[New post] New Theme: Delicious Magazine

New Theme: Delicious Magazine Ian Stewart | June 16, 2011 at 6:11 pm | Categories: Themes | URL: http://wp.me/pf2B5-1TH

If you've wanted a magazine theme for your blog but haven't found just the right one today's new theme might just do it for you. It's called Delicious Magazine and it's the latest in a series of terrific magazine themes from Woothemes.

The Delicious Magazine Theme

If you love using images to draw your visitors into your writing, you'll love Delicious Magazine. Right away you can see how it uses Featured Images to build an elegant area for highlighting groups of select posts on your home page. And just like the other premium magazine themes available on WordPress.com it's packed with features that let anyone easily customize the design.

Delicious Magazine is available for the lifetime of your blog for $45. Read more about the Delicious Magazine features or preview it live on your blog from Appearance → Themes. It might be the magazine theme you've been waiting for!

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[New post] Personalize Your Blog with the New Custom Design Upgrade

Personalize Your Blog with the New Custom Design Upgrade Lance Willett | June 15, 2011 at 4:09 pm | Categories: Customization, Design, Features, New Features, Upgrade | URL: http://wp.me/pf2B5-1Rn

Today we're excited to bring you Custom Design, a powerful new tool that combines easy to use, code-free font selection from Typekit and a beautiful CSS editing interface with world-class support from our famous WordPress.com Happiness Engineers.

You'll find both new features—Fonts and CSS—under Appearance → Custom Design in your dashboard. Custom Design costs just $30 a year, and both features include a free preview so you can try them out first.

Example of Custom Design landing screen.

Fonts Made Super Easy

The Font Editor provides a visual preview of your blog with over 50 gorgeous premium Typekit fonts—from foundries like Mark Simonson, exljbris, FontFont, and the League of Moveable Type—and allows you to easily modify the size and style of your fonts. It works with all themes, no coding skills required!

Example of choosing fonts with the Font Editor.

We worked closely with Typekit on this new tool—incorporating their long experience with delivering beautiful fonts on the web—to create the best experience possible. With the Custom Design upgrade comes the ability to manage all your Typekit fonts settings from within your dashboard; you no longer need to make a roundtrip to Typekit and back to update the fonts on your blog.

If you are already using Typekit fonts on your blog, you are grandfathered in—meaning your fonts will continue to display as they do now but you'll have limited editing and functionality. To take advantage of all the new features, we encourage you to upgrade to Custom Design.

CSS Backed by Expertise

Our popular CSS editing tool received a visual refresh with its merge into the Custom Design upgrade. If you know your way around a cascading style sheet, you can use the CSS Editor to really put a personal touch on your blog and create an entirely new design.

CSS editor in action.

If your site already has custom CSS enabled, it will continue to work as it does now, and visitors will see no changes to your design. Furthermore, you've been upgraded to the new Custom Design package for free, so you now have full access to all the new features, including the Font Editor.

Along with the CSS Editor updates we're making the WordPress.com CSS forum officially supported by the WP.com Happiness team. Bring your CSS customization questions to the forum and you can get expert help.

From your feedback—and by seeing your cool customizations in use all over WordPress.com—we know that design tools on WordPress.com are put to good use, so we hope you love this new upgrade. Fonts are now incredibly easy. We're now helping you craft your CSS. Let's make something beautiful.

If you'd like more details on the new upgrade, head over to Custom Design.

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[New post] Your Own Domain Address on WordPress.com? Absolutely!

Your Own Domain Address on WordPress.com? Absolutely! Sara Rosso | June 14, 2011 at 5:07 pm | Tags: upgrades, WordPress.com | Categories: Customization, Domains, HowTo, Upgrade | URL: http://wp.me/pf2B5-1Te

Here at Automattic we feel really lucky to be able to interact with so many WordPress.com users through our awesome Happiness Engineers in Support, meeting WordPress users and lovers at various global WordCamps, and even Matt runs into WordPress users when he's on a plane (is there a better way to get Support? We think not. But let him sleep a little).

One of the most common questions we answer is, "Can I have my own domain on WordPress.com?" The answer to that question is a resounding YES!

