WordPress developer Dan Cole has created a Plugin to take the job of theme options out of the hands of theme developers and, in that way, universalize them. The idea is that instead of each theme creating its own options page, each with its own strengths and weaknesses, they can all hook into this one Plugin.

Dan’s Plugin is called Theme Options, and is available in the WordPress Plugin directory.

This sort of Plugin is one that tends to divide people, as it seems to beg for themes to require its installation in order for the theme to work to its fullest. At the same time, the simplicity of options sticking around from theme to theme, modularizing preferences and making transitions from themes that much easier, is a pretty solid argument for wanting to use it.

The Theme Options Plugin and Dan Cole caught my interest, so I asked him to sit down with a few of my questions, to give a little insight into the creation of this Plugin, and where he hopes it will go.

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Thanks to all of those that dropped by and left a comment in the Tweem giveaway post. Without further ado, the five randomly drawn winners are:

1. Rafie,
2. Kel,
3. webbografico,
4. JB, and
5. Richard Howell

Congrats to those who won, I’ll be sending your copy of Tweem to the emails you posted with in just a moment.

To everyone else, thanks for jumping in, and hopefully we’ll get you something in a future Theme Playground giveaway. A big thanks to Shopping Themes for partnering with us on this one. Remember, if you’re still jones-ing for a copy of Tweem, head over to ShoppingThemes.com and pick one up.

Recently Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and other popular services we all know and love, launched a partial redesign of their company website. Most notably, each of the company’s projects is described in a haiku, a Japanese form of poetry. At first glance this is hokey, cute, and worth a chuckle or two. Especially when reading through them.

But I think these haikus are more important than they may seem at first.

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Update: Comments are closed because the winners have been chosen.

After the review of Tweem yesterday, I now have 5 copies to give away to you guys. Are there 5 of you out there that would like to run your own Twitter microsite?

Tweem is an awesome theme for creating your own Twitter microsite on a sub domain. Save yourself $15, though, and win a copy by picking one up in this post.

So what do you need to do to win a copy? Just leave a comment explaining why you love Twitter so much, and what you’ll do with Tweem. On Friday I’ll choose 5 comments at random and send each over a copy of Tweem.

Get commenting. 48 hours to go!

You may be saying WP-what? Excellent question. Short one, but excellent nonetheless.

WPurls is a new project of mine that I’ve been nursing for a few weeks. It’s my effort into the new niche of WordPress link aggregation, in a similar vein as WPAZO and WPTopics. Where WPurls is different, though, is that you can submit links you come across about WordPress, and can find others that you’re interested in based on others’ bookmarks. This should prove to be an interesting way to track popular links in the WordPress arena.

The way it works:

1. Submit a WordPress link. Tag it, if you like.
2. WPurls adds it to the link list and gives you a short, Twitter ready link to share.
3. You share the link. Happiness abounds.

At least, that’s what it will be when it’s public. Right now WPurls is in private beta, and I’m looking to bring a few WordPress faithful in to give me some feedback. If you ever read I may even give the beta testers something cool for helping out (as if being one of the cool kids wasn’t enough!).

To join the beta let your interest be known in the comments, or just email me at ryan at themeplayground dot com. I’m looking forward to hearing from you!

Microblogging is all the rage nowadays. Everyone and their cat is doing it. Literally, cats are doing it.

One of the more exciting aspects of WordPress development, Plugins and themes, is how to draw what we’re doing elsewhere on the web into our blogs so we can own them. Right now for most of us that means integration of Twitter into our WordPress sites.

Tweem is a new theme from the new WordPress theme shop called Shopping Themes. I recently received a copy of Tweem and gave it a spin. Read on for my thoughts.

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Do you know what an oh great topic is?

It’s one of those topics that, when you bring it up, causes certain people at the table to go “Oh great&helllip;” Count on it being followed by a mumble or two and lowered heads.

In the WordPress world there are a couple of oh great topics. And the fact that they are oh great topics doesn’t make them bad ones, not by a long shot. In fact it means they are probably some of the better topics because they’ve clearly been talked about to death.

“The GPL topic is one that’s been beaten to death, resuscitated, and promptly beat down again.”

GPL (which stands for General Public License, which is the license WordPress is released under) is one of those topics. For those who care, it’s been beaten to death, resuscitated, and promptly beat down again.

The discussion tends to go in the same circles each time it happens. In the latest development, posted at WordPress.org, a fairly definitive hammer came down in that discussion when the Software Freedom Law Center gave an official opinion on the matter. You can read about it in detail on that blog, no need to paraphrase here. Suffice it to say that the issue is, for most purposes now, moot.

So now what? What will the WordPress community focus on now that GPL is (hopefully) off the table?

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I’ve very excited to announce (on the blog) the launch of a new WordPress site of mine, CommentBits.

CommentBits is for any of you who have ever gotten to the point in creating a WordPress theme where you groan because it’s time to work on the comments. Designing and creating the CSS for comments on WordPress themes can be a real pain sometimes. One option you now have is to pick up a ready-made comment style from CommentBits for the super cheap price of $7.

There are four very different styles available right now, including my personal favorite Quotable and the freshly baked SideBySide that was just released today.

There’s also a Lifetime Pass that’s available for $50, available for a limited time, which will give you access to all of the current styles and all future styles as well. Get it while you can.

I don’t want to get too informercial-y here on the blog, since that’s never been the point of this site. But I thought I would let everyone know, since it’s something I’m going to be spending a bit of time on from now on. It solved a problem that I was having, maybe it can be a solution for you as well.

You can read more about my thoughts behind the creation of CommentBits in the site’s launch blog post, and you can follow @commentbits for notification via Twitter when new styles are available.

With that: what do you think? Do you hate designing/styling comments enough to spend the equivalence of two cups of coffee?

A little more than a year ago the folks at WordPress unleashed Prologue on us — that being a theme specifically meant for quick status updates amongst a group. Then this year came P2, an enhancement on Prologue that made real time updates a reality. Now, with the advancements happening with im.WordPress.com, we could be seeing the early makings of a true microblogging service built on WordPress, better than the likes of Twitter. I’ll tell you why I think so.

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In an effort to keep up to date on the weekly news within the WordPress community, well known WordPress blogger Jeff Chandler has prepared a community roundup post for us. If you come across any news (or create any yourself) feel free to drop a post in the Theme Playground forum and we’ll try and include it in next week’s roundup. — Ed.

Ryan Imel Giving The Deets On CommentBits.com

Ryan Imel who we know and love through ThemePlayground.com recently did an interview with WPTavern.com where he outlined what the service is all about. I think it’s pretty cool to have a niche design service exclusively for the commenting section of WordPress sites. Make sure to check out the end of the article for an exclusive coupon code enabling you to get 50% off the price of a lifetime pass.

WPCult Up For Sale

Austin has decided that he no longer has the time to maintain the WordPress site, WPCult.com so he is putting it up for sale.

How To Filter The Read More Link

Justin Tadlock gives us a primer on how to use the filter the_content_more_link which was introduced in WordPress 2.8.

Show Your Post Word Count

WPRecipes provides a short and sweet block of code which enables you to add a function that displays the word count of a post.

Yoast To Produce Podcast

Joost de Valk looks prime to have a WordPress centric podcast of his own thanks to WebmasterRadio.FM. He’s looking for feedback regarding time slots and a name for the show.

Need More Contestants In The Plugin Competition

Ozh brings up an interesting point in that new WordPress plugins are being released everyday yet, they are not being entered into the competition. Ozh lays out a great series of points of what the competition is and is not.