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!

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?

I’ve been wanting to add a forum to Theme Playground for a while now, so I’m happy to present it to you now, in true bbPress form.

One of my biggest complaints about forums in general is that they seldom fit well into the website or blog they are a part of. I finally sat down over the long weekend and pieced together a bbPress theme to go along with the current Theme Playground theme.

Also, for those of you who are interested, I’ll be putting up some bbPress tutorials in the coming week. It’s about time for some advanced bbPress themes to start coming out, don’t you think?

I’m excited to discuss WordPress and development issues with you guys on the forum. Don’t hesitate to jump in, it’s only a quick (and free!) sign up away. Make a name for yourself early.

What are you still doing reading this? Go sign up as a member on the new Theme Playground Forum!

We interrupt your regularly scheduled WordPress content for a message from your resident WordPress blogger.

Believe it or not, all of the blogging which has happened at Theme Playground so far has been done solely by me, Ryan Imel. But now I’m looking to bring a few wise WordPress minds into the fold here — do you have what it takes to write intelligently about this software?

What I’m looking for

I’d like to take the Theme Playground up a notch as well as maintain the posting frequency I’ve had the past month or two. It’s been great to see the explosive growth lately, and I think a lot of people are really looking for the kinds of things being published here.

What I’m looking for are a few minds interested in joining me in this little endeavor, to take a shot at writing blog posts, have a say in the new podcast, and maybe even lend a hand in some of the related projects I have running in the background right now.

Continue reading…

For the third Theme Playground WordPress Podcast, being recorded today, we’re going to give it a shot live. This means that there will be streaming video, streaming audio, and a chat for anyone who wants to be a part of the process.

Today at 5:00pm EST will be the live recording of the podcast at the brand new ThemePlayground.TV.

Not only that, a second voice

For those who have been saying that a second voice would really help the podcast, I absolutely agree! We’re going to give it a shot this time around with J. D. Bentley (on Twitter), who has agreed to sit across the virtual table with me and talk WordPress for an hour or so, later today. Bentley is a fellow web designer/developer who works with WordPress, and works from his web development company called Idea Anarchy. It should be interesting to have his perspective and thoughts on the topics we’re covering today.

Speaking of today’s topics

For the first time, here’s a brief list of what we’re planning on talking about today at 5:00pm EST. If anything here strikes your interest, be sure to tune in at ThemePlayground.TV and chime in with your thoughts.

Today, we’ll be covering:

• Recent claim: the future of WordPress is in child themes. A bit of discussion over this statement: agreement and disagreement in the WordPress developer community.
• Where do you find WordPress news and updates? Do you stick to the Dashboard or venture as far as Twitter?
• Making a living with WordPress
• Our (mine and then Bentley’s) top 5… well, that’s a secret!

Hopefully a couple of items there pop out at you. We’re definitely hoping for a few people to show up in the chat and give us some feedback. Tune in to ThemePlayground.TV at 5:00pm EST to catch the live feed. Follow me on Twitter to receive an update as we get closer to airtime.

Okay, not a book quite yet. But a book is in the works. By me, of course.

Continue reading…

If you care to, take a minute to step out of your feed reader and have a look at the new design of Theme Playground. It’s been a little while since a fresh design hit the scene here, and it was time for something unique that fit in with the content. It also helps that the new design is keeping me excited to post again!

It’s been an interesting run of designs at Theme Playground. Just before this design I was running a version of Mocha Theme, which is now available for sale. For this time around I opted for something a bit louder and less “personal blog-ish”, if that makes sense.

Continue reading…

What I’m calling Theme Playground On WordPress (Live) — real original, right — will be an hour long discussion, from 9pm to 10pm EDT tonight at Ustream.tv.

Continue reading…

Any fans of Alex King’s work with Share This, a popular WordPress Plugin used to share pages via email, is now available in version two. This version allows for sharing via IM and texting. It looks really cool, with some backend customization options and stat tracking as well. Look for more coverage of it in the next few days.

In case the subtle title threw you off, I am now going to start up an email newsletter here at the Playground to encourage some participation and discussion of this site’s development as well as WordPress issues as a whole. Would you like to join us?

The subscription box is over on the home page in the middle of the screen.

Some of the things I will be using the newsletter for:

• Initiating discussion over WordPress news and topics,
• Dropping advanced notice of upcoming additions to the Playground,
• Allowing reader feedback to directly influence what happens here, and I might
• Let slip some free resources or theme releases that won’t grace Theme Playground.

If that sounds enticing to any degree, please try it out. I’m pretty excited about it, both to see its success as well as see what sort of thing this community can turn it into.

So this is the beginning of something I’m excited about. What would it take for you to be excited about it?