With the recent release of WordPress 2.8 this past week, there has been a number of complications and/or frustrations from the WordPress community, leading to a lot of discussion about how long you should wait to upgrade WordPress when a new branch is released.  Historically the WordPress team has always done a great job of testing their releases, which I think lead to a strong confidence from the WordPress community when it was time to upgrade.   Combine that with the one-click upgrade option that is now built into WordPress and the annoying tag reminding you to upgrade, and you’ve got a huge number of people who upgraded to WordPress 2.8 immediately upon its release.

Unfortunately, with each new WordPress branch comes changes which sometimes break WordPress plugins, create problems with the WordPress theme you are using, and usually includes changes to the code.   If you upgrade before the themes or plugins you rely on have been updated, this can cause problems.   The iThemes team recently touched on this subject with their post, When Should I Upgrade WordPress?  Their post also includes five helpful things that need done BEFORE you do your one-click upgrade:

1. Make a backup of all your site data
2. Upgrade of all your plugins
3. Visit plugin and theme author websites
4. Disable all plugins
5. Ask yourself if you need to upgrade now

I also recommend waiting a week or so to view feedback before upgrading.

I know several of you haven’t upgraded WordPress to 2.8 yet.   How long do you plan on waiting until you upgrade your WordPress installation?  Please include which version of WordPress you are currently using with your comment!

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.

Have you ever had an image show up on your website which is to large, causing problems for your WordPress theme?   This is especially common for WordPress blogs that have multiple authors, where some authors or guest posters may not know how big they can make the images.

Fixing this is incredibly easy with this CSS hack!    All you need to do is take the following code and place it in your stylesheet, setting a maximum width for your images:

.postarea img {
max-width: 500px;
height: auto;
}

In the above code snippet, you’ll want to replace postarea with whatever div ID or CLASS your theme uses for the content.   You can also adjust the 500px to the maximum width you’d like for your images to be.

Note: This hack may not work on some versions of Internet Explorer.

To our readers that are also WordPress designs, if you are interested in trying to win $3500.00, you may be interested in a new design contest that is being run by ColorLabs Project.     Here is some information about the contest:

How can I participate in the contest?

To participate in the contest, you must submit a theme concept to ColorLabs Project. It’s not a theme, it’s just a concept. Here are some technical requirements of the concept:

• The theme concept is intended for Wordpress. That’s rule number one. But the great news is: there is a broad possibility of amazing stuffs we can create with Wordpress.
• We believe that there are numerous ways to present a theme concept, but to participate in the contest, your theme concept must be created in Photoshop format.
• The theme concept must cater the 1024 X 768 user’s screen. Therefore, considering the margin and borders, the maximum width of the design is 980 pixels.
• To participate in the contest, you need to publish a blog post and tell a bit of your story about the contest. You should also give a linkback to this post.
• Designs must be submitted in JPG or PNG format to contest [at] colorlabsproject [dot] com. You also have to tell us the background story of the concept: what inspired you, how you designed, what the design is all about. Designs are not only about shapes, colors, or patterns. They should have insightful story that complete the whole as one. In the story, please also mention your full name and any URL you would like to be linked to if you win.
• If you use any stock/source images in the designs, please submit them as well and mention the URLs in the story above. Please make sure that those images have extended usage licenses that allow the distribution of the design.
• Designs must be submitted before 14th February 2009, midnight (GMT+7).

The competition is divided into two phases:

1. Qualification Round: ending February 14, 2009.
   In this round, participants are only required to submit the front-page of the theme concept in PNG/JPG format. In the end, there will be 12 theme concepts that will be selected to compete in the final round.
2. Final Round: February 14, 2009 - February 21, 2009.
   In this round, finalists are required to submit the inner pages of the theme concept along with the source files (PSD files). Source files will be assessed to determine the core quality of the design.

The contest is divided into 3 (three) categories:

1. Category A: General Blog/Lifestream and Photo/Videoblog
   Theme concepts participating in this category should include general elements for standard personal/lifestream blogs or photo/videoblogs.
2. Category B: Business Blog/Portfolio
   Designs competing in this category should include several basic elements of business/portfolio blogs. They should be able to market products/services or function as a showcase site.
3. Category C: Newspaper/Magazine
   Theme concepts participating in this category should include main elements of an online newspaper/magazine, particularly: headline, featured posts, multiple post listings, and ad spots.

The winner from each category will receive US$ 1000 and additional US$ 500 will be awarded to the best of the three. So it’ll be US$ 1500 for the best of the best and US$ 1000 each for the rest two winners. All winners will be interviewed and featured in ColorLabsProject. One contestant may submit more than one design and he/she may win more than one category as well.

Designs are assessed by a special team from ColorLabs Project. Three main factors that we will put into considerations are (1) the background story of the concept, (2) how well the theme concept presents the site’s content to the viewer, and (3) how far it transforms Wordpress into something stunning yet well-functioning as a website.

We will then make the winning theme concepts available as official ColorLabs Project themes and we will credit the contestant for the design.

Click here to find additional information and the Terms and Conditions.