Next you’ll begin to notice the new features subtly sprinkled through the new interface: the new dashboard that you can arrange with drag and drop to put the things most important to you on top, QuickPress, comment threading, paging, and the ability to reply to comments from your dashboard, the ability to install any plugin directly from WordPress.org with a single click, and sticky posts.

Digging in further you might notice that every screen is customizable. Let’s say you never care about author on your post listings — just click “Screen Options” and uncheck it and it’s instantly gone from the page. The same for any module on the dashboard or write screen. If your screen is narrow and the menu is taking up too much horizontal room, click the arrow to minimize it to be icon-only, and then go to the write page and drag and drop everything from the right column into the main one, so your posting area is full-screen. (For example I like hiding everything except categories, tags, and publish. I put categories and tags on the right, and publish under the post box.)

It’s all about you. It’s the next generation of WordPress, which is why we’ve bestowed it with the honor of being named for John Coltrane. And you can download it today.

Last, but certainly not least, this may be the last time you ever have to manually upgrade WordPress again. We heard how tired you were of doing upgrades for yourself and your friends, so now WordPress includes a built-in upgrade that will automatically notify you of new releases, and when you’re ready it will download them, install them, and upgrade your blog with a single click.

(As with any interface change it may take a little bit of time to acclimate yourself but soon you’ll find yourself whizzing through the screens. Even people who have hated it at first tell us after a few days they wonder how they got by before.)

The Story Behind 2.7

The real reason Coltrane is such a huge leap forward is because the community was so involved with every step of the process. Over 150 people contributed code directly to the release, our highest ever, with many tens of thousands more participating in the polls, surveys, tests, mailing lists, and other feedback mechanisms the WordPress dev team used in putting this release together.

For some of the back story in the development of 2.7, check out these blog posts (thanks to WeblogToolsCollection for the list):

• Usability Testing Report: 2.5 and CrazyHorse
• The New 2.7 Dashboard
• The Visual Design of 2.7
• WordPress 2.7 wireframes
• Comprehensive Codex Article on WordPress 2.7
• WordPress Development Updates from Jane Wells
• WordPress Usability Testing in New York
• WordPress 2.7 UI Configurability from Ryan Boren
• Customizable Post Editing Screen from Mark Jaquith
• WordPress 2.7 Navigation Survey from Jane Wells
• Shortcuts/Favorites Menu from Jane Wells
• CrazyHorse Presentation at WordCamp SF
• WordPress 2.7 Walkthrough by Matt
• WordPress 2.7 and beyond from Matt at WordCamp Utah

This was interesting to us, a blogging software release we actually blogged about, but the process was hugely informative. Prior to its release today Crazyhorse and 2.7 had been tested by tens of thousands of people on their blogs, hundreds of thousands of you count .com. The volume of feedback was so high that we decided to push back the release date a month to take time to incorporate it all and do more revisions based on what you guys said.

For those of you wondering why we didn’t call this release 3.0, it’s because we abhor version number inflation. 3.0 will just be the next release after 2.9. The major features in new point releases approach also works well for products like OS X, with huge changes between a 10.3 and 10.4.

The Future

Those of you following along at home might have noticed this was our second major redesign of WordPress this year. Whoa nelly! While that wasn’t ideal, and I especially sympathize with those of you creating books or tutorials around WordPress, there’s good news. The changes to WordPress in 2.5 and 2.7 were necessary for us to break free of much of the legacy cruft and interface bloat that had built up over the years (gradually) and more importantly provide us with a UI framework and interface language we can use at the foundation to build tomorrow’s WordPress on, to express ideas we haven’t been able to before. So at the end of 2009 I expect, interface-wise, WordPress to look largely the same as it does now.

That said, we couldn’t be more excited about the future with regards to features. Now that we’ve cleared out more basic things, we are looking forward in the coming year to really tackling media handling including audio and video, better tools for plugin and theme developers, widgets, theme updates, more integrated and contextual help, and easier integration with projects like BuddyPress and bbPress.”

