Okay, it’s been a while since my last “WordPress Weekend Resources” and some of you have noticed I stopped posting them since I came back. Well, now that I’ve got back into the swing of things, here’s this week’s set of WordPress weekend resources.

Force CSS changes to “go live” immediately – This is a quick tip to any of you who frequently change your WordPress site’s CSS, and notice you have to “force-reload” your browser each time to see the changes. This is due to your browser cache, but not to worry, this post provides an easy fix for those having this problem.

Important Security Fix for WordPress – This article discusses a rare problem that may affect your WordPress installation in the event of a database outage. While a lot of people agree this isn’t something to worry about, it may be better to stay on the safe side and delete the default WordPress installation file.

110+ Massive WordPress Video Tutorial Collection – This is a collection of links to several sites with, you guessed it, video tutorials. Unfortunately they missed my WordPress video tutorials, but that’s okay since they’re a bit out of date anyway.

Custom taxonomies in WordPress 2.8 – Justin Tadlock discusses a new easy-to-use feature that will be introduced in WordPress 2.8 called custom taxonomies, a feature that even average users can take advantage of. It can be incredibly useful if you want to label your posts (or links) with something besides the usual category or tag.

Using Filter Hooks in WordPress Child Themes – In this tutorial, Ian Stewart goes over the basics of WordPress filters, and how to use them in your WordPress theming. This article is a bit technical, but very informative.

That’s all for this week. If anyone knows od any recently published WordPress resources, let me know in the comments, and I’ll consider featuring them next week.

P.S. Yes, I’m still having internet problems, although I’m trying to work around them.

P.P.S. If anyone wants a sneak preview of the next free theme, check this out.

I registered the domain themelets.com several months ago (way back in August of last year) in the hopes of one day making a WordPress child theme “portal” of sorts. I started working on it off and on for the past few weeks, and earlier today I finally got it ready.

On the site you can find information on the latest WordPress child theme releases, announcements regarding many popular theme frameworks, along with tutorials and other resources.

Yeah, I know the site is pretty much dominated by Thematic child themes at the moment, but in time maybe we’ll see more variety of child themes spanning across different frameworks.

Don’t worry, I’m not jumping ship from Theme Lab to start posting about new child themes all day. Think of it as a sister blog to complement the content here.

So go on and check out Themelets and let me know what you think in the comments.

Andy Peatling, head of the BuddyPress project, just announced that BuddyPress 1.0 has been released. For those of you who don’t know, BuddyPress is a series of plugins and themes for WordPress MU, which extends it to allow social networking features and functionality.

With this release of BuddyPress, that probably means people are going to start making themes for it. I’ve already asked if you all would be interested in bbPress themes in the past (more on that later). Remember, this site is called Theme Lab, not just “WordPress Lab,” and I don’t want to limit myself to just creating WordPress themes for this site in the future.

If any of you are using, or plan to use, BuddyPress, would you be interested in me creating themes for that too? I’ll admit I don’t have much BuddyPress experience at the moment, but I can always learn if there’s enough demand for it. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Today we have a very clean ported theme, originally designed as a free template by Brad of DemusDesign, and ported into WordPress by myself. This theme has the usual Gravatar support and WordPress tag support. This theme is coded for WordPress 2.7 and above only, which means it won’t work in previous versions of WordPress, but also means you can take advantage of threaded comments and comment pagination.

There are three widgetized areas as well as a convenient theme options page where you can change a number of things, both of which will be gone over below.

Live Demo | Download

And now onto the widget areas and theme options page…

Widgetized Areas

This theme is broken up into three widgetized areas. Two are in the sidebar and one in the footer. The following diagram will illustrate where exactly these are located.

Okay, the sidebar and footer are pretty straightforward, but what are the “testimonials” for exactly? Well, you can put any text you want in there pretty much whether it be a site slogan, testimonial, or something else. It’s best if you use the text widget only for this widgetized area. If you can’t think of anything to put there, no worries, because it can be easily removed in the theme options page.

Theme Options

This theme comes with a simple options page, where you can control a few aspects of the theme. Simply go to Appearance -> Mountain Leaves Options. Here’s what it looks like:

The first part of the options page is for the “About Me” portion of the footer, since I figured it wouldn’t be practical as a text widget.

• Title: You could change this to something like “About Us” or “About This Blog,” whatever you think would be appropriate. The default is set to: “About Me”
• Image URL: If you have a small avatar-like image (around 42×42), simply put the full path to that image in this box. If you don’t have one, no problem. No image will be displayed if that is the case.
• Message: You can write a little about yourself and/or your blog in this box. Just a few sentences would be enough.

The second part of the options page are just quick options for the sidebar area.

• Sidebar Title: This is how you change the green text displayed directly above the sidebar widget area (mapped out in the diagram above). The default is set to: “This is the sidebar”
• Disable Testimonials Widget: Like I mentioned above, you can disable the testimonials widget. You can do this by simply checking off this box. Even if you have the text widgets defined for the “Testimonials” area, they won’t be displayed if this box is checked.

Thanks once again to this post from the Theme Forest blog for the code used, which I also used for the Underwater theme (also designed by DemusDesign).

Conclusion

I really like this design, and I think it could be customized into different looks, while still using the same theme code base. For example, replace the autumn trees header background image with something else, change the colors, etc. If anyone has any suggestions on possible styles to be based on the Mountain Leaves theme in the form of child themes, I’m all ears.

Well, that should be just about everything. If you have any quick questions, feel free to comment on this post. Remember, support related queries should go in the support forums. I do my best to check there daily. Hope you like the theme. Enjoy!

I was hanging out on the WordPress Tavern Forum in the ChatBox, where I heard about a new “free premium” theme site called WP Gorilla coming soon. Yes, I know the term “free premium” and even “freemium” are not exactly new terms, but here’s what intrigued me about this project.

• It’s designed to be run in a collaborative fashion.
• The themes (which you can see on this Flickr page) look absolutely stunning.
• The themes are completely free, open source, all that jazz.
• It’s caught the attention of Matt (in a good way).

One problem that I can foresee in the future is how they would make money. Jeremie of Web-kreation, who appears to be leading this project has stated in the comments of the announcement post:

My goal is really to make this project opensource and I would rather avoid to ask money from our users but if this project grow too fast or too big for us to maintain, we might have no choice but to offer paid support.

I would imagine this would be kind of like the “enterprise” support Automattic offers for WordPress users, although people could still seek help in the public forums.

So what do you think of this project? If it takes off, do you think it can compete with the likes of paid WordPress theme sites such as WooThemes, iThemes, etc.? Will you be contributing to it?