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The first release candidate for WordPress 2.5 was announced last night.

New features include:

• Faster load times.
• Multi-file uploads.
• New “Media Manager” for images, audio, video, etc.
• Built-in gallery function.
• Built-in (and pluggable) Gravatars support.
• New backend design.
• One-click auto-update for plugins.
• Reactivate plugins after a ‘Deactivate All Plugins’ action.

One-click plugin updates sound really cool, as do the built in media gallery. If you’re interested in getting the full skinny (or even trying the release candidate) you can head over to Wordpress.org’s WordPress 2.5 Sneak Peak and see screenshots, downloads, etc.

Straight from SmashingMagazine.com comes this awesome list of wordpress themes. Dang, now this just means I’m going to be trackin down a new theme for my site again! 

High-quality WordPress themes always come in handy. Whether you are looking for some design inspiration or professional coding solutions — in both cases you can learn a lot, you can apply them and you can build customized designs upon them without reinventing the wheel all the time.

In this article (snagged from smashingmagazine) we present 100 free high-quality WordPress themes. Together with hundreds of other designs, these themes have been manually selected, installed and tested over the last weeks. They all can be downloaded, customized and used for free in both personal and commercial projects. Links to demo-versions provide a direct preview of a theme.

Please notice that the listed WordPress themes are presented in 8 sections: vibrant themes, simple & minimalistic themes, magazine style, grid-based, clean and legible, advanced, experimental, photoblog & videoblog.

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I have been pretty frustrated over the past few weeks with the performance of a few of my WordPress sites. At first I was convinced that it was my web host. perhaps it was their web or DB severs; perhaps that I’m on shared hosting. After putting up with it for a while I decided I needed to get to the bottom of the issue. It had to be my host, a plugin, or some content that it just to stinking big. I found an article by Idano called Nailing Down Slow Performance in Wordpress. The approach outlined entailed reverting to the default theme, disabling all plugins, and then one by one enabling the plugins to find the culprit. Sounds like a lot of work eh? I already know my theme is relatively heavy, but I like it so it’s not going anywhere. I suspected it might be a plugin… but did I REALLY want to go thru the process or turning them all off then one by one turning them back on? Naw…

Enter FireBug. Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. If you don’t already have FireFox and FireBug, you should check them out…. particularly if you do any web development. For the record I typically use IE, I’m not anti-Microsoft or anything like that, but it’s nice to have FF and FB around for development purposes. Once installed enable FireBug by going Tools -> FireBug  and then deselecting the Disable FireBug check. Then go to Tools -> FireBug -> Open FireBug. At the bottom of the screen you’ll now see a console window for FireBug. Hit the NET tab and point your browser to your website.

What you’re seeing is the total number of requests made by the browser and how long each one took. With my standard plugins enabled, my homepage took a crazy 12.65 seconds to render! TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE.

 

I began scrolling through the results and immediately saw that the lightbox plugin, as well as an Amazon Context Links plugin were the cuplript (image below shows the lightbox stats).

I then went to my plugins page and disabled each of the plugins. Removing those two plugins took my page render time down to 7.79 seconds. Better… but still not GOOD. I repeated the process above until I found another performance culprit… a call the the MyBlogLog tracker is taking 2.44 seconds. This is not a plugin, but a script code I added to the header of my website… 2.44 seconds, gone. I like MyBlogLog… but not that much.

So how much time did I shave off by removing the Lightbox, Amazon Context Links plugins and the MyBlogLog link tracker?

Yup… 9.06 seconds shaved off my front page load time. 3.59 seconds still isn’t excellent performance, but my front page usually has YouTub videos, linked images, etc. I then noticed the time to render a sidebar widget I put in place to show where else I can be found on the net was making a bunch of requests. I move it to my About Me page… nobody really click it anyway.

In total my average front page load time is now down to about 3.2 seconds. I could probably do even better, but I’m happy with the performance increase so far. The average page on my site, when it’s mostly text, is down to around 1.5 seconds. w00t! Feel much more snappy!

FYI… if you CANNOT live without the lightbox effect, there’s a new Slimbox plugin, which claims to be a 7kb clone of the previous Lightbox plugins. I haven’t tried it yet… it’s a cool effect, but I’m not sure if it’s worth it.

WTSI has 350+ Wordpress themes that you can sort by:

• Last Added
• Most Downloaded
• WTSI (Wordpress Theme Sparkling Index)
• Most Viewed
• Most Tested
• Most Voted
• Top Rated

In addition to that you can drill into themes based on 38 different categories and 24 different theme properties (color, number of columns, fluid vs fixed, widget or plugin ready, etc).

WTSI was created because lots of people are ordering the themes by most downloaded to find out which themes are most wanted by people. Some choose most downloaded themes for their sites and some look unique themes for their sites to prevent web duplicates. But most visitors don’t check out the themes’ added dates so a counter-affect happens. The top 10 most downloaded themes do not change at all! The listing is always the same. We thought this is unfair to most of the great theme designers. Very very… great themes get lost in mass without getting noticed by the majority of people. Thats why we created the WTSI. We did several tests and it is working great on the other hand you are very welcome for additional ideas.

How WTSI is calculated, What is the formula?

If you’re looking for new WP themes, this might be a good place to start. Check out WordPress Themes Free.

 If you don’t know what GTD is… well, you’ve been living in a box. GTD is the shorthand for “Getting Things Done”, which is a work-life management system and book by David Allen. It’s intention is to “transforms personal overwhelm and overload into an integrated system of stress-free productivity”.

There are many people who are REALLY into GTD, but you don’t have to be a die hard to take advantage of the methodology as it’s a very common sense approach to dealing with work/life. GTD is based on the “notion that with a complete and current inventory of all your commitments, organized and reviewed in a systematic way, you can focus clearly, view your world from optimal angles and make trusted choices about what to do (and not do) at any moment”.

So here’s my list of top 5 GTD websites that help you to work faster and get more done while stressing less. These sites are regularly updated with interesting, thought provoking content.

• Lifehacker - Probably my favorite of the bunch, Lifehacker makes getting things done easy and fun. It’s stuffed full with the latest in personal productivity technology and reveals the million ways hardware and software can improve our busy lives. This is one of the few sites on my iGoogle front page RSS feed.
• Lifehack.org - Similar in both name and concept to Lifehacker, Lifehack.org brings hacks, tips and tricks that get things done quickly by automating your daily life, increase productivity and getting organized.
• DigIGetThingsDone - A cool blog covering GTD in general as well as deeper into the specifics. It covers software, using Wordpress and more.
• ZenHabits - A personal blog about setting and achieving goals through the building of good habits that must be cultivated through daily practice.
• RirianProject - Extremely easy to digest site covering GTD. Most of the site is done in “lists” format. For instance:
  • 9 Little Known Ways To Sleep So It Counts
  • 5 Back-to-Basics Strategies For Renewing Your Energy
  • 5 Powerful Hacks to Immediately Improve Your Presentations

David Allen’s website