According to the official WordPress blog, it looks like you can now purchase WordPress Clothing, including t-shirts and hoodies from their official store.

I know the Firefox clothing has done pretty well, so I expect WordPress to find the same type of success. I wouldn’t mind sporting the hoodie around town.

There has been a lot of anticipation building for WordPress 2.4, which has been in the works for awhile now.  There are going to be several positive changes, but one that has gotten some mixed reviews are the planned changes to the look of the WordPress dashboard.

Though we don’t have a release candidate ready to view yet, Hyper123.net has posted a live preview of the WordPress 2.4 dashboard.   Not every feature included functions properly, but it will give you an idea of what we can expect in WordPress 2.4.

Here is a screenshot of the WordPress 2.4 dashboard:

You can also check out this video walkthrough on Tubetorial.

What do you think about this early look at the change?

[via Weblog Tools Collection]

If you haven’t already noticed, at some point yesterday the WordPress team released a crucial security update to the WordPress software.

If you are someone who schedules posts ahead of time, you’ll want to read this post explaining why your future-dated posts may be at risk.  Here is some more information about the release:

• Performance improvements for post sanitization when raw content is required (#5325).
• Changes to is_admin() to ensure that it is only true for admin pages thereby protecting against exposing draft posts. (#5487).
• Suppression of database errors unless WP_DEBUG is true (#5473).
• Check for valid database connection information during install and display and error if the install fails due to database rights (#5495).
• Support for a custom database down page to be displayed on database connection errors (#5500).
• Changes to make sure we are more selective in what we make clickable, this introduces different rules for different uri types ([6450]).
• Changes to wp-mail.php to escape the error messages when displaying them to avoid a possible XSS attack (#5484).
• Changes to ensure that the post password is only exposed by the xmlrpc method metaWeblog.getRecentPosts to users with rights to edit a post (#5535).
• Changes to the information exposed the wp.getAuthors xmlrpc method to reduce the information exposed and add a capabilities check (#5534).
• Addition of extra capabilities checks to xmlrpc methods ([6504]).
• Addition of extra capabilities checks to APP server ([6508]).
• Changes to validate_file() to improve its traversal attempt detection when running on windows ([6521]).

Although Digg has its share of problems, it is an undeniably useful service that they provide. More often than not the best stories will make their way to the front page.

Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t really fit in very well on Digg, as they have many users that are not bloggers, and the site is more geared towards reporting news.

If you are looking for a good WordPress Theme, I recommend checking out WP Themez. This site was inspired by Digg, and allows users to submit and vote for their favorite WordPress themes. The idea is that the best themes make their way to the top with the most votes.

So far, the site is just getting started, so its hard to gauge how useful of a resource it will develop into. The other problem is see is that most WordPress users want to find a theme that isn’t heavily used, so they will probably avoid the most popular themes.

According to Ryan Boren, it looks like we can expect WordPress 2.4 to be delayed from its original due date. It was originally scheduled for December 12, 2007, but is now scheduled to be released on January 24th, 2008.

Reasons for the delay include the holidays and an upcoming baby (congrats Ryan!). According to Ryan:

With the holidays upon us, a new baby Boren coming next month, and a new admin design to implement, we’ve decided to push the release of WordPress 2.4 out to January 24th of next year. I updated the roadmap with the new date.

The WordPress team has promised that while version 2.3 focused a lot on the infrastructure of WordPress, version 2.4 will bring a lot of to the user interface and the user experience, as well as some speed improvements and caching changes.

In case you missed it, it looks like WP Themes Gallery has thrown together a collection of the top 40 WordPress blogs about WordPress. Included in the list are what WP Themes Gallery believes are the most significant WordPress blogs currently out there, based on various rankings. Their formula factors in Alexa ranking, Google PageRank, and the blog’s Technorati Ranking.

If you enjoy reading about WordPress, this is a great list to go down and make sure you are subscribing to a majority of these feeds.  There are a lot of sites that I love to read each day and many also offer some great resources for WordPress users.

Update: WP Themes Galary has released an update to their post which includes some additional WordPress blogs.  It looks like Hack WordPress is now ranked #32.   Not bad considering we’ve only been up and running for less than 40 days!