Chris Boyd has announced that version 2.6.3 of the WordPress for iPhone app is now available in the App store. This version includes a bunch of bug fixes and improvements. Some of them include: Fix for multisite login issue. Fix for crash when deleting media items. Fix for occasional “Communication Error” for WordPress.org sites. Fix for crash when selecting Pages tab after deleting a draft. Fix for crash when entering settings during blog setup. If you upgrade to 2.6.3 and notice any recurring or new issues, please report them in the support forums or link to them via Twitter. I’ve been having an issue where after I successfully add a new website, it does not show up in the list. I’m hoping 2.6.3 solves this problem.

The talented folks at WordPress.com have just launched their official Theme Showcase! Previously, the only way to browse through the over a hundred available themes at WordPress.com was to open a free blog and start looking through the Appearance section of the Dashboard.  Now, current users and potential users are treated to an in-depth theme showcase featuring large screenshots, specifications, recommended uses, and examples of other WordPress.com blogs pushing the limits of the themes. Though the showcase is specific to WordPress.com, most of the listed themes can be found for self-hosted WordPress blogs in the official Theme Directory. What do you think of the new Theme Showcase?

Over the years, I’ve read and participated in numerous discussions around the topic of removing Hello Dolly, one of the default plug-ins that ships with WordPress and is used for learning purposes. Despite all of the talk surrounding the plug-in, I’ve never seen anyone mention the issue of copyright. According to ticket 15769 on Trac, Hello Dolly is infringing on the copyrights of Jerry Herman, the creator of the musical. No one knows for sure if Matt or the WordPress Foundation has the permission of Jerry to use the lyrics in the plug-in or if he even needs it since the use may fall under fair use. There is also the discussion that if the plug-in is indeed violating the copyright of Jerry Herman that this infringement terminates the license of WordPress, that being GPL. None of the people involved in the discussion is a lawyer so keep that in […]

Fudo is stylish, customizable, simple, and readable. It contains a cross-browser html5 layout and supports 17 widget areas and featured images (thumbnails for gallery posts and custom header images for posts and pages). Saga is a personal blog or business theme with modern look design, and a slider for your featured post (based on category) or lates post.

Pingdom, a popular website monitoring service, performed a two month experiment to find the most reliable blogging services. From October 15th to December 15th, Pingdom ran a variety of checks every minute from multiple locations around the world on the homepage and four individual blogs from each blogging service. In the end, WordPress.com came out as #2, just behind Blogger, which should be the expected winner since it’s backed by the entire Google network.

New plugins Delicious XML Importer lets you import your Delicious bookmarks into WordPress as links or posts. Post Video allows you to easily embed an HTML5 video into a post/page. This plugin places custom fields in the edit post or page area allowing you to fill in the fields with your mp4 mobile video url and your flv video url. Updated plugins Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen. Email Post Changes sends an email to a specified list of users and email addresses each time a change is made to a post or page. The changes are emailed as a unified diff. If the email client supports HTML emails, the diff will be colorized. Fast Secure Contact Form lets your visitors send you a […]

As part of their ongoing series, WPEngineer has published a cool post that explains how to add new menus to the admin bar coming in WordPress 3.1. In the example, Frank