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We are offering you the opportunity to showcase your work in our magazine by releasing a high-quality freebie. We try to keep high standards and we have high expectations because we want our readers to really see what you, as a designer, are capable of, what one can learn from you and why you should be hired. Average freebies usually get average publicity: we want you to get the best publicity and the biggest exposure from our magazine. Therefore, we want your work to stand out. Please contact us if you want to feature your work in our magazine.

Many designers take advantage of this opportunity; in fact, we are receiving more and more emails regarding freebie releases. Please note that we can’t answer all emails, but we read each of them. However, to get featured on Smashing Magazine, you really need to show us something that makes you different than the “usual” crowd.

Today, we are glad to release Color Paper: a free professional Wordpress theme, created by the DreamTemplate team. This theme aims to combine visual appeal with clean typography and vivid design elements. It was created especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

Download the theme for free!

The theme is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License (details of the license). You can use the theme freely for all of your projects, without any restrictions. However, it’s forbidden to sell or redistribute the theme without both the designer’s and Smashing Magazine’s permission. Please link to this article if you would like to spread the word. You may modify the theme as you wish, but if you are planning to release your modification, please ask our permission first.

• live demo
• download the theme (.zip, 1.8 Mb)

I just got word that the first beta release of WordPress 2.7 is now available to the public. You can download your copy here (WordPress 2.7 Beta 1). Ultimately, it is not recommended that you use this version on a production website but rather, install it on a sub-domain or on a local server.

By the way, the public release of WordPress 2.7 will not be available on November 10th as originally scheduled. Instead, considering this design has a lot of visual design elements as well as features, it needs a lengthier testing period. Thus, November 10th will be aimed as the date that a Release Candidate will be made available. It looks like it could be the end of November before we actually see WordPress 2.7 available to the public. Of course, this all depends on how the testing period goes.

If you happen to install the beta version on your site, come back and let us know what you think of the new version.

In Liz Strauss’ 10 compelling reasons people read our blogs, number 9 on the list is the following:

You do what you can to make it easy to comment. Other than a small fence for spammers, you take the load of keeping a “clean yard” on yourself so that folks will find it easy to be part.

Liz, with 60,000+ comments on her blog and counting, must know what she is talking about. That’s her forte, communicating with her readers. We’d like to share 6 WordPress comment plugins that will enhance the experience of both bloggers and commenters:

1. Subscribe to Comments.

A plugin that allows commenters to “sign-up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries” after their comments. Download here.

2. Comment Relish.

Dispatches an e-mail to first-time commenters. The message is configurable. Download here.

3. WP Comment Remix.

This plugin do a lot of things, like a swiss knife for comments. Lots of widgets to place in our sidebars. Download here.

4. Liz Comment Counter by OZ.

Outputs a badge showing the number of comments in our blogs. Download here.

5. Separate Comments and Pings.

Like what its name says, this plugin separates the comments from the pings and trackbacks,making them less confusing to read. Download here.

6. Better Comments Manager.

Powerful comments management tool. Makes figthing spams a lot easier. Download here.

1. The SEO search bar and button works in Firefox but not IE. The solution is to add a search widget with no title. This will allow users that use IE and Firefox to do a search on your page. There is a problem. The original search box and button are still visible. Therefore, I recommend that you use my modified images. All the images for the seo-basics 1.1 are under the images directory in the seo-basics directory. This is quite obvious. Replace the images there with the images here. These images are an extra large RSS feed button, a white search box, and white button. This ensures that the original search box and button are not visible on your page. You also get a gigantic RSS button like mine.

If you want to do it yourself, open search-field.jpg and search-submit.jpg in your favorite picture editor, and just delete them, or cover them in white. Save your pictures over the original ones. That was easy.

For the rssfeedicon.jpg, enlarge the picture 200%. Save the picture over the original one. That’s it. You can now use this modified theme with Wordpress.

Click on the Design tab and add the Search widget. Make sure it is the first widget in Sidebar 1. If you must, move it to the top. Save it and view your site.

2. The blog description goes over two or three lines, and this can be avoided.

Click on Design -> Theme Editor. Click on Stylesheet

Look for #blog-title, #blog-description {

width:270px;

}

Change this to 700px;

Save it and it should be all on one line.

If you want to change the background from that orange to another, change the background-color section as shown below in bold.

/* changed from #F58E0E. This is the background */
body {
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Sans-serif;
font-size: 10pt;
background-color: lightskyblue;
}