Welcome to another Blogosphere News edition. Today’s topics are: the new interface of WordPress 2.7, the release of WordPress 2.6.3,a debate on the rapid upgrade schedule of WP and the recently released Tell-a-Friend widget.

WordPress 2.7 is getting prettier

With each day that passes, the previews of WordPress 2.7 show us a more and more visually appealing application. After giving people a preview of the WP 2.7 Dashboard (which by the way, Rocks!), the devs are now looking for the perfect icon designer to create an original icon set for WP’s main administration menu.

It’s actually the first time when WordPress introduces icons for their menus and, if you think you got the skills (experience in the field is required), follow this link.

WordPress 2.6.3 is out

Big community, a lot of love, a lot of updates. That’s WordPress. 2.6.3 is out now and it’s supposed to fix a security flaw in the administration dashboard, a vulnerability in the Snoopy library which WordPress uses to display the dashboard feeds.

In regard to the update cycle, Chris Garrett said yesterday:

A number of people have complained to me about the WordPress upgrade cycle. Today I am sure to get more people complaining. Yes, there is yet another WordPress version out.

I think this is amazing. How can you complain if the one application that allows you to get your a*s online in less then 5 minutes, for free, is getting rapid updates? Do you people know how much time I spend waiting for different applications that I use to upgrade, praying that they finally get their bugs fixed? Compared to having no updates, WordPress it’s a blessing!

Tell-a-Friend Widget

The concept behind the Tell-a-Friend widget is not new. Services like ShareThis or AddThis have already been there, but Tell-a-Friends swears to have something new, to enable your readers to recommend and share content directly with their friends in a one-to-one way through e-mail, IM, social networks, or even their blog.

The widget is also very customizable, and here’s what the developers say about it:

You can customize Tell-a-Friend in any way you like. Change color, size, included features, channels and outbound messaging. Imagine your users sharing professional looking, formatted messages that carry your branding without being caught by spam filters.

Along with the free version, a corporate version has been released, that allows even more customization options, including branding the widget UI skin and control over the activity database.

Here’s a short video presentation of Tell-a-Friend:

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