We are happy to give you a free website at WordPress.com (something like anyaddress.wordpress.com) but if you want to also use your own domain, you can do that very easily.

You don't need to create another site - you simply need the inexpensive Domain Mapping Upgrade. In layman's terms, domain mapping just means pointing example.com to your anyaddress.wordpress.com site, so when your friends visit example.com they will see your super-cool site hosted at WordPress.com, and example.com will remain the visible address.

That's it!

• It doesn't matter where you registered your domain - you can still map it to your WordPress.com site. Check out How to Map an Existing Domain.

• Still need to get a custom domain? You can do it all through WordPress.com. Check out How to Register and Map a New Domain.

• Have a domain already, but want to put your WordPress.com site on a subdomain (like blog.example.com)? We can do that, too. Read How to Map a Subdomain.

After you map your domain, make sure you Update the Primary Domain to your shiny new personalized domain so when people visit your example.com site, that's the address that stays visible in the address bar. Instructions for doing that are in each of the above posts, or you can find it under Upgrades > Domains on that blog's dashboard after you've completed the domain mapping process.

Oh, and we're not jealous, either. If you ever decide to transfer the site off WordPress.com, you can take your domain with you, too. Check out How to Transfer a Domain and if you prefer one of our super talented Happiness Engineers to move your entire website for you to a self-hosted WordPress solution, check out Guided Transfer.

Spread the Word!

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[New post] World IPv6 Day

World IPv6 Day Ashish | June 8, 2011 at 3:44 pm | Tags: ipv6 | Categories: Technical | URL: http://wp.me/pf2B5-1S7

To show our support for IPv6, and as part of our IPv6 migration plan, we have enabled dual stack connectivity on our blog on this occasion of World IPv6 Day. If you view this site over IPv6, you will see a visual indicator confirming access from IPv6:

What's IPv6?

For those of you who don't know, IPv6 is the next-generation Internet protocol, which offers a large number of IP addresses, 296 (= 79228162514264337593543950336) times of what IPv4 has to offer. A typical IPv6 address looks like 2001:db8:cafe::1, compared to an IPv4 address 192.168.148.1. IPv4 space is quickly becoming exhausted, necessitating the migration to IPv6. You can read more about IPv6 in its Wikipedia entry or in the free book, The Second Internet. You can use IPv6 tunnels if your ISP does not offer IPv6 connectivity yet. Using http://test-ipv6.com/, you can verify IPv6 connectivity.

Behind the Scenes

This is powered by 2 load-balancers running nginx, and connectivity to IPv6 internet is through IPv6 6in4 tunnels provided by Hurricane Electric Tunnelbroker, as our datacenters have not enabled IPv6 yet.

Plans

This is not the end. Once we have native IPv6 connectivity, we are planning to roll out IPv6 connectivity for all sites on WordPress.com, and maybe all Automattic sites as well. Stay tuned for more IPv6 announcements...

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[New post] Post Comments Using Twitter and Facebook

Post Comments Using Twitter and Facebook Scott Berkun | June 7, 2011 at 6:44 pm | Categories: Features | URL: http://wp.me/pf2B5-1rk

Starting today, visitors to your blog can use their Facebook or Twitter account to leave comments. This saves everyone a few steps and gives visitors control over which identity they use.  It's a win for everyone.

As an important touch, we let you stay logged in to multiple services. This means you can stay logged in to Facebook for convenience, but still leave a comment through Twitter or your WordPress.com account. Just click whichever identity you'd like to use, and the selected one will be associated with your comment when it is published. You're in control of your identity, as you should be.

Depending on your theme, you may notice the comment area looks different than before to make room for these new features. We also intelligently choose to use a light or dark visual style for the comment box, depending on the theme you are currently using.

And since you know your readers well, you can now change the text above the comment box to be whatever you like. We recommend using the default we are applying to new blogs, "What are you thinking?", as questions often encourage more comments, but you can change it to whatever you like by going to your dashboard, then Settings → Discussion.

We know you like comments and this will help you get even more. Stay tuned for better Twitter and Facebook integration features, coming soon.

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