Matt Mullenweg. WordPress.org

We think RC1 is ready for everyone to try out.  Please download RC1 and help us make the final release the best it can be.  As always, back up your blog before upgrading.”

Ryan Boren. WordPress.org

Download WordPress 2.7 RC1 »

Version 2.5.1 of WordPress is now available. It includes a number of bug fixes, performance enhancements, and one very important security fix. We recommend everyone update immediately, particularly if your blog has open registration. The vulnerability is not public but it will be shortly.

In addition to the security fix, 2.5.1 contains many bug fixes. If you are interested only in the security fixes, you can download these corrected copies of wp-includes/pluggable.php, wp-admin/includes/media.php, and wp-admin/media.php. Replace your existing copies of these files with these new copies.

If you download the entire 2.5.1 release, you will be getting over 70 other fixes. 2.5.1 focuses on fixing the most annoying bugs and improving performance. Here are some highlights:

• Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages.
• Better performance for those who have many categories
• Media Uploader fixes
• An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7
• Widget Administration fixes
• Various usability improvements
• Layout fixes for IE

Secret lives of blogs

Since 2.5 your wp-config.php file allows a new constant called SECRET_KEY which basically is meant to introduce a little permanent randomness into the cryptographic functions used for cookies in WordPress. You can visit this link we set up to get a unique secret key for your config file. (It’s unique and random on every page load.) Having this line in your config file helps secure your blog.

Many thanks to Steven Murdoch for responsibly reporting the security issue (CVE-2008-1930) and Alex Concha for reporting an XSS issue.

[via WordPress.org]

Download the newest version of WordPress »

WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.

For a short overview of the features with screenshots, it’d be best to visit our sneak peek announcement for RC1. Or check out a 4-minute screencast of the new interface in action. If you just want to jump straight to the good stuff here’s where you can find 2.5 upgrade and download information.

If you want to see everything I would grab a cup of coffee or a mojito, because this post is epic.

User Features

Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard — we’ve worked hard to take your feedback about what’s most important in the dashboard and organize things to allow you to focus on what’s important — your blog — and get out of your way. In collaboration with Happy Cog and the community we’ve taken the first major step forward in the WordPress interface since version 1.5.

Dashboard Widgets — the dashboard home page is now a series of widgets, including ones to show you fun stats about your posting, latest comments, people linking to you, new and popular plugins, and of course WordPress news. You can customize any of the dashboard widgets to show, for example, news from your local paper instead of WP news. Plugins can also hook in, for example the WordPress.com stats widget adds a handy double-wide stats box.

Multi-file upload with progress bar — before when you would upload a large file you’d wait forever, never knowing how far along it was. And uploading more than one photo was an exercise in patience, as you could only do one at a time. Now you can select a whole of folder images or music or videos at once and it’ll show you the progress of each upload.

Bonus: EXIF extraction — if you upload JPEG files with EXIF metadata like camera make and model, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, et al. WordPress will extract all the data into custom fields you can use in your template. If you use the EXIF title fields or similar those will be put into their equivalent fields in WP. Most modern digital cameras generate EXIF data.

Search posts and pages — search used to cover just posts, now it includes pages too, a great boon for those using WordPress as a CMS. New themes can style or sort pages differently in results.

Tag management — you can now add, rename, delete, and do whatever else you like to tags from inside WordPress, no plugins needed.

Password strength meter — when you change your password on your profile it’ll tell you how strong your password is to help you pick a good one.

Concurrent editing protection — for those of you on multi-author blogs, have you ever opened a post while someone was already editing it, and your auto-saves kept overwriting each other, irrecoverably losing hours of work? I bet that added a few words to your vocabulary. Now if you open a post that someone else is editing, WordPress magically locks it and prevents you from saving until the other person is done. You’ll see a message like below.

Few-click plugin upgrades — if the plugins you use are part of the plugin directory since 2.3 we’ve told you when they have an update available. Now we take that to the next logical step — downloading and installing the upgrade for you. This is dependent a little bit on your host setup, and it may ask you for your FTP password much like OS X or Windows will ask you for a password, but it works well on majority of hosts we were able to test, your mileage may very, plugins in mirror may be larger than they appear.

