The “Astral” theme is basically a culmination of all my favourite news-related websites merged and ported into a friendly little three-column WordPress template. I also spent a heck of a lot of time devoted to ensuring that the graphics are as easy to customize as possible; the Astral theme also includes the highest number of Photoshop .psd files so far, too.

I’m really pleased with the outcome and I’m sure that the new three-column layout will prove a welcome change from the standard two-column designs that some of you might be familiar with. The current pricing of the latest theme - at the time of posting this - stands at a very reasonable $49.99 and is available on the Products page. Please feel free to take a gander and let me know what you think.

I’m very optimistic that everybody will be able to benefit from this fantastic deal; whether this will be the very first WordPress theme that you’re looking to purchase from us or you’re simply returning to take advantage of this offer and invest in a second or third theme, I’m sure that you’ll all agree that price cuts of up to 33% can’t be bad at all, can it?

So, if you’re interested in purchasing from us, I greatly encourage you to take a look through our growing catalogue or premier WordPress themes while the offer is still available; and remember: Christmas doesn’t last forever! So be sure to take advantage of this opportunity while it lasts!

• SEO-friendly URL redirection
• Faster javascript
• Built-in tags support
• Plugin and core update notification

Be sure to head on over to the official WordPress 2.3 Beta 1 announcement to read more.

On the Trac you can see the bugs closed for 2.2.2 and 2.0.11 to get more details about the problems fixed. With a little more Trac magic you can see all the changed files for 2.2.2 or 2.0.11.

The WordPress download page is always the where you must go in order to get this latest release, and the legacy page now has the latest available version for the 2.0 branch.

This year we’re expanding the conference to two days instead of one with the first focusing on user and blog-facing topics, like search engine optimization and podcasting, and the second day will focus on more development topics, such as usability, iterative design, and the future of publishing.

Speakers this year include several WordPress developers, Matt Cutts, John Dvorak, Robert Hoekman Jr., Dan Kuykendall, Om Malik, Rashmi Sinha, Lorelle Vanfossen, and Dave Winer. Check out the entire schedule.

Just like last year there will be free lunch (with the legendary BBQ on Sunday) and t-shirts for everybody, and a party on Saturday night. Unlike last year we’re asking for $25 to help cover costs, but if that’s a problem there are scholarships available. Registration will be closing July 9th and there will not be tickets at the door, so get yours soon.

To learn more, be sure to check out the rest of this article over at WordPress.org.

• Atom feed validation fixes (#4274, #4307, #4381, #4382)
• XML-RPC fixes (#4314, #4329, #4315, #4469)
• Widget backward compatibility fixes (#4275)
• Widget layout fixes for IE7 (#4264, #4268)
• Page and Text Widget improvements (#4302, #4259)

Unfortunately, 2.2.1 is not just a bug fix release. Some security issues came to light during 2.2.1 development, making 2.2.1 a required upgrade. 2.2.1 addresses the following vulnerabilities:

• Remote shell injection in PHPMailer
• Remote SQL injection in XML-RPC Discovered by Alexander Concha.
• Unescaped attribute in default theme

Special thanks to Alexander Concha for his continued assistance in making WordPress more secure. Special thanks also to Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software for his improvements to our XML-RPC implementation.