I Am Blogie

In the market for woot!-inspiring premium WordPress themes? Head on over to WooThemes.com — they’ve redesigned their entire site (calling it WOO2) and are now offering a 4-for-1 special sale.

Ever since I discovered the Woo rockstars, I’ve made over all my blogs with premium WordPress themes from their fantastic collection. They have themes for straightforward blogs, for magazine-type sites, online news, portfolio sites, even e-commerce webs. WooThemes are designed with function and form in mind. And as if it weren’t enough to give us professionally-crafted theme packages, each theme ships with several color schemes. Talk about major giveaways!

What’s more, WooThemes are avidly supported by their designers, as well as by a large community of “Woo ninjas” and users. Their support forum is an excellent resource that can help you explore how you can extend the functionality of your WordPress themes. And, problems do crop up once in a while — good thing is, chances are, you’ll find the solution in the forum.

Hurry! Their 4-for-1 deal lasts only up to 24 June 2009. But just in case you miss that one, there’s still the 2-for-1 perpetual promo at WooThemes.com.

(This is NOT a paid post.)

Sponsored By: DVO Bloggers Network - the Davao blogosphere

WordPress 2.7, which introduced major changes to the platform’s core, was released only recently, and now there’s another significant upgrade on the horizon: version 2.8. It’s still fresh in beta 1 status (Matt hasn’t even chosen a jazz musician to name it after yet).

Still, WP2.8 is already looking to be a very welcome upgrade. Number one on the list: automatic theme installations. I’m beta testing it now, and the built-in theme installer seems to be working just fine. Much like the automatic plugin installation functionality, the theme installer lets you search for themes (that exist in the WordPress.org directory) from within your dashboard, and get your chosen theme up & running in no time. The theme search facility is pretty accurate, too. You can search by keyword, tag, and/or author, either by manually entering the keywords or selecting predefined values.

There is also a way for you to upload and install theme .zip files that are already sitting in your hard drive. No need to go to your web host’s control panel file manager any longer. Whew! Now that’s what I call a content management system to beat!

More on WP as a serious CMS: themes templates and plugin codes are now presented to you in technicolor. OK kidding aside, editing theme templates are now easier on the eyes because of what Automattic calls CodePress syntax highlighting. It’s now easier to sift through templates’ codes, thanks to basic color differentiation of PHP, HTML and normal text. Nothing like what you might expect in industry-strength code editors, but it’s a start.

All in all, WP2.8 will be a major enhancement and a collection of bug fixes and security patches — all in the effort to make using WordPress much more user-friendly and yet powerful. Here’s a list of the new features we can expect from this upcoming upgrade. Can’t wait for the final release!

Welcome to the new look and feel of my personal blog!!!

I’d gotten tired of the old one already, although it did serve me well. Truth is, when I chose that old theme, it was simply meant to be temporary while I hunted around for a more suitable one. But my other blogs got more attention from me then, and that’s why that old theme stuck with Blogie Blog for quite some time.

The new WordPress theme that you see now, called Angel, is from Jai Nischal Verma of Blog Oh! Blog. He has quite a number of awesome packages for your WP installation. My favorite blog, Ang Dabawenyo, uses one of their themes.

Speaking of this WP theme designer, Jai is running a “mega contest” for bloggers. He’s giving away 10 Super Premium WordPress Themes, worth a total of $700! All you have to do to join this blogging contest is subscribe to his RSS feed, and post an entry about the contest on your own blog (make sure to trackback to his contest post). Good luck!!

If you’re the type who wants more out of your whole WordPress experience, some of the themes Jai is offering in this contest are really worth having. I happen to have one of his premium themes, but I’m not using it yet… I’m saving it for a future blog project.

So, how do you like my new blog design?