Friendlier visual post editor — I’m not sure how to articulate this improvement except to say “it doesn’t mess with your code anymore.” We’re now using version 3.0 of TinyMCE, which means better compatibility with Safari, and we’ve paid particular attention this release to its integration and interaction with complex HTML. It also now has a “no-distractions” mode which is like Writeroom for your browser.

Built-in galleries — when you take advantage of multi-file upload to upload a bunch of photos, we have a new shortcode that lets you to easily embed galleries by just putting [ gallery] (without the space) in your post. It’ll display all your thumbnails and captions and each will link each to a page where people can comment on the individual photos. I’ve been using this feature on my blog and have already uploaded over 1,200 pictures into 23 galleries. The shortcode has some hidden options too, check out this documentation.

Developer Features

Now for the geeky stuff. While we’re excited about the above features, each one represents a new opportunity or API for other developers to take to another level. (The best of which we’ll someday integrate back into WP.)

Salted passwords — we now use the phpass library to stretch and salt all passwords stored in the database, which makes brute-forcing them impractical. If you use something like mod_auth_mysql we’ve created a plugin that will allow you to use legacy MD5 hashing. (The hashing is completely pluggable.) Users will automatically switch to the more secure passwords next time they log in.

Secure cookies — cookies are now encrypted based on the protocol described in this PDF paper. which is something like user name|expiration time|HMAC( user name|expiration time, k) where k = HMAC(user name|expiration time, sk) and where sk is a secret key, which you can define in your config.

Easy taxonomy and URL creation — probably best illustrated with an example: I can call register_taxonomy() with a few arguments to register a “people” taxonomy and whenever I edit an image I’ll see a UI like tags has for identifying the people in a photo, and these will be URL addressable with /person/firstname-lastname/. All with a single function call.

Inline documentation — the vast majority of the new code going into WordPress include inline documentation that explains the functions and documents their arguments.

Database optimization — we haven’t changed the table layout in this release, which is one of the reasons so many plugins work fine with 2.5. We have added a few new indicies and made a few default fields more flexible based on some bottlenecks we found on WordPress.com, which now hosts 2.7 million WordPress blogs. It should be invisible to the application, just a bit faster on the database side.

$wpdb->prepare() — now almost all of the SQL in WordPress is prepared first, and the same functions are available to your plugins. This should prevent elementary SQL escaping issues.

Media buttons — the add media buttons above the post are both expandable, so you could have an “Add Google Map” button if you like, They can be overridden, so if you think you can do the video or audio tab better than we have you can replace the default.

Shortcode API — the new gallery functionality is powered by the new shortcode API. Shortcodes are little bracket-delineated strings that can be magically expanded at runtime to something more interesting. They give users a short, easy to type and copy/paste string they can move around their post without worrying about messing up complex HTML or embed codes. The Shortcode API is fully documented.

Now you see why 2.5 took a little extra time.

Upgrade Notes

2.5 does include security fixes so it is recommended for all users, the 2.3 branch will no longer be updated. The upgrade instructions for this version are pretty much the same as any other version. The most important thing to check is your plugins, so if for example everything works except the new uploader, a legacy plugin might be causing a javascript error on the page and breaking it. If something goes wrong, the safest thing to do is turn your plugins off (we have a button to do them all at once, now) and turn them back on one-by-one, testing the problem along the way. This has solved almost everybody’s problems in testing, and it also lets you know which plugin author to show some love to so they’ll update their plugin, and which plugin authors already have so you can shower them with praises on your blog.

One brief note about some of the new upload and plugin upgrade features, there are some edge-case hosting platforms, like versions of Lighttpd before 1.5 or over-agressive mod_security rules, which can break. If something isn’t working like it was looked in the screenshot, ask your host if there’s something on the server side which may be interfering. Hosts, feel free to join and post to our wp-testers mailing list if you have an environment that requires some extra code to work around. We’d be happy to include it in the next update.

