There is a page on wordpress.org that promotes a select few premium theme marketplaces, as we reported yesterday. The only criteria is that the themes need to be GPL and provide professional support a well as give a professional impression.

I caught up with Matt Mullenweg for some quick questions about this via email. This is what he had to say. read more

The hub of all things WordPress, as in the kind you install on your own, is wordpress.org. There’s both a plugin and a theme directory there, and the latter has now gotten some commercial (aka premium) themes treatment. However, the new page merely lists some resellers of commercial GPL themes, so this is not the marketplace a lot of people has been waiting for.

Some of them you may pay for access, some of them are membership sites, some may give you the theme for zero-cost and just charge for support. What they all have in common is people behind them who support open source, WordPress, and its GPL license.

If you’re selling GPL themes for WordPress you can get listed, just scroll down to the bottom of the page. Personally, I think the themes should be hosted on wordpress.org so that they got automatic updates and so on, but that’s a whole other story. I do hope this is just the first step of many in this area, but we’ll see. An official blog post has yet to outline this addition, which might or might not have been up for some time, I really can’t tell.

WordCamp 2009 is officially in the books. With two and a half days of some of the best community, speakers and information, it was an incredible event. Over the course of the weekend, I saw some of the best blogging-related presentations, met many of the most wonderful people in the blogging world and observed some of the worst bowling ever witnessed by man (though most of that was my own).

The event was a smashing success with over 300 attendees. Organized by John Pozadzides and sponsored prominently by his company, Woopra, it was, according to those in attendance, the second-largest WordCamp in the world.

But while the best part of these WordCamps is always the community and getting to meet all of the people who share your passion, there were also a slew of great speakers, 16 in total, plus a panel discussion. Even for a veteran blogger, there was a great deal to learn.

So, as I try to digest and take in everything I saw and learned at WordCamp Dallas, a more complete recap is forthcoming on my site, here are five things I’m holding onto dearly as WordCamp Dallas closes up for the year (in no particular order). read more

The discussion around the Chris Anderson goof episode raises an interesting issue.

Is WordPress.com bad for the WordPress brand? read more

Premium themes marketplace WooThemes are changing things, going GPL on all themes, and launches a theme club, along with the WooCamp blog. There’s a bunch of membership options for the themes club, and the whole site got a makeover. More will follow. It is hip to be GPL these days. read more

If you like to give a little to charity without actually giving anything, you can install the new SocialVibe widget on your WordPress.com blog. What it does is that it lets you pick one of the available causes, and then a sponsor will pay every time the SocialVibe widget is loaded, of course showing the sponsor message to cover the bills. Doesn’t cost you anything other than screen real-estate, which it might very well be worth. More details on how it works in the WordPress.com Support area.

Self-hosted WordPress users can nab the plugin, and everyone else can find a suitable solution on the SocialVibe website.

Matt Mullenweg has announced the release of WordPress 2.8, available for download from wordpress.org as always, but also in your up to date WordPress install by automatic update. If you haven’t followed the beta talk, you’ll note that it is visually the same as the previous version, but a lot faster thanks to code improvement. It also featured a new widget interface that greatly improves the usage, as well as giving themes the same update and install treatment as plugins. Speaking of themes, if you’re one of those mad people who edit them right in the browser, you’ll like the code syntax added to these things. There is also new screen options on a per page basis, and a ton of bugs are ironed out.

As for compatibility, most plugins and themes will work. There’s nothing groundbreaking in the core code department, so you can probably update right away. read more

The first, and possibly only, release candidate for WordPress 2.8 is out now. Ryan Boren on the wordpress.org blog thinks that 2.8 is done, and if that is the case then the June 10th release date will hold firm. Get it now.

The target release date for WordPress 2.8 is June 10th, and I’m sure you’re as anxious to press that update now button in the admin interface as I am. But hold on, you need to make sure that you’re plugins are compatible. So how do you do that? One solution is to find the plugin’s homepage, which might the wordpress.org directory, but chances are most plugins haven’t been updated for 2.8 there yet, wether if it just a compatibility notice or an actual plugin update. Enter WordPress Plugin Compatibility Checker, a 5,000+ list of WordPress plugins and what they need. Impressive!

WordPress MU is the multi-user version of WordPress, which basically means that you can run several WordPress blogs within one WordPress MU installation. It is in many ways similar to WordPress, but adds this functionality along with some other small things that is needed for being your very own blog host. The most well known WordPress MU sites are WordPress.com and Edublogs.

And now, finally, WordPress MU and WordPress will merge. The MU lead developer Donncha O Caoimh said this on his blog:

Basically, the thin layer of code that allows WordPress MU to host multiple WordPress blogs will be merged into WordPress. I expect the WordPress MU project itself will come to an end because it won’t be needed any more (which saddens me), but on the other hand many more people will be working on that very same MU code which means more features and more bugfixes and faster too.

Is this good or bad? read more