I know many of our readers use BuddyPress, so I wanted to pass along that BuddyPress 1.0 has finally been officially released.   If you are interested, you can download BuddyPress 1.0 here.

Now that BuddyPress offers the ability to create BuddyPress plugins as well as BuddyPress Themes, I imagine that its popularity will continue to grow.  It also looks like they are already working on the next release.  

According to Andy Peatling:

This is just the first step on a long road ahead. So much is possible now that we have a solid WordPress-based social framework to build upon.

The status updates and gallery components are next on the roadmap, you can expect to see versions of those components appearing later this year. We’ll also be going through the hundreds of enhancement tickets we’ve received, and with your help prioritizing them for future versions.

I’m most excited to see what plugin developers and theme designers can come up with. Even in the pre-release stages, plugins to extend and add functionality have already been popping up. If you’re a plugin developer or theme designer, be sure to check out the skeleton component and skeleton theme. These packages will provide you with a solid starting point to build BuddyPress components and custom themes from.

To those of you that use BuddyPress, what do you think of the latest update?

Being a long time domainer, I’ve always understood the value of a strong domain name.   It can literally make or break a product before it even launches!     Automattic appears to understand domains as well, and wants to protect their brand.   In a brilliant move, it seems they recently completed the purchase of WP.com, the common abbreviation for WordPress, which was previously owned by Yahoo.

Here is what Matt had to say about the acquisition of WP.com:

Yes it’s true, Automattic is now the proud owner of WP.com, which we acquired from our buddies over at Yahoo! We’ve been using WP.com as internal shorthand for this site for years now, and ever since we figured out four or five years ago that Yahoo had that domain (as opposed to the Washington Post or something) we’ve been doing our best to get it, a journey that culminated in ultimate success a few days ago.

WP.com seemed like a great fit: people’s attention spans are getting shorter every day.  Wow the weather is great in San Francisco today. Also it’s seven keystrokes shorter to type in, which multiplied by the hundreds of millions of times people visit the site every year will be a huge productivity boost to our troubled economy and prevent RSI in a large percentage of the population.

Matt has also thrown a question out to the WordPress community.    What should they do with this outstanding domain name?   You can leave a comment on their post here with your suggestion!

My recommendation?   People are going completely mobile these days for everything and that trend is only going to continue over time.   After seeing what is in store for the iPhone 3.0 and the BlackBerry Storm 2.0, I am as convinced of this as ever.   At the same time, people are also loving Twitter and sending Tweets from their phones.

Why not take WP.com and build it into a mobile blogging platform, or a Twitter competitor of some sort that ties into your WordPress.com blog?     What other ideas do you guys have?

Note: It appears Automattic has also acquired Blo.gs.  It will be interesting to see if they decide to try to improve or somehow integrate this service.

From time to time, I run across a number of very useful WordPress resources or interesting posts related to WordPress, which I share in my WordPress news and notes posts.   Here is a few that have caught my attention over the past month or so:

• WordPress Optimization Bible -The WordPress Optimization Bible is a collection of useful tips and tutorials on how to speed up your WordPress site. If you ever experienced slow WordPress admin panel, “MySQL server has gone away” message, pages taking forever to load or you want to prepare your site for a major increase in traffic (for example Digg front page) this is the guide for you.
• What’s in Store for WordPress Themes in 2009? – Justin Tadlock shares his thoughts on what he expects out of WordPress themes in 2009.   In my opinion, you’ll see many more premium WordPress themes, as well as a shift towards theme frameworks and child theme releases.   Click over to see what Justin is expecting!
• 135+ WordPress Tutorials – Instant Shift has compiled another large collection, this time featuring a number of our WordPress Tutorials and our WordPress code page.
• The A to Z of .htaccess – Alex of Nometech has published an excellent post covering a bunch of information about the .htaccess file.    Useful resource to bookmark for any webmaster!

Written by Alex Denning, a Twitter fan who has finally got around to launching his own blog, Nometech.com!

Recently WordPress has had a huge popularity surge, with the rise of ‘magazine themes’. At the same time that WordPress’ popularity has soared, people have forgotten about what WP is all about: fundamentally, it is a blogging system. Trying to keep that in mind, I’m releasing my first WordPress theme, NomeBlog.

NomeBlog is as simple or as complicated as you’d like it to be; those of you who don’t have much experience coding or don’t want to edit your theme files, you can just install the theme and leave it at that. However, those of you who are into theme customization, you’re going to love NomeBlog! Why? I’ll run down some of the features:

• XHTML valid code
• Auto-image resizing
• Breadcrumbs
• Awesome jQuery navigation
• Widgetised sidebar
• Author info at the bottom of posts
• Related posts automatically displayed
• iPhone support
• ‘Login’ option displayed on the navbar to those logged in
• Customised default gravatar (+gravatar support)
• Support for WP-Pagenavi
• Sidebar blog
• Built in archive
• 125×125 ad ready
• Feedburner subscribe by email ready
• Homepage thumbnail support

NomeBlog prides itself in ease of use – I originally built the theme, or at least what I based NomeBlog on for one of my other sites, Nometet.com. Why did I build it? It was taking me too long just to post something on Nometet, resizing images, inserting custom fields; I needed something that did the hard work for me. The solution was to build the NomeBlog theme.

As I’ve already said, NomeBlog is as simple or as complicated as you’d like it to be, so I’ll quickly run through some of the more advanced features:

• phpthumb built in – the script that timthumb was built off, phpthumb is the image resizer to end all image resizers; it is great! Check out the getting started guide (link below) for details of how to use it in posts, alternatively, you can create the custom field ‘Image’ and on the homepage will be displayed a thumbnail of the image you’ve input.
• iPhone support – as I wrote here a short while ago, iPhone support is becoming increasingly a necessity. NomeBlog supports the iPhone through the use of the iWPhone plugin, which I’ve customized. You can download the customized version of the plugin (which looks great!) here.
• Customised default gravatar – fed up with random monsters and boring silhouettes being displayed next to Gravatar-less-comments? NomeBlog has built in support for your own customized Gravatar. Just upload your own image file (again, see the getting started guide) and you’re done.

It is hard to show off all the features briefly, so for the full, complete list of features and details on how to get started, check out my new blog, where there is a lengthy getting started guide. To keep updated, make sure you grab the Nometech RSS feed too!

And of course, you can view a live demo here or download the theme. It is free, but please keep the link back. Any comments would be appreciated.