Have you ever switching to using a new WordPress theme for your blog and then suddenly notice it all over the blogosphere?   It can often be tough to find a quality free theme that isn’t already being heavily used by other WordPress bloggers.  

As a result, many serious bloggers make the decision to instead go the route of purchasing a premium theme.   These are usually some of the best quality themes and you won’t find to many of them scattered around the blogosphere due to the cost.   Some examples of affordable premium themes include the Revolution theme by Brian Gardner or some of the exclusive themes by Unique Blog Designs.

Now it looks like WordPress will make it a little easier for serious bloggers to find a quality theme.   Once purchased, it looks like half of the sales price goes to the theme author, while the other half goes to Automattic to help maintain the site. 

Its a little early and we don’t have enough information yet to comfortably form an opinion on this, but it is something that if done right, could be useful.   It will be interesting to see how many theme authors are willing to give up 50% of their sale price for a little extra exposure, and also to see if this is something available to WordPress.org users, rather than just being for WordPress.com users.

In case you didn’t see the alert in your WordPress dashboard, it looks like WordPress 2.3.1 is now available for download.   Included are tagging fixes for Windows Live Writer, as well as over 20 bug fixes.

It is always good to avoid vulnerability by always using the most current version of WordPress, so I recommend upgrading as soon as you get the chance.

Only a few weeks after the successful release of WordPress 2.3, it looks like the WordPress team is back at it again with their announcement that the next release, WordPress 2.3.1, is now available for download.

As is the case with most .1 releases, this release’s primary function will be to patch up a bunch of bugs that have been discovered in 2.3.  Click here to see a full list of the bugs that will be covered in this release.

As a quick reminder, this release is still in beta, so you won’t want to upgrade quite yet unless you have a good backup!

It wasn’t so long ago that Gravatar was all the rage around the blogosphere. Who wouldn’t want a globally recognized avatar? But problems with the service, combined with the emergence of the popular MyBlogLog avatar, seemed to have spelled the doom of Gravatar.

Now it looks like the service has been revived with Automattic’s recent acquisition of Gravatar. If anyone can turn this service into a success, it is the makers of WordPress. So what does this mean for Gravatar? And will the MyBlogLog avatar lose its popularity? Here is what Automattic has to say about their plans for the new service:

• We’re going to make all of the Premium features free, and refund anyone who bought them in the last 60 days.
• Move the gravatar serving to a Content Delivery Network so not only will they be fast, it’ll be low latency and not slow down a page load.
• Take the million or so avatars we have on WordPress.com and make them available through the Gravatar API, to compliment the 115k already here.
• From Gravatar, integrate them into all WordPress.com templates and bring features like multiple avatars over.
• From WordPress.com, bring the bigger sizes (128px) over and make that available for any Gravatar. Currently Gravatars are only available up to 80px.
• Allow Gravatar profile pages with Microformat support for things like XFN rel="me" and hCard.
• Develop a new API that has cleaner URLs and allows Gravatars to be addressed by things like URL in addition to (or instead of) email addresses.
• Rewrite the application itself (site.gravatar.com) to fit directly into our WordPress.com grid, for internet-scale performance and reliability.

It looks like the main beneficiaries of this plugin will be WordPress.com users, but I would expect to see the revival of Gravatar plugins appearing on WordPress.org blogs around the blogosphere once everything gets implemented.

The great thing about using open source software is the fact that it is constantly being tweaked and improved. The WordPress community is no exception. Despite the recent major release of WordPress 2.3, they already have released some information about what is in store for WordPress users in the future.

As usual, Blogging Pro has the latest about upcoming releases and conferences. On the releases side, it looks like we have some good stuff to look forward to:

On the releases side, you will see some updates to WordPress 2.0, 2.3, and a full 2.4 release by the end of this year, or early in the new year.

Releases
WordPress 2.0.12 is listed as three weeks late according to WordPress’ trac system, meaning it should be out any time now. I would guess that it will be released at the same time as Wordpress 2.3.1 which is due November 15th.

WordPress 2.4, which should see some very visible changes to the WordPress administration panel is currently set to be released December 12th of this year, but The Blog Herald has it listed as being released January 15th of 2008, which I think is much more realistic to their development cycle. Either way, it should be interesting.

Then for all those keeping track, we will see a WordPress 2.5 in May, 2008.

It looks like WordPress 2.4 is well underway, and I look forward to an improved administration panel. I’m still holding out hope that they can continue to integrate more plugins into the actual WordPress software.