Quick tip: in 2.5 you click the name of things to edit them, like your username to edit your profile or the title of a post to edit it.

The Community is Growing

More than growing, it’s on fire. We always talk about things like downloads, and the 2.3 branch has already had 1.92 million downloads as I write this post, but this time we have some far more interesting information I’d like to share.

There were over 1,200 commits to our repository since 2.3.0 and over 90 people were credited in them. This means in our core code, not plugins, there were at least 90 individual folks that contributed something high-quality enough that it made the cut to be part of the download you guys get today. I had no idea this group of people was so large.

Outside of the core commit team, there was particular help from these people, in rough order of number of credits and tickets: mdawaffe (Michael Adams), azaozz (Andrew Ozz), nbachiyski (Nikolay Bachiyski), andy (Andy Skelton), iammattthomas (Matt Thomas), tellyworth (Alex Shiels), josephscott (Joseph Scott), lloydbudd (Lloyd Budd), DD32 (Dion), filosofo (Austin Matzko), hansengel (Hans Engel), pishmishy, ffemtcj, Viper007Bond, ionfish (Benedict Eastaugh), jhodgdon (Jennifer Hodgdon), Otto42, thee17 (Charles E. Free-Melvin), and xknown. Also want to thank MichaelH and Lorelle on the documentation side, and moshu, Kafkaesqui, whooami, MichaelH, Otto42, and jeremyclark13 for helping with support.

The 2.5 branch is nicknamed “Brecker” in honor of Michael Brecker, an exceptionally talented saxophonist who could cross styles effortlessly and never stopped experimenting and pushing himself until he passed away last year.

New WordPress.org

All of this wasn’t enough, so in our copious spare time we decided to redesign WordPress.org to better match the aesthetics of the new dashboard and also to spruce up a few areas that needed lovin’. Some parts of the site, like the Codex, might show the old style for a day or two. We know, just give us a bit of time. Thanks to Matt Thomas for his epic effort in designing and coding the new site.

What’s Next

As always with WordPress, we don’t claim any of these features to be perfect, or to be better than everyone else in the world, but they are done by and for the people and the one thing we do promise is that with every release we listen and do our best to improve.

2.5 is a major milestone for WordPress not because it added dozens of user-requested features, but because it reaffirms that we’re as passionate about blogging as the day we started. Our community is too fierce to rest on its laurels — contrary to what pundits claim, blogging is far from “finished” and every improvement just whets our appetite for more. And more is coming.

It’s a good thing WordPress doesn’t limit the length of posts, because this one would have hit it. If you made it this far, thanks for sharing a bit of your day with us. I sincerely hope this new version of WordPress helps you do what you love to do.

[via WordPress.org]

Download the newest version of WordPress »

via ProAffiliateIncome.com

“There’s a war going on in the blogosphere, and it has nothing to do with bloggers dissing each other on their respective websites. The war is about control of the blogosphere by several great, many good, and tons of terrible blogging platforms. The average newbie now has “too many” options to choose from, and the battle for blogging supremacy is hotter than ever.

At my website and blogs, I’m always asked the question “Is Wordpress better than Blogger?”. The answer, of course, is “Yes”. But to really understand why, it’s important to look at both blogging platforms side-by-side and see which one you really need. Here’s the comparison scale:

1) Ease of Set-up And Use

Yes, it’s much easier to set-up a blog with Blogspot.com and get your own Bloggger account. You can be done in 10 minutes flat. Once you’re set-up you can start posting immediately. If you want to add a designer’s touch to your blog, there are also tons of blogger templates available for free.

Installing Wordpress however can be a major headache if you don’t know what you’re doing. Since you’re going to host it on your own account, you’ll need to download the installation files, upload them to your server, set-up a database, and run the configuration script.

However, if you know which hosting account to get, you can choose one with Cpanel included. With Cpanel, you can do a one-click installation, upgrade and removal of your Wordpress platform.

2) Customization & Advanced Use

Blogger doesn’t allow categories. You can’t sort your articles into different focuses, unless you know how to hack the platform. With Wordpress, not only can you add categories, you can also display each category differently on your main page. In fact with the correct plugins you can even turn your Wordpress into a magazine-like portal.

