With many of the top theme designers switching their focus to creating and selling premium WordPress themes, it is always good to see some premium quality WordPress themes being released for free.

Today’s theme is called WP Freemium, and it was originally created by Ptah Dunbar for BloggingTips.com. It looks like due to some complications, BloggingTips.com decided to go another route so Ptah has made this theme available for anyone for free.

Here are the advertised features:

• Valid xHTML Strict 1.0 / CSS
• Code is well commented for the non technical savvy
• Sidebar Widgets enabled
• Custom Front Page with 3 featuring articles
• By default - 6 advertisement spots on all pages
• Gravatars highly Supported for Comments, Author Profiles and Author Posts.
• Author Byline + Promotion on single pages
• Author Profiles feature prominent image of the author with bio, contact details and more
• Image Gallery Support
• Print Stylesheet is included.
• Favicon + iPhone Webclip icon Ready
• SEO Optimized title tags and headers
• 404 Error Page notifies admin each time someone stumbles across a broken link so they can fix it.

I was unable to find a demo, so here are some screenshots provided by the author:

Homepage

Single Page

Author Bio

Author Page

I really like how this theme was setup for a blog that has multiple authors, making it a great free option for anyone starting a multi-author WordPress blog.

If you’d like to get a copy for your WordPress blog, click over to get WP Freemium.

Recently Richard over at WP Project did a great redesign on his site.   With that redesign came a great “Featured Articles” section that features the five most recent posts in the “Featured” category on his blog.

In this post, Richard explains the steps required to feature a designated number of posts in a category of your choice.  Here is the result:

Click over to get the code you need to setup something similar on your WordPress blog.

Open source is a wonderful thing.   Probably my favorite part about it is that everyone who uses open source software can find ways to help improve it.   So, what can you do to help WordPress grow?  Weblog Tools Collection did a great job recently when they tackled this exact question in their post 24 Ways to Contribute to WordPress.

The first three things that come to mind when I think of contributing to WordPress are creating WordPress themes, creating WordPress plugins, or creating a WordPress blog to help the community.   If you’d like to see the other 21, click over to check out the list.

I know this isn’t WordPress related, but these are way to awesome not to mention.

Fast Icons is now offering free iPhone-like Web 2.0 icons representing the popular social networking companies.   I think they are incredible and will make good bookmarking icons on a WordPress blog.   I’m even considering using them for a theme I am building for one of my blogs.

Here is how a few of them look:

Thanks to Jeffro for the heads up on this!