More than 162 million people saw our message asking if you could imagine a world without free knowledge. You said no. You shut down Congress’s switchboards. You melted their servers. From all around the world your messages dominated social media and the news. Millions of people have spoken in defense of a free and open Internet.

For us, this is not about money. It’s about knowledge. As a community of authors, editors, photographers, and programmers, we invite everyone to share and build upon our work.

 

Our mission is to empower and engage people to document the sum of all human knowledge, and to make it available to all humanity, in perpetuity. We care passionately about the rights of authors, because we are authors.

SOPA and PIPA are not dead: they are waiting in the shadows. What’s happened in the last 24 hours, though, is extraordinary. The internet has enabled creativity, knowledge, and innovation to shine, and as Wikipedia went dark, you’ve directed your energy to protecting it.

We’re turning the lights back on. Help us keep them shining brightly.

 

Many other sites are taking a stand with the SOPA movement by blacking out their web site for a 24 hour period on Wednesday, tomorrow.

In a blog post earlier this week, Reddit team members said they have decided to black out the site next Wednesday from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. EST in a bid to draw attention to SOPA.

“Instead of the normal glorious, user-curated chaos of reddit, we will be displaying a simple message about how the PIPA/SOPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit,” the blog noted. PIPA, is an acronym for the Protect IPA Act, a U.S. Senate version of SOPA.

“A few months ago, many people thought this legislation would surely pass. However, there’s a new hope that we can defeat this dangerous legislation,” the Reddit team wrote.

Visitors to Reddit’s site on Jan. 18 will be presented with a live video stream of a hearing by House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on DNS and search engine blocking.

SOPA was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by Lamar Smith (R-Va.). It is co-sponsored by John Conyers (D-Mich.), Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), Howard Berman (D-Calif.) and several other lawmakers.

SOPA is ostensibly designed to make it easier for U.S. copyright and IP owners to take action against foreign sites dedicated to selling counterfeit goods, fake prescription drugs and copyrighted movies, music and other content. SOPA supporters claim such sites cause tens of billions of dollars in losses annually to U.S. companies.

The bill enjoys support from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and predictable quarters such as the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America. It also has garnered wide support from a majority of state attorneys general, law enforcement officials, hundreds of trade unions and industry groups.

Opponents say that while the intent of the bill is good, the provisions in it would lead to a form of Internet censorship.

As always, plugin and theme authors, PLEASE test your code against the beta so you can catch any incompatibilities now rather than after your users update their WordPress installation and find bugs for you. This time we really mean it, especially if your plugin uses jQuery. We’ve now updated to jQuery 1.7 in core, so please please pretty please check your plugins and themes against beta 3.

The developers are confident that this is the last release candidate and that it is ready to run on a live site, so if you want to test this out, now’s the time. If you run into any bugs, please don’t hesitate to report them and communicate with other users on the support forums.

    San Kloud

San Kloud is a blogging theme focused on typography and content. Several different color schemes to choose from.

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   zeeBusiness

zeeBusiness is a two column wordpress theme in an elegant bold design with strong colors. It comes with three navigation menus (top, main and foot), five sidebar areas (blog, pages, 3x footer) and a Featured Posts Slider.

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   Allure Real Estate Theme for Placester

The Allure Pro Real Estate theme for Real Estate Pro plugin powered sites. Placester provides all that you need to easily create robust sites for generating leads, professional branding. Easy option menus make it easy to personalize your site, create a network of sites with specific listings focused on niche markets for best results.

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Twitter is rolling out user galleries, as the feature is called, to members beginning Monday. Galleries will automatically display the 100 most recent images the user has shared by way of Twitter — dating back to January 1, 2010 — from supported photo-sharing services.

Galleries will live on a user’s profile and highlight a few recent images. A visitor can click the “view all” button to see even more images in either a grid view showing image thumbnails or a detail view highlighting the most recent image and the text of the tweet that was shared along with it.

The update ties into Twitter’s photo-sharing push and will dramatically change the appearance of Twitter profiles. Galleries will provide equal billing to images shared via third-party app makers, but also serve to remind users that Twitter is no longer a place just for 140 characters — it’s for photos too. The update is likely designed to entice Twitter users to add more photos to their tweets.

Galleries, at launch, will be image-only. Twitter Communications Manager Carolyn Penner said in a tweet that users can expect to see the update Monday. “We’re rolling out one of my fave features today: user galleries! View photos an account has shared on Twitter. Sit tight – it’s coming soon,” she tweeted.

This is just another step that shows why WordPress stopped being “just a blogging platform” long ago. For those of who think that WordPress can’t be anything more than just a blogging platform, stop by the CMS section of the official WordPress Showcase for some great examples of WordPress used as a CMS all around the world.

The Open Source Awards is an annual online event held by Packt Publishing to distinguish excellence among Open Source projects. The Award, formerly known as the Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award, is designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward a wide range of Open Source projects.

Here is a complete list of the new features:

_Video. Record, upload, attach, and play videos within the app. Yay for being able to catch your friends’ and co-workers’ most embarrassing shenanigans creative moments with iPhone video and publish them immediately for all the world to see on your WordPress site.
_A total rewrite of the way local drafts are handled, to prevent the unintentional loss of your pending posts.
_Autosave/post revisions. Bam! One of the “oh, thank goodness” features of the web app makes it into the iOS version.
_Easier setup. Faster and easier process for adding your sites to the app.
_Media Library. We’re gradually getting closer to the media management you’re used to in the web app.

There are also numerous bugfixes and performance enhancements in this release, so if you haven’t been using the app lately, you should consider giving it another try. I’m personally pretty excited to start using the iPhone version more often now that there are all these fixes and new features. Especially the video upload. You know, for those creative moments that make life fun.

You can read the full 2.6 release post on the WordPress for iOS blog, and can download v2.6 from iTunes/the app store. Happy mobile blogging!

Not an iPhone user? We’ve still got your on-the-go back! Check out the WordPress apps for Android, Blackberry, and Nokia (beta). They’re all 100% GPL, of course, and we’re always looking for contributors to the development projects, so check the blogs if you have mobile dev skills and want to get involved.

Matt Mullenweg is obviously excited, as”the most central piece of WordPress’s identity, its name, is now fully independent from any company.” Ownership of the trademark could have made Automattic millions on the name alone, but in a move praised as “extremely generous and community-minded,” they are ensuring that both WordPress and its name will never be used to unfairly profit from, confuse, or cause harm to the blogging platform, its integrity, and the community itself.

You will also begin to see recommendations for similar users when you view another account’s profile. If you’re interested in a particular user, you might be interested in these other accounts as well. All these features will be available for developers, too. They will launch an API so third parties can provide these suggestion features in your favorite desktop, mobile, and web applications. Now, go find somebody new to follow.