Wordpress 2.5.1 is now available for download at wordpress.org. This Wordpress release is full of tweaks and bug fixes for Wordpress 2.5.

It includes a number of bug fixes, performance enhancements, and one very important security fix. We recommend everyone update immediately, particularly if your blog has open registration. The vulnerability is not public but it will be shortly.

In addition to the security fix, 2.5.1 contains many bug fixes. If you are interested only in the security fixes, you can download these corrected copies of wp-includes/pluggable.php, wp-admin/includes/media.php, and wp-admin/media.php. Replace your existing copies of these files with these new copies.

If you download the entire 2.5.1 release, you will be getting over 70 other fixes. 2.5.1 focuses on fixing the most annoying bugs and improving performance. Here are some highlights:

• Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages.
• Better performance for those who have many categories
• Media Uploader fixes
• An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7
• Widget Administration fixes
• Various usability improvements
• Layout fixes for IE

Read the full article about Wordpress 2.5.1 here.

Popularity: 24%

While I was cruising around the internet searching for a cool new theme for this website, I stumbled upon www.themelab.com. After reviewing tons of their high quality free themes, I realized they also had some helpful articles about the Wordpress publishing platform.

I found this really cool article titled “Put your dormant domains to use with Wordpress“. It’s a very simple and straightforward tutorial about how to set up your Wordpress blog to automatically syndicate posts from other blog feeds. He goes on to say:

For those of you domainers who have a lot of unused domain names earning nominal revenue at old-fashioned domain parking services or simply collecting dust and not doing anything, read on. Developed domains will almost always outperform one-click landers at parking sites. One of the easiest ways to do quickly develop a domain is to set up an automated WordPress blog.

Just a small note before continuing. This isn’t a guide on making content scraping/rewriting splogs. I’m merely going over a much more efficient way to monetize unused domains, or possibly to augment your current blog with regularly updated news from relevant feeds. Aggregating RSS feeds legally is a perfectly legitimate way to add content to your WordPress blog.

Click here to visit www.themelab.com to read the entire article.

Popularity: 45%

The Gravatar, also known as globally recongnized avatar, has recently been completely rebuilt under the PHP platform by the Automattic development team. Now your gravatar photos will be clearer, larger, and load much faster.

Other Gravatar Information

• What is a Gravatar?
• How do I add a Gravatar to my blog or site?

Quick Fix

I added this to my comments.php code:

<img align=”right” src=”<?php gravatar(”R”, 60, “http://yourblog.com/images/your-gravatar-image.gif”); ?>” alt=”Gravatar” />

Popularity: 34%

Wordpress is freaking awesome but at some point you have to tweak your site at least a little bit. Most bloggers end up changing all kinds of things especially if you have downloaded a custom theme from Wordpress.

I was surfing around the blogosphere and I found this site called wpcandy.com. They have lots of great stuff if you use Wordpress. They teamed up with Liquidicity and designed a really cool Wordpress help sheet.

If you you’re new and don’t know a lot about code, or maybe even if you do, The Wordpress Help Sheet will help you get it done. It provides a list of all the major Wordpress code snippets that get used throughout the site and what they do.

Visit wpcandy.com to download the help sheet.

If you don’t know about Wordpress, read this article I recently posted about titled “Get Your Blog Up And Running Fast“.

Popularity: 29%