Earlier this week, Mehmet of Gabfire Themes offered up a few free single-use licenses of his popular NewsPro theme to two of our lucky readers, simply for leaving a comment on that post.   I have to say that the participation was great and I appreciate everyone taking the time to comment.

In speaking with Mehmet, he was really impressed with both the responses and participation that his offer received, and decided to give away an additional two licenses, making a total of four single-use licenses that will be given away!

Here are the four winners of the free NewsPro premium WordPress themes:

1. Dave (Comment #5)
2. Ahmad (Comment #6)
3. UncleLar (Comment #22)
4. Rajesh (Comment #35)

The winners should receive an email from me later today (at the email address provided with the comment) with instructions on how to claim your free themes.     Thanks again to everyone who participated and congratulations to the winners!

Possibly my favorite feature introduced in WordPress 2.6 was the wiki-style document revisions.  You can now easily get access and/or restore old revisions.   It took a few days to get used to, but I have to say I really love it!

I’ve always felt that this feature was intended primarily for multi-author blogs and probably isn’t needed for most WordPress bloggers, as it only serves to grow your wp_posts database table.   If you are someone that would like to disable this feature, all you need to do is open your wp-config.php file and add the following code:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

This should restore WordPress to handling posts the way it did in the WordPress 2.5 branch and earlier!

Back in late January 2008, I asked our readers ” Would you be interested in a WordPress eBook?”   Along with that question, I also took an informal poll of whether people would prefer to get a free eBook or purchase an eBook.    That may seem like a silly question, but there is a significant increase in the quality of an eBook that you buy over a free eBook, so I needed to know what people wanted.

In my poll I got a variety of answers, but between the comments from that post and the emails that I received, I was given the impression that people would rather I write a more advanced eBook with a fee attached, rather than releasing a free one that was thrown together quickly and just rehashes stuff you can find in our archives.

Over the past 6 months since that post, I have focused on building an eBook that collects my WordPress experiences, techniques, and other tips and put them together in a new eBook titled Success with WordPress, which is currently available for $24.95.

Because I knew this book would come with a small price tag, Success with WordPress was designed to cover all aspects of WordPress.   In the beginning, you’ll find some general information about installing WordPress, finding good WordPress plugins, etc.  Then it gets into the more advanced stuff that most of you will be looking for:

• Building a Multi-Author WordPress Blog
• Using WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS)
• Building a WordPress Forum
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tips designed specifically for WordPress
• Maximizing CPC Income with Google AdSense
• Advanced Affiliate Marketing Techniques
• Building a Niche Blog with WordPress

If you are looking to find success with WordPress, this eBook is definitely for you.   Also, if you’d like to promote this product on your website and make some money, you may also be interested in the Success with WordPress affiliate program.   It currently pays out an amazing 33% per sale and we have a 125×125 banner available as well, so you can promote it on your WordPress blogs and start generating some extra income.

Though the number of premium WordPress themes being released seems to have slowed recently, one of the newcomers to the market is Mehmet of Gabfire Themes, who is the author of the popular NewsPro theme, as well as the WP-Showcase theme.

In honor of Mehmet’s release of NewsPro version 2.0, he is celebrating the occasion by offering our readers a chance to win a free single license copy of NewsPro for your private use!  Before I get to the details, here is some of the features you get with NewsPro 2.0:

• Installation guide
• Ad Optimized
• Built in Flickr Support
• Video Spot
• Ajax tabs
• Unique newspaper style design
• Easily customizable using CSS
• Advertising Space (125×125 sponsor ads)
• Custom 404 Error page
• Gravatar support
• Dropdown navigation
• Widget support for sidebar
• Valid XHTML
• Valid CSS
• Support by e-mail & chat

Here are a couple screenshots of NewsPro 2.0 (which is available in Blue, Green, and Red colors)

NewsPro Homepage

NewsPro Post Page

NewsPro is normally available for $59.00 (single use), $159.00 (multiple use), and $259.00 (developer’s license), but as I mentioned above, Mehmet has a special offer for our readers.  In order to obtain a single-use license of NewsPro (which includes all three colors), you simply need to leave a comment on this post!   That is it.   We will then pick two winners at random among all the comments.   If you decide to comment, just make sure you use a valid email address so we can contact you if you win.

I’ve always been a big baseball fan because I guess I am sort of a sucker for statistics.  This morning I just noticed a fun post over at Matt’s blog which talks about some WordPress 2.6 statistics, and thought I might share part of it here for our readers who might have missed it:

• There have been around 23 thousand downloads per day. (Of just the English version.)
• According to the update system there are 201 thousand blogs using 2.6 already.
• That’s about 9% of all known WordPress.org blogs in 10 days.
• The video in the announcement post has been viewed 665,080 times.
• There have been over 300 themes submitted to the new Theme directory, which launched just 6 days ago.
• In the same period (10 days) there were 579,871 downloads of 2,527 plugins.

As Matt also eluded to, I’m sure that WordPress 2.6.1 will in fact bring those numbers up over 50% as a lot of people like to wait for the first patch release to upgrade.

I talked a couple of weeks ago about the importance of always upgrading your WordPress install, as old WordPress installations are often vulnerable.  One thing I don’t think people realize is that a hacker can easily find vulnerable WordPress blogs because most standard WordPress themes will actually tell them what version you are using.

If you open up the header.php file of your theme, you should notice some code that looks something like this:

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress <?php bloginfo('version'); ?>" /><!-- leave this for stats -->

In order to protect your WordPress installation, I recommend people completely remove this code from their header.php file for all of their WordPress blogs.

Now, this obviously isn’t going to make your WordPress blog hack proof, but what it will do is make it so hackers can’t easily locate your blog if it is using a vulnerable WordPress installation.

Update: Thanks to a tip from Leland, it looks like WordPress 2.5+ now generates the meta link anyway via the wp_head hook, which is something you can’t remove.  With that said, if you care about your security, you can still remove the meta generator.  It looks like Ian of ThemeShaper has provided a couple methods, including a WordPress plugin to remove the meta generator information from your WordPress blog.