For those of you basketball fans out there, tomorrow marks the beginning of the NCAA tournament, which is by far my favorite event of the year.  In addition to enjoying some great basketball, we also get to fill out our brackets.

I know it is late notice, but if you are interested in having a friendly (and free!) competition, I have created the Hack WordPress Challenge, which is hosted by Yahoo.  All you need to sign up is a Yahoo account and the following information:

Group ID: 166922

Password: opensource

You can click here to get signed up.

If you have any questions, please let me know.

WordPress.com is a wonderful and free way for people to begin blogging, but it is only natural for a blogger to eventually “outgrow” it and make the move to a self-hosted WordPress blog. Eventually the draw of being able to monetize your blog, combined with the lure of WordPress themes and WordPress plugins can be to much!

For those making the switch, it can be a period of adjustment as the blogger transitions from having everything done for them to having to do everything themselves. Michael Martine has written a great post walking people through making the move from WordPress.com to WordPress.org. If you are still on WordPress.com, I recommend you click over to check it out!

With today’s announcement of the first release candidate of WordPress 2.5, anticipation is starting to build around the WordPress community.  The road map shows March 24th as the release date, and rumors are flying that we will have WordPress 2.5 prior to WordCamp Dallas on March 29th and 30th.    In the meantime, plugin authors can get a jump on testing their plugins to make sure everything is working properly with the update, then get a fix in place if needed.

Now that you have the good news, there is also some bad news.  I did run across one quick note about the release candidate that I wanted to share with everyone.   Apparently there are known problems with the automatic plugin upgrade feature, so you’ll want to avoid using the automatic plugin upgrade feature until a fix is in place.  Guess I’m glad they went with a release candidate to start!

Probably the most talked about feature in WordPress 2.5 is the new design for the dashboard that was supposed to be released in WordPress 2.4.  The design has taken a lot of heat since the initial demo was released as many WordPress bloggers don’t seem to like it.   I personally think that it is just drastically different and will just taking some getting used to.  Once people are used to it people will like it.

Once you’ve upgraded, the good news is that you have options.  If you prefer to customize your own colors, Ozh has a nice tutorial up explaining how to make a custom stylesheet in WordPress 2.5.

As previously mentioned, you also have the option of using a plugin such as Fluency Admin to adjust the look of your dashboard (WordPress 2.5+).   I’m sure other plugins will be released as well, giving you a wide variety of looks to choose from.

If you are someone that likes to be ahead of the game, the first release candidate of WordPress 2.5 is now available for download.

Dougal lists the following new features:

• Faster load times.
• Multi-file uploads.
• New “Media Manager” for images, audio, video, etc.
• Built-in gallery function.
• Built-in (and pluggable) Gravatars support.
• New backend design.
• One-click auto-update for plugins.
• Reactivate plugins after a ‘Deactivate All Plugins’ action.

Along with the new features will come a period of adjustment as we get used to the new admin panel. Not only have the colors changed, but the location of many links and information has been moved.  You may also want to check out 10 things you need to know about WordPress 2.5 by TechnoSailor.

As we get closer and closer to the release I think I’m getting more and more excited. What feature are you most looking for to?

Note: As a reminder, this is just a release candidate which is designed for locating bugs in the software. If you are waiting for a more stable version of WordPress 2.5 you’ll want to wait until the official release.

If you’ve been looking for a premium quality WordPress theme, but don’t want to fork over the cash for one, you can sometimes get lucky and win one in a contest or giveaway.

Today I noticed that Blog oh Blog is giving away two free copies of MoneyBlogger, which is their popular premium WordPress theme. How do you enter? Just write a post blogging about the giveaway sometime before March 25, 2008 to be entered to win.

Here is a screenshot of the theme: