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!

Over the weekend I noticed that WordPress has launched a sweet new visual resource for their blogging software, which can be found at WordPress.tv.   As you would probably guess by the domain extension, WordPress.tv will provide video tutorials for both WordPress.org and WordPress.com installations.

If you look at it now, you’ll find a lot of extremely basic tutorials for people new to WordPress, but one cool thing is you can submit requests to see future WordPress video tutorials.  I would imagine over time you’ll start to find a lot more advanced WordPress tutorials.

Some other cool things about WordPress.tv:

WordPress.tv is also now the place to find all that awesome WordCamp footage that was floating around the web without a home. See the presentations you missed and get a peek at behind-the-scenes action. We call it WordCampTV.

You’ll also find slideshows of presentations made by Automattic employees and other WordPress gurus, plus interviews I’ve done with the media and fellow bloggers.

I hope you’ll consider WordPress.tv not just a support resource, but also a place to hang out and keep up with all the geeky goodness going on in the WordPress community. Tune in regularly for fresh content and updates to the WordPress.tv blog. Lots more is on the way.

If the WordPress 2.7 Release Candidate 1 release announced yesterday wasn’t enough of a sign that WordPress 2.7 is close to an official release, now it looks like the WordPress team just announced that WordPress.com will get the official WordPress 2.7 upgrade Thursday afternoon/evening here in the United States and early morning on the eastern half of the globe.  That is only two days away!

Here is the official announcement from the WordPress.com team:

As promised, here is the advance notice that WordPress 2.7 is coming to WordPress.com, and will go live on Thursday, December 4, 2008 at 8pm Eastern Time. That’s 5pm Thursday in California, 1am Friday in London (UTC), 8am Friday in Jakarta, noon on Friday in Sydney…find your time here. Some people like to learn how to use new things by jumping right in and exploring, while others like to read the manual first to get the lay of the land. This post is a written version of the 2.7 interface tour/feature review I have been doing at WordCamps, and will tell you what’s new in the administration interface of WordPress 2.7. There are a lot of new features, so fair warning: this post is pretty long. If you’re more of the jump-in-and-play kind of person, you can skip this post for now, but you might want to remember it’s here just in case you get confused when 2.7 arrives at WordPress.com in two days.

A note on browser capabilities: WordPress 2.7 makes extensive use of JavaScript to create the user experience outlined here. If you have JavaScript turned off in your browser, some features may not be available or may work a bit differently than described here. In addition, using a recent standards-compliant browser will ensure that you have an optimal experience. Older browsers that are not supported by their manufacturers any longer may not look as expected; we recommend Firefox 3, Google Chrome, and Safari 3.

Anyone notice they don’t recommend IE8?  

With all the acquisitions lately by Automattic (the parent company responsible for WordPress), you almost have to wonder what is next.   Well, today that question was answered when Matt Mullenweg announced that Automattic has acquired PollDaddy. 

Unlike the past few acquisitions, there is a good chance most of you are already familiar with PollDaddy, who is currently considered to be the leader in internet polling.   They are the polling service of choice by most bloggers because they are easy to build, can be integrated into your blog, and allow people to vote from most feed readers (increasing the number of votes you’ll receive). 

Here is a quote from Matt’s post (linked above):

As we started to look at building out our own service for this, it became more obvious that, while on the surface it’s a very simple problem, there’s a lot of hidden complexity and opportunities for some really powerful features under the hood. There are probably a dozen companies addressing this space right now, but as we started to survey the space I was struck by how often I’d see this “PollDaddy” thing pop up.

Two guys in Ireland with a quirky company name were cleaning up with some of the largest and most respected websites using their service on a daily basis. They weren’t the biggest, but they had the high end of the market. It seemed to be the WordPress of the polling space.

According to their announcement, it looks like WordPress.com blogs are now fully integrated with PollDaddy and a PollDaddy WordPress plugin is now available for WordPress.org users.  The PollDaddy plugin for us is similar in that it allows you to create and manage your PollDaddy.com polls from within your WordPress blog’s administration area!

What do you guys think about this acquisition?

Earlier today I posted about the big WordPress Hacks theme giveaway contest.  Only a few hours later Brian Gardner and Jason made a MAJOR announcement, so I decided to clarify a few things with Brian and get this post up for people to discuss.

For those that don’t follow Revolution closely, Brian has been teasing a major project for several weeks now, but I doubt any of us realized just how major it was until today when he announced that Revolution is going open source.   For the few of you that are wondering what open source is, this basically means that all future Revolution source code will be made available for free, making all future Revolution themes completely free.  Also keep in mind that not every detail has been worked out already, so some of the minor details may change a little as the new Revolution gets ready to launch.

According to Brian:

As of 12:00 midnight, Friday October 31st, the themes that are currently available at the Revolution theme site will no longer be available. Ever. This was a decision that I made in order to protect the integrity of the current themes and the conditions under which they were released. Over the past year I have built a community of Revolution users, and to freely offer up those themes would be completely unfair to them. My community matters to me, and this is how I have chosen to handle current themes.

So what does this mean? It means that as of Saturday November 1st, a completely new Revolution site will launch - call it the second coming, or what you will. There will be a new set of themes on that website, which like I said will be made available under the GPL license. There will be an option to purchase packages which include support, tutorials, access to customization and a few other things.

I have to admit that this news shocked me at first, but as I’ve pondered it throughout the day today, the whole business concept seems to be a smart move.   The idea of premium WordPress themes is okay, but I’ve never been 100% convinced that this business model will survive for more than a few years.

Just like ebooks, premium themes can be distributed illegally and the whole concept kind of goes against the spirit of open source and WordPress.  Under this new business model, a bare version of the theme will be available for free to everyone, but services such as theme customizations, support, and tutorials will require either a one-time fee or a monthly/quarterly membership (attempting to get clarification on this still).   This way there is no theft worries, the theme is available for anyone to use for free, and the new business model will likely earn a recurring income instead of the income gained with a one-time purchase, making for a better long term solution.

So, what does this mean for current owners of the Revolution theme?

As you can see from Brian’s quote above, not much will change for existing members of the Revolution community.  All existing themes will NOT be made open source so buyers will still have their unique theme they purchased.   The current Revolution URL will redirect to the new website on November 1st, 2008, and the forums and other support tools will have a home on the new website for anyone to use.

As a side note, if you have been eyeing one of the existing Revolution themes, but you’ve been waiting to commit to purchasing one, then you only have until the end of this month.  At that time they will be taken down and no longer available to be purchased.