It took me a while to get back to work on Green Park after a little break and some vacations. So, this is only a small update to the translations for Green Park 2 Beta 5 but Beta 6 is on the way. Thanks to the following users, the theme now features native support for 12+1 language.

1. Chinese by wxzbb
2. English (default) by me
3. French by Julien
4. German by Andreas Jacob
5. Icelandic by Jóhannes Birgir Jensson
6. Italian by Saverio Tonno
7. Norwegian Bokmål by Bjørn-Arild Eriksen-Woll
8. Polish by Tosiek
9. Romanian by Cristian Boba
10. Russian (formal) by Dr. Dmitry Tarasov
11. Russian (informal) by Perllover
12. Spanish (castellano) by José Manuel Mao
13. Swedish by Jon Klarström

Many thanks for your contributions!

The new release (still Beta 5) is now available for download from the Green Park 2 page and should be available within a few hours from WordPress.org.

Late last month I released Green Park 2 Beta 4 with a small support for i18n — thanks to a lot of people with a lot more eyes than I have, I could fix around 15 smaller issues, two bugs and I got a lot of feedback regarding the i18n of the theme. Thanks to the community, we have support for the following languages:

1. Chinese by wxzbb
2. English (default) by me
3. French by Julien
4. German by Andreas Jacob
5. Polish by Tosiek
6. Spanish (castellano) by José Manuel Mao
7. Swedish by Jon Klarström

I’d love to see your language here as well Please check this posting: Green Park 2 – for translators

Green Park 2 Beta 5 is available for download

So it’s time to release Green Park 2 Beta 5 into the wild. The download is now available:

Download Green Park 2 Beta 5 | Demo (Changelog)

Like it? Buy me a cup of coffee

As you might know, coders love coffee — and I need a lot. If you like my free themes, feel free to send me 1$ for a coffee.

If you use a WordPress driven blog, get the latest release of Green Park 2 for WordPress here or leave your comment here.

I started porting Cordobo Green Park 2 to Habari. A demo is available here: Cordobo Green Park 2 for Habari Demo.

Please note that GP2 for Habari is in early development and far away from being feature complete. Please report any bugs you encounter.
Download: Green Park 2 for Habari (updated July 18^th, 2009)

Cordobo Green Park 2 (GP2) has reached the Beta status after 8 Alpha revisions. The download is available at my WordPress Themes Page.

Apart from a new header graphic and more appealing forms and buttons, GP2 comes with a lot of code and CSS improvements, to render the website even faster along with typography and SEO optimizations. The Beta needs ~3KB less code on each created page compared to the latest alpha. The new settings page located at the WordPress Admin section, to configure Feedburner, Adsense and Analytics, has been cleaned up although.

Download Green Park 2 Beta 4 | Demo (Changelog)

Like it? Buy me a cup of coffee

As you might know, coders love coffee — and I need a lot. If you like my free themes, feel free to send me 1$ for a coffee.

The theme is released as “ALPHA”, to let you know I’m still adding features and improvements. So please feel free and report any bug you may encounter in the comments section below.

Featurelist

• Fully compatible with WordPress 2.7.1 and up
• Support for WordPress widgets
• Light-weight: optimized CSS for really fast cross-browser rendering, less graphics (Grade “A” in YSlow)
• Fast: the minimum set of SQL queries
• Findability: SEO optimizations for humans and search-engines
• Accessible: clean and structured code for screen-readers and “jump links” for navigation
• A very clean typography for advanced readability
• Use of css sprites for images for even less http-requests
• Built-In Simple-Twitter Plugin support
• Built-In Sitepagination-Plugin support

Download Green Park 2 Alpha 7

1. the new permalink structure is in some cases faster because of the way wordpress stores the URL information in the database (see further: Efficient permalink strategies for WordPress)
2. according to SEO’s, a link like cordobo.com/540-firefox-add-ons-for-developers/ is more likely to result in a better SERP position than (the same) link named cordobo.com/2008/09/30/firefox-add-ons-for-developers/

Migrating old permalinks to a new structure

To avoid duplicate content and 404 – Not found errors, you should redirect visitors and web crawlers (like GoogleBot) to the new URL with the HTTP Status Code 301 – Moved Permanently.

The fastest way to migrate your old permalinks to the new structure is Dean’s Permalinks Migration plugin. It’s from 2006, but it works great with WordPress 2.7.1. After uploading the plugin, activate it and enter your actual permalink structure (the old one), e.g. /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ on the plugin’s options page and save it. Now you have done that, change the “Permalink Settings” to the new structure, in my case /%post_id%-%postname%/.

Canonical URLs for comments pages

I really like WordPress new way to break comments into various pages, because paginated comments can reduce your traffic and save your visitors browser (or RAM) resources. But on pages with a lot of comments, it can create a lot of duplicate content, like it happened here:

• http://cordobo.com/224-updateupgrade-to-wp-21/
• http://cordobo.com/224-updateupgrade-to-wp-21/comment-page-6/
• http://cordobo.com/224-updateupgrade-to-wp-21/comment-page-5/
• …

A consortium of leading web companies, including Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, created a new standard to handle this kind of unintended duplicate content – Canonical URLs.

Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?
A: [...] Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

* www.example.com
* example.com/
* www.example.com/index.html
* example.com/home.asp

But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.

Quoted from Matt Cutts, SEO advice: url canonicalization

They came up with a simple solution, a reference in the <head> of the page to the preferred URL:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://cordobo.com/224-updateupgrade-to-wp-21/" />

To apply this link automatically to every page with comments, I added some lines of code to the functions.php file of my theme. Steve came up with a simple solution in his article Dealing With Duplicate Content Issues on WordPress Comments Pages:

function canonical_for_comments() {
global $cpage, $post;
if ( $cpage > 1 ) :
echo "\n";
echo "<link rel='canonical' href='";
echo get_permalink( $post->ID );
echo "' />\n";
endif;
}
add_action( 'wp_head', 'canonical_for_comments' );

If you use a plugin like All-In-One-SEO or Yoasts Canonical URL’s for WordPress, you don’t have to worry about it – both already take care about canonical URLs.

If you want to know more about duplicate content and how to avoid it using canonical URLs, watch Matt Cutts video or check the presentation he did at SMX West: