Plurkr – Technology Step by Step

This theme has been developed exclusively for the MilBits blog. Because of the large amount of requests, the MilBits team decided to give MilBits WordPress Theme for free under GPL license.

This theme has a lot of optimizations within the code and defined development strategies to increase performance both for users and search engines.

Features:

• WordPress 2.6+ is supported (tested on 2.6 and 2.7)
• 2 columns
• Supported browsers: It works on most common browsers under Windows, Linux and Mac: Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, Chrome… (only in IE 5.5 and 8.0 the sidebar is broken).
• CSS is valid. HTML is also valid but WordPress sometimes add code in XHTML, so it doesn’t validate. To solve this trouble, you could install this plugin
• Widgets are supported
• If there is no comments on a post it isn’t show; so ‘No comments’ is never shown.
• Images optimized using CSS sprites
• In sidebar, last comments are shown using Simple recent comments plugin
• In sidebar, most commented posts are shown using this plugin
• Editor’s comments are highlighted using this technique
• CSS layout. Every part of the pages (sidebar, articles, icons, pagination) are commented and isolated to make it easier to find and edit.
• Comments and trackbacks are separated thanks to this tips
• Usable 404 pages to make it easier to understand.
• Width of lines is optimized for reading using width in ems (usability tip)
• SEO (Search engine optimization): Archives, tags and categories doesn’t show full articles to help article’s pages to get higher in SERPs.
• Every article has options to share in 12 social bookmarking sites
• Subscription to feed is highlighted from sidebar and article’s page.

[Demo] | [Release Page] | [Free Download for MilBits WordPress Theme]

Here is a very nice looking Free WordPress Theme made by Instant Shift. This is version 1.1 and it comes with some bug fixes and one more additional CSS design.

WordPress Christmas Features:

[More]

• DZine made a list with 45 Really Fantastic Desktop Wallpapers
• DD_belatedPNG says it’s the perfect IE6 PNG fix – it has support for: the background-image CSS property, background-position and background-repeat. Also, you can use PNGs for <img/> elements, which is nothing new, but you don’t need a 1px by 1px clear GIF image, which is new.
• Need a background quick? No problem – BgPatterns.com allows you to generate your custom background in 4 easy steps ;)
• Need a Lightbox effect for your website and don’t know which lightbox script to choose? No problem – The Lightbox Clones Matrix helps you. [developed by Ozh]
• eGallery is an excellent WordPress Theme. It’s not free, so if you want it go and buy it :)
• David Walsh learns us how to create in PHP a tinyURL link and an Is.Gd link
• Download Blog made a list with the best new Windows programs of 2008
• Flapi is an open source Flash image gallery that uses the popular Flickr photo service to manage the images. Seen on WRD
• Do you have problems converting from PX to EM? Then PXtoEM is your solution.

Elegant Grunge is a free wordpress theme made by Michael Tyson [no, not this one]

Main features:

• Automatic surrounding of all images with a frame packed with eye-candy that makes images really pop out.
• A ‘photo blog’ tag page that displays entries in a photo blog style.
• A widget to display thumbnails from latest/random photo blog entries.
• A custom page template that allows complete customization of the sidebar: Supply a list of tags to automatically display related posts, and specify any text/html to be displayed.
• Per-page and per-post configuration to turn on and off automatic image framing, among other things, and a global configuration interface – turn on/off the RSS link, set your own copyright message, or add your own extra header content – like adding a rel=alternate link to your Twitter feed.
• A ‘feature’ footer that you can add widgets to.