UPDATE: 09/03/07
While browsing through my files, I found the customization kit for the Dark Black theme. The kit is what you’ll need to create your own customized header for this theme. If you want it, just leave a comment with your email address and I’ll send it to you.

UPDATE: 08/05/07
I found out from Nemo’s comment that OneMoreRevision can’t be accessed at this time. If anyone wants to have this theme, just leave a comment with your email address and I’ll send the zip file to your inbox.

Dark Black is a beautiful theme scheme created OneMoreRevision for the popular Dark theme by Bartelme. Dark Black works exactly as the original theme and the only difference is the color scheme.

The Dark Black theme has been tested on WordPress 2.1.3 and browsers like Firefox, Safari, IE 6 & 7. It’s been validated as XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.0 compliant and supports the following WordPress plugins:

• flickrRSS
• Gravatar
• Ultimate Tag Warrior
• WP-PageNavi

You can also download the Dark Black customization kit to create a personalized logo. Right now, the kit doesn’t include instructions so you’ll have to figure it out yourself.

Screenshot:

My Take:
The Dark Black is a beautiful “dark” WordPress theme. If you love dark themes, you’ll definitely love this one and I’m pretty sure you’ll be downloading it soon afterwards. Personally, I like it more than the original theme. I think the color scheme suits the design better. The author, Brad Bowen did a really good job with this theme.

When I first saw this theme, I was tempted to use it here on JaypeeOnline but changed my mind because I know some readers might have a hard time reading my posts with the dark background. IMO, this theme would be fine for personal blogs or photoblogs but not for blogs that have lengthy or wordy posts.

The only drawback that I can see for this theme is that it isn’t widget-ready. Although it might not be long before someone decides to make this theme widget-ready. So for those who use widgets, you’ll just have to wait. I give this theme a 4.5 out of 5.

Check out or Download the Dark Black theme for WordPress.

UPDATED: 4/20

A few days ago, I asked this question: Are you Looking Forward to WordPress 2.2? as the release for WordPress 2.2 was scheduled to be on Monday, April 23rd. However, Matt announced yesterday that the release would be delayed for at least a week or two as the guys from the WordPress dev team try to polish things up.

The tagging system which is one of the features that’s supposed to be included in WordPress 2.2, will be included in the next release, version 2.3. But it’s a good thing though coz the dev team is making sure that when the tagging feature is added, it would be totally compatible with the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin making it easy to import your current tags into the new tagging system. This is good news for me and everyone else who’s using UTW.

While the tagging feature has been put off, WordPress on the other hand has included several new features and improvements.

• Improved comment editing
• Multiple format comment feeds, including Atom
• phpmailer integrated for performance and maintainability
• Plugin Sandboxing to Test Drive Plugins
• Default and Classic WordPress Themes widgetized

What I’m looking forward to in this coming release is the Plugin Sandboxing feature. I believe that this would be very useful to a lot of bloggers like me, the type who likes to install and try new plugins. Anyways, all we can do for now is sit back, relax and wait for WordPress 2.2 to be released.

Dougal Campbell on his blog Geek Ramblings, talks about another feature that hopefully will be added in the WordPress 2.2 release, which is the “Deactivate All Plugins” option that can be done with a single click. This is a time saver especially when you want to upgrade your WordPress installation. No more going through the plugins one by one, all you have to do is click on the “Deactivate All Plugins” button. This was one of the things that I hoped WordPress would implement and now it’s gonna be a reality.

Btw, also check out Jhay’s post – WordPress 2.2 Delayed: Removed tagging support.

The theme is called Skittlish. It was created by Cristi Balan for Mephisto, a Ruby on Rails weblog publishing system. Cristi deserves the vast majority of credit and love for this theme. I simply threw some WordPress guts into it. I was a bit unsure if it was kosher to port Skittlish as I couldn’t find a license for it, but after a couple of failed attempts to contact Cristi I went ahead and ported the sucker.

Screenshot:

Skittlish has been tested with the latest versions of Firefox, Safari, Flock, Camino, OmniWeb, and Opera. Other features of Skittlish include Christian Montoya‘s comment.php template, support for hatom and built-in support for the following WordPress plugins:

• Ultimate Tag Warrior
• Similar Posts
• Live Comment Preview
• Gravatars
• Get Recent Comments
• OpenID plugin

Skittlish works right out of the box and would work fine with or without the mentioned plugins.

Skittlish is designed to work with later versions of WordPress, meaning versions 2.0 and up. So if you’re running an older version of WordPress and encounter any problems, the reason for it would be the 2.1 specific tags. The best thing to do is upgrade your WordPress installation.

My Take:
I love clean themes and that means that I also love this theme but not enough to make me change my current theme. What I love most about it is it’s seven color option. The fixed or fluid width option is a cool feature since visitors have different screen resolutions and they can adjust the theme to fit their screen. But for the blog owner, you have to make sure that the images and other media that you insert in your posts aren’t too wide or else you’ll have them overlapping into your sidebar when the width is made narrow. One more thing, Skittlish is not widget-ready. Overall, I give it a 3.5 out of 5.

Preview or Download the Skittlish WordPress theme.

If you’re using the latest version of Ultimate Tag Warrior and plan to upgrade to WordPress 2.1, don’t!

While I was looking for a fix for my trackback problem, I found out that using Ultimate Tag Warrior version 3.141592 with WordPress 2.1 will cause you to lose all your tags on a post whenever a new comment is added, deleted, or unapproved. I was guilty of using both so I checked my recent posts after the WordPress upgrade and true enough, my tags were all gone. I had to add all the tags back for each post.

Ultimate Tag Warrior is a very good plugin however, the current version doesn’t work with WordPress 2.1. This issue has already been verified as a bug and expect to see an update.

In the meantime, if you’re also a victim of this don’t fret. Moeffju has a manual fix for it. Below is the steps on how to do it.

How to fix it:

1. In the UTW folder look for: -actions.php & -actions-wordpress2.php.
2. Open both files with your text editor.
3. Look for function ultimate_save_tags($postID).
(-actions.php go to line 499 and -actions-wordpress2.php go to line 424).
4. Right after the curly bracket “{“, insert these lines:

if (!is_admin()) return $postID;
if (!isset($_POST['tagset'])) return $postID;

5. Save the files, upload them via FTP & overwrite existing files.

That should fix the problem. I also did this and so far it has solved the issue.

If you would like to try another plugin to work with your tags, another option is to use Bunny’s Technorati Tags.