WPCandy

Matt Mullenweg has announced that Automattic has transferred the WordPress trademark to the non-profit WordPress Foundation, which is, according to the post, dedicated to “pro­mot­ing and ensur­ing access to Word­Press and related open source projects in per­pe­tu­ity.” Regarding the transfer, Mullenweg wrote:

“It’s impor­tant for me to know that Word­Press will be pro­tected and that the brand will con­tinue to be a bea­con of open source free­dom regard­less of whether any com­pany is as benev­o­lent as Automat­tic has been thus far. It’s impor­tant to me to know that we’ve done the right thing.”

Courtesy of WPClassroom.com we’re happy to offer two free passes to attend their upcoming WordPress classes later this month. And all you need to do to win is fan the WPCandy page on Facebook.

WP Classroom is offering two classes at the end of this month: WordPress for Beginners and Extending WordPress for Beginners. The normal price for attending both of these classes is $40, but if you like us on Facebook you could be attending these classes for free.

We have two free passes, and we’ll draw the two winners tomorrow afternoon. This is one of many upcoming Facebook-only giveaways, so even if you aren’t interested in the classes it wouldn’t hurt to send a like our way.

WordPress training site WP Classroom is back with two new courses for September–WordPress for Beginners and Extending WordPress for Beginners.

WordPress for Beginners is a 1 hour course combined with a 1 hour Q&A session that is scheduled to take place on Tuesday, September 28, 2010. The class will focus on content, including the creation and management of posts, pages, media, links, comments and more. Extending WordPress for Beginners is also a 1 hour course combined with a 1 hour Q&A session. It’s scheduled to take place on Thursday, September 30, 2010. The class will cover the installation and configuration of plugins, the installation and modification of themes, the creation and customization of menus and more. Both classes cost $25 each.

Also announced, though not yet scheduled, are advanced courses covering the topics of plugin development, theme design and Genesis theme customization. For more information, visit WP Classroom.

It’s another week, which means a new stack of solid themes have been released. Which one’s the best? That’s for you to decide.

This week’s new themes (or the new themes that we’re aware of) are in the poll below. Take a look at these new works of art, free and paid, and voice your opinion on the best of them. If you don’t see a theme that you know was released this week, enter it in the “other” option (and ping us about it, we’d like to know what we missed).

If your theme was released this week and we missed it, shoot us a note using this form. We’ll be sure to add it.

The WordPress Theme Review Team acts as the quality control for the WordPress theme directory. It’s a team that is entirely volunteer based, and is sometimes the subject of criticism from theme authors and the community.

I’m happy to publish this interview with Edward “Cais” Caissie, who has been on the Theme Review Team since June of this year. In the interview we discussed:

• The hardest part about being a theme reviewer.
• The most common mistake theme authors make.
• How the theme review process works, and what it looks like from their end.
• Why theme reviewers do what they do.

Full video and relevant links after the jump.

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In preparation for the Developer Chat later today, Jane Wells posted an explanation of the purpose of these chats on the WordPress development blog.

From the post:

It’s understandable that many people want a direct line to the lead developers, and knowing they will be in a specific place at a specific time makes it easy to corner them to pitch pet requests, but please respect that these busy individuals are continually prioritizing the pet requests of hundreds of people and millions of users. Hijacking their product team meeting doesn’t help anyone’s cause.

Dev chats are held every Thursday at 20:30 UTC on the freenote IRC network in the #wordpress-dev channel. Chats typically last one hour, and the next chat is later today.

Web apps like Facebook have experimented with a technique called infinite scroll, and now there is a simple Plugin that makes it simple to add it to your WordPress blogs.

Infinite scroll is a Javascript Plugin by Paul Irish that grabs more posts dynamically from archive pages and displays them on the bottom of the page as the visitor scrolls down. This Plugin, created by Dirk Haim, adds the necessary Javascript and offers options for tweaking its settings.

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Jane Wells has announced on the WordCamp NYC blog that they are now accepting speaker proposals. WordCamp NYC is focused on local speakers this year, so anyone in the New York area is particularly encouraged to submit ideas.

Anyone interested in speaking is being asked to comment on their blog with their proposed topic and experience.

WordCamp NYC is taking place OCtober 16, 2010 at Baruch College. You can follow the event on Twitter @wordcampnyc.

Jeremy Clarke and Brendan Sera-Shriar, both involved in the organizing of this year’s WordCamp Montreal, stepped in front of a camera to break down the event, as well as what it takes to put together a WordCamp.

WordCamp Montreal took place August 28-29 of this year, and over 200 people attended. You can follow Jeremy on Twitter @jeremyclarke and Brendan @digibomb.

Full video after the jump.

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As I mentioned in this week’s WPCandy Podcast, the Search and Replace Plugin by Frank Bueltge is helpful for replacing phrases and URL on your WordPress website. In this tutorial we’re going to look at how to use it.

Rather than search through your posts and pages to change something like a URL string, or a particular phrase, this Plugin searches through the tables in your WordPress database and does the job quickly.

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