Following the success of the offical WordPress Extend Plugins Directory the WordPress Extend Themes Directory has just been added.  As this takes off the WordPress Extend Themes Directory will give WordPress.org users easy access to numerous WordPress themes that are open source (GPL) and that are free of “link bait” (this has been a huge problem in the past).

Just a word of caution for anyone who is using their WordPress install in order to power a podcast via PodPress…DO NOT UPGRADE TO WORDPRESS 2.6 just yet.  There is an issue with PodPress 8.8 that won’t allow you to add and save the audio file(s) in WordPress 2.6.  Dan from Mighty Seek said an update should be avaialble 10 days from now, so keep your eyes open for that.

For those of you who haven’t heard yet, development of the WordPress Spam Karma plugin has officially been discontinued and the current code has been released GPL Version 2.  While this isn’t a plugin we use ourselves, we do see it running on probably around 10% (+/-) of our clients’ blogs, thus the announcement has caught our attention.

To address what the future of Spam Karma may hold, we can only speculate from what we’ve seen in the past with other open source projects.  Here are some common scenarios:

• The project will just die. Since this is already “off the ground” we doubt that happens, at least not right away.
• An individual or a group of people will pick it up and run with it.  The majority of WordPress plugins fall under this category.
• A development firm will pick it up and take over development. This could be likely due to the high profile of the plugin as long as the development firm consistently has the time and resources to devote to the development and upkeep of the plugin.

So, with that said, we’ll keep our eyes open to see what happens.  In the meantime, Spam Karma 2.3 Release Candidate 1 seems to still work with WordPress 2.6.

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WordPress 2.6 has been released.

Key new user features include:

• Post Revisions
• Google Gears support
• Image captions and better image control
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries
• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one
• Improved WYSIWYG editor
• Theme Previewer
• Word Count displayed when writing and editing posts and pages
• Press This bookmarklet

If you need assistance with upgrading or have any questions regarding WordPress, please contact us.

The Chicago Tribune published an article a few days ago that discusses business blogging and in particular includes portions of an interview with Robert Mark from CommAvia about their JetWhine blog.  I hope to see more of these sort of articles (business related or otherwise), as there are so many facets to blogging that could be explored.

CommAvia has been a client of ours since November 2006, right after the initial launch of the JetWhine blog, for the various WordPress services and tasks necessary to keep the blog up and running and growing.  It’s rewarding to watch a client’s blog and blogging grow and excel, especially in what I’d consider a relatively short time-span.