It was only a matter of time before a superior WordPress SEO plugin came along to dethrone the extremely popular All In One SEO Pack. After a change of ownership, questions arose as to whether the new owner would keep it up to date with the latest SEO trends. Others would be happy as long as it would remain compatible with future WordPress versions.

A few days ago, a new plugin was released known as Platinum SEO Pack. This appears to be a “fork” of the All In One SEO pack. It claims to do everything All In One SEO does, and more. Here are a few new features in this plugin:

• Ability to add index, noindex, follow or nofollow, noodp, noydir meta tags to any post or page
• Automatic 301 redirect if you change your permalink structure
• Choose to block indexing (using noindex tag) on RSS feed pages
• Nofollow external links on front page
• Nofollow links to archive/category/tag pages

Some of this stuff might be considered “SEO overkill” although all of these are options in the backend.

I was using it myself (on another site) earlier today and didn’t find any problems or bugs. You can get the plugin yourself here.

What do you think? Has All In One SEO Pack been trumped in favor of Platinum SEO? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Only a few weekend resources this week – both related to customizing the WordPress administration panel.

Four Alternative WordPress 2.5 Admin Themes – While I use the default WordPress admin panel, these alternative themes may be useful to those who want a branded look for their WordPress-powered sites.

For the Love of 2.3 – James Dimick, author of the Easy Admin Color Schemes Plugin, has released a new color scheme for the 2.5 admin panel resembling the old 2.3 admin panel.

That’s all, thanks for reading! If you know of a quality WordPress resource published recently, feel free to let me know in the comments.

Today we have an interesting WordPress theme, originally designed by growldesign. This theme only has one column, with category and page navigation in the header and footer. On the homepage template, there is room for your latest blog post and an area for your latest 3 portfolio entries below. More information on how to use this will be gone over below.

Live Demo | Download

And now onto the theme features. It will require a few code hacks to get it working perfectly on your new portfolio site…

Bottom Half of Homepage

This area of the homepage is reserved for your 3 latest “portfolio” entries, or posts in a certain category. To set the category you’ll need to retrieve the category ID. You can do this in WordPress 2.5+ by hovering over the link and viewing the address bar. Hack WordPress does a good job explaining this.

Change the “1″ in this example, to whatever category ID you have chosen to post your portfolio entries in.

Using Custom Fields for Portfolio Images

You can use the custom field key portfolio_image with the value as the image name to display portfolio images on the homepage.

The image will have to be stored in the wp-content/themes/mintswirl/portfolio/ directory for it to work, unless you change this directory in the home.php file.

Conclusion

Sorry if this theme is a little too confusing with all the code edits that may be necessary for you to get this theme up and running. If all else fails, you can simply delete the home.php file, and just have a normal blog layout.

If anything is unclear, feel free to leave a comment and I’d be happy to clarify it.

To those who don’t read the archives of the “Site News” category, today is exactly one year after Theme Lab was launched.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone and everything who made all of this possible, go over a little Theme Lab history, as well as let you know what is in store for the future.

This post will be very long and gushy, so if you don’t like long and gushy posts – you should probably stop reading now.

History

Theme Lab was launched by me, Leland, one year ago. In the span of a year, we’ve gone through 3 designs.

The first was later released for free. The second design briefly went through a 3 column phase, before the design you see now was settled on.

Thank You

These thank yous will be broken up into a few categories, since there are a lot of people to thank. This is in no particular order.

Top Commentators

Thank you to the following commentators. These loyal readers of Theme Lab have commented on numerous posts.

• Anto
• Andrea
• WordPress Modder aka IndieLab.
• Pete
• Nick Berlette
• BANAGO
• ameo

Blogs

The following WordPress-related blogs have helped Theme Lab grow in one way or another.

• Weblog Tools Collection
• Smashing Magazine
• Jeffro2pt0
• WP Candy
• WP Project
• Hack WordPress
• Blog Perfume
• Blog Herald
• Lorelle on WP
• WPMU Tutorials

WordPress

Of course, how could I forget about WordPress itself? And it’s lead developers.

• WordPress.org
• Automattic
• Matt Mullenweg
• Ryan Boren
• Andy Skelton

My apologies if I forgot anyone.

The Future

Expect to see some more great free WordPress themes, tips, tutorials, and more in the future. I’m also going to experiment with some paid content and perhaps subscription membership. Don’t worry though, you’ll still be able to get good stuff for free.

A question I get asked a lot is, “will you ever sell Theme Lab?” In short, the answer is: not any time soon. I understand that sites like Theme Lab require a certain amount of care and love for the community, although a ,000 offer may make me think twice.

Of course, I’m only kidding.

Conclusion

In the comments, I’d like to hear how you originally found Theme Lab. Was it via search engine, word of mouth, Entrecard, Twitter?

Thank you for reading and sticking around Theme Lab. I appreciate your readership.

It was only a matter of time before a superior WordPress SEO plugin came along to dethrone the extremely popular All In One SEO Pack. After a change of ownership, questions arose as to whether the new owner would keep it up to date with the latest SEO trends. Others would be happy as long as it would remain compatible with future WordPress versions.

A few days ago, a new plugin was released known as Platinum SEO Pack. This appears to be a “fork” of the All In One SEO pack. It claims to do everything All In One SEO does, and more. Here are a few new features in this plugin:

• Ability to add index, noindex, follow or nofollow, noodp, noydir meta tags to any post or page
• Automatic 301 redirect if you change your permalink structure
• Choose to block indexing (using noindex tag) on RSS feed pages
• Nofollow external links on front page
• Nofollow links to archive/category/tag pages

Some of this stuff might be considered “SEO overkill” although all of these are options in the backend.

I was using it myself (on another site) earlier today and didn’t find any problems or bugs. You can get the plugin yourself here.

What do you think? Has All In One SEO Pack been trumped in favor of Platinum SEO? Share your thoughts in the comments.