plugin compatibility issues

Version 3.1.1 also addresses three security issues discovered by WordPress core developers Jon Cave and Peter Westwood, of our security team. The first hardens CSRF prevention in the media uploader. The second avoids a PHP crash in certain environments when handling devilishly devised links in comments, and the third addresses an XSS flaw.

We suggest you update to 3.1.1 promptly. Download 3.1.1 or update automatically from the Dashboard → Updates menu in your site’s admin area.

Our release haiku:

Only the geeks know
What half this stuff even means
Don’t worry — update

Source: WordPress 3.1.1 is out – upgrading is easy