It was recently announced by Ryan Boren, that WordPress 2.6 Beta 1 has been released. Here are some things you should know:

• They are targeting a mid-July release.
• It will have post revisions.
• Theme previewing, which I guess will make this plugin obsolete.
• Improved SSL support for the administration panel
• Ability to relocate content directory
• Ability to relocate config file (with database and other sensitive configuration information)
• You can bulk delete, activate, and deactivate plugins
• Customizable default avatars

Complete list is here, along with a download link if you want to test it out. Remember, this is not the final release – and is not recommended to be used on production blogs.

A great free WordPress theme, called Chocolate, has been released by Pancak.es. I made another video, similar to my last video review of a theme by the same author, Nick. Here are a few of the features present in the theme.

• Able to view and add comments from the main index with Ajax
• A live search which grabs results without loading a new page
• Fallback support for those with no Javascript enabled
• Alternative “White Chocolate” color scheme
• Comments with Gravatar support

Read on to watch the video…

Feel free to download the Chocolate theme and try it out for yourself.

Thanks to the great feedback I received on the previous WordPress theme, I decided to go out and look for another “non standard” WordPress layout. I came across some great templates from Six Shooter Media. One in particular, called Motion, caught my eye – and I decided to port it into WordPress.

This WordPress theme has no comments, no pages, no single posts, no sidebar, no widgets, no Gravatars – nothing but a one column main index template. In fact, the only theme files included are index.php and style.css.

Live Demo | Download

As you can see from the demo, it has some pretty cool Javascript features. I hope you like it. Let me know what you think in the comments section, and if you’d like to see any more of Six Shooter Media’s templates ported into WordPress.

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.