Publishing with Blogger can be a pain in the ass. It can take forever to post articles, especially if you’re making changes to the entire website. With Wordpress, publishing is much faster, although if you load your system with all kinds of bells and whistles it can be just as frustrating. With a Blogger account, you can get additional features like “Shout Boxes” that improve interaction on your site. You can also get pretty themes and nifty little tools that you can add to the core template files. However, that’s as far as you can go with Blogger.

With Wordpress however, the sky is the limit. As cliche as that may sound, not only can you get themes, additional “plugins” and advanced tools, you can also extend Wordpress to far beyond just a blogging platform. The talk today is about using Wordpress as a complete, user-friendly Content Management System or CMS.

4) Copyrights and Ownership of Content

I started with Blogger and I won’t say that it’s bad. But after a while I started to get frustrated with Blogger, and here’s why: Google Owns Your Content!

Google has the authority to shut down your account without warning if they don’t like what you’re blogging about. You don’t have absolute control over your own blog. With Wordpress, you own the domain name and the blog is hosted on your own account. You have full control over your content.

With the self-hosted version of Wordpress (not Wordpress.com), you’re free to write about anything you want, and use the software in any way you want. Yes, Blogger allows you to publish to your own domain, but they still own the database that holds your content! Don’t forget that!

5) Search Engine Optimization and Traffic

There’s this propaganda that since Google owns Blogger, they tend to favor Blogger accounts. I won’t say that this is illogical, but from my experience, there’s no such favoritism.

I’ve heard as many stories of getting indexed fast and ranking high in search engines from both Wordpress and Blogger users. As long as the content is good, the spiders will come.

When you post in Blogger, you can only “ping” a limited amount of sites, whereas with Wordpress on your own domain you can ping as many blog directories as you want, and start getting more traffic.

As a conclusion, I would say that Wordpress is only slightly ahead in terms of optimization for search engines, and building large amounts of traffic.

6) Money-Making Potential

There’s no doubt that it’s easier to get started with Google Adsense if you have a Blogger account. In fact you can now apply for Adsense from within a Blogger account. Not entirely surprising considering the fact that both are owned by the same company.

With Wordpress, it can get tricky. The default installation is not enough. You’ll need a couple of plugins and even a better theme to really maximize the Adsense potential. However, this seems to be getting easier and there’s even “Adsense revenue sharing” plugins around that allow you to share ad revenue with other contributors and writers for your blog.

When you start using Wordpress to build your Adsense websites, you’ll soon discover what I mean. It’s something you need to experience for yourself. I can tell you one thing though – when you go Wordpress, you don’t go back.”

[via ProAffiliateIncome.com]

Also, there is a vulnerability in the WP-Forum plugin that is being actively exploited right now. If you are using this plugin, please remove it until an update is available from its author.

Since we are talking security, remember to use strong passwords and change them regularly.  While you’re updating WP and your plugins, consider refreshing your passwords.

[via WordPress.org]

“AdSense-Deluxe is an easy-to-use plugin for WordPress for quickly inserting Google or Yahoo! ads into your blog posts, and managing when and where those ads are displayed. It was developed for my own use after an exhaustive search for a similar tool turned up nothing adequate.

Have you added Google AdSense to your WordPress blog yet? Or maybe thought about it? I was thinking about this last year and knew I could do it generically in the templates, or painfully by pasting the AdSense code into each post I wanted it in, but neither seemed like the optimal way to accomplish my aims. I wanted some flexibility in deciding which posts ads appear in and perhaps some control of which ad format would display in any given blog post.

I found Phil Hord’s AdSense WordPress plugin and gave it a test. It’s simplicity was great and it offered some of the control I thought I wanted while avoiding template changes. Phil’s plugin is configured by pasting your AdSense code into the plugin PHP file, then adding an HTML comment (“<!–adsense–>”) anywhere in a post, then your ads are substituted for the placeholder when the post is served. The plugin operates in the common role of a WordPress filter hook.

Working from Phil’s simple and effective design, I started digging into the basics of WordPress plugin coding to add some of my the items on my wish list. The first item on the list was having a choice in different AdSense code blocks. It would have been trivial to just put all the different blocks into the PHP code and use a bit of conditional logic for choosing among them, but that’s not very nice for anyone not comfortable mucking about in PHP source code. Which led me to discovering that plugins can have their own configuration pages….Cool! :-)

Download: AdSense-Deluxe WordPress Plugin v. 0.8

AdSense-Deluxe Features

1. Use simple HTML comments for embedding AdSense or Yahoo! Publisher Network ads in a WordPress post
2. Choose from any number of ad styles and format on a post-by-post basis
3. Globally change ad styles
4. Selectively disable display of individual ad styles or all ads
5. Integrated AdSense Preview tool (a sandbox) for seeing what ads will appear on a given page. (Stand-alone AdSense SandBox Tool also available)
6. All settings configured through WordPress Options interface (no knowledge of plugins or PHP required)
7. Easily test different ad formats and color styles across (all, or) a range of blog posts.
8. (Optionally) Apply CSS formatting to the AdSense code.
9. Does not display live ads when editing a page, instead placeholders are shown.
10. Ads are EXCLUDED from RSS feeds — even if you have full-text feeds enabled. (new in v0.3)
11. Preview your ad blocks from the AdSense-Deluxe options page (in case you forget what the ad style looks like), and ads can be clicked without penalty since they use a test account.
12. Support for wp-tiger-admin plugin’s CSS in post/page editor QuickTags.

AdSense-Deluxe Advantages and Uses

1. Switching all AdSense ads to a new color scheme across the entire site
2. Trying out image ads instead of textual ads
3. Testing alternate AdSense formats
4. Disabling a class of AdSense ads, or even all ads
5. Including common formatting for AdSense ad blocks (less typing)
6. Testing alternate ad placements for higher click-thru rates
7. Controlling ads within your WP template files.”

Read more on the official site »

[Via Acme Technologies Zeitgeist]

Download: AdSense-Deluxe WordPress Plugin v. 0.8

This theme might look pretty basic… that’s because it is!

The theme has been designed to be quickly added to any WordPress site with no customisation. There is no need to alter header images because there aren’t any… like Kubrick it relies on text generated from your blogs title and description, and also from the category and post descriptions.

AdSense is integrated (3 units per page, and one linkunit ~ the maximum Google allows), and the theme also includes AdSense for search in place of the standard WordPress search function. Of course, it is easy to switch out AdSense for any other advertising program you may wish to use, the banners are standard sizes.

Some basic SEO has been carried out… the “title” and “h1? tags contain the most relevant information… on a post page, the post title is used, on a category the category title is used etc. This should give Search Engines a better understanding of your page, and hence an improved ranking for your page. Another often overlooked advantage of correct use of tags is that your result in the SERPs will be formed correctly, so instead of your websites name (eg. pilkster.com) being used in every result, the page title (eg. SEO AdSense WordPress Theme) or category title will be used. This is a much more useful and appealing result for the searcher.

This theme is also compatible with Amazon Plugin For Wordpress.

AdSense is located in the following files; header.php (728?15 linkunit), footer.php (728?90 adunit), sidebar.php (336?280 adunit, 160?600 adunit). AdSense for search is located in searchform.php.

The theme is intentionally basic and should be simple to build up and out from. If you use this theme as-is, or build a new theme from it, please let me know by commenting on this post.

Important User Notes

Please remember to change the Publisher ID for the default AdSense units after you upload the theme! You’ll need to insert your personal AdSense publisher id (e.g. pub-xxxxxx) in the various AdSense units that you decide to use.

[Via pilkster]

Download: SEO AdSense WordPress Theme

This fast loading and easily customizable theme is built to accommodate heavy contextual ad monetization: Its very infrastructure is designed to direct maximum attention to Adsense ads while preserving as much focus as possible on your blog content.

Download ProSense | ProSense Blue | ProSense Grey | Test Site

Featuring built-in ad units with optimized placement and blending, ProSense’s broad design scheme makes it easily suitable for a wide variety of niche topics or content types.

A Guide to the ProSense Theme Features

ProSense was created with the aim of including several features which we knew most bloggers would find useful. One of these is the freedom to choose which type of ad units should be automatically displayed.

While designed to effortlessly incorporate a large amount of AdSense ads, ProSense allows you to have complete control over the amount of ads displayed and therefore is even suitable for bloggers who are not seeking to heavily monetize their blogs.

Here are some of the theme features, some of which are currently exclusive to ProSense:

• Separate and Distinct Ad Blocks. The use of distinct theme files for ad codes allows for easy editing and insertion of AdSense units. These ad blocks can also be used to insert other types of advertisements as well and are not solely limited to Adsense use.
• Multiple Ad Display Options. Unlike other Adsense Ready themes, ProSense allows you to choose between either banner or rectangle ads for the single post page, thus allowing you more flexibility when it comes to ad blending.
• Hassle-free convenience and ease of use. You?ll only have to insert your Adsense publisher ID in the default ad units and you?re done. It should only take a minute or two to set up ProSense perfectly.
• Integrated Ad placement on the homepage. Unlike most Adsense ready themes currently available, ProSense blends a 468 x 60 banner unit between the second and third post on the blog homepage.
  This enables you to display relevant ads to search visitors who arrive at your homepage, as they are more likely to scroll and scan through your posts.The inclusion of a well-blended horizontal link unit near the top of the homepage also attracts navigational-style visitor clicks.
• Highly Optimized Ad units on post pages. There are two types of ad blocks on both the top and bottom of the single post page. You can choose between using a 468 x 60 banner and 300 x 250 rectangle at the top of the post or a 468 x 60 banner and 336 x 280 large rectangle at the bottom of the post.
  The ability to designate and match different ad units is exclusive to ProSense and is currently not available for other Adsense Ready themes.
• Pre-blended Adsense unit colors. All Adsense unit colors are tweaked to match the blog?s link and background colors. There is absolutely no need for you to spend time picking the appropriate ad colors.
• Search Engine Optimized site structure. ProSense is built from good, clean code that validates well. The CSS positioning is written so that your blog content is prioritized in the source code as this may help to improve search engine crawling and ranking. Dynamic and descriptive title tags are also used for each blog page.
• Compatible with Wordpress 2.0+. ProSense has been tested with the latest 2.2 Getz version of Wordpress and no problems were experienced.
• Widget-Ready. If you?re a widget lover, you?ll be happy to know that Prosense allows you to easily install and use widgets to complement your content and advertising scheme.

Important User Notes

Please remember to change the Publisher ID for the default AdSense units after you upload the theme! You’ll need to insert your personal AdSense publisher id (e.g. pub-xxxxxx) in the various AdSense units that you decide to use.

All the ad units are found in the following theme files:

Single Post Pages:

• adsense_singlepost_top_square.php – 300 x 250 Medium Rectangle
• adsense_singlepost_top_banner.php – 468 x 60 Banner
• adsense_singlepost_bottom_square.php – 336 x 280 Rectangle
• adsense_singlepost_bottom_banner.php - 468 x 60 Banner

Homepage:

• adsense_sidebar.php - 160 x 600 Skyscraper
• adsense_homepage_linkunit.php – 468 x 15_4 Link Unit
• adsense_homepage_banner.php – 468 x 60 Skyscraper

Alternate Color Schemes for ProSense

For those you would prefer a different color scheme, we?ve also provided ProSense in a clean blue or grey color combination so feel free to download these versions if they find them more to your liking.

Theme Support and Feedback

Theme support will be provided on this post itself so please leave a comment here if you have any queries. Any feedback on the theme will also be much appreciated.

Upgraded versions of the theme will be released in the near future so you might want to subscribe via RSS feed to get free updates.”

[Via: Dosh Dosh]

Download ProSense | ProSense Blue | ProSense Grey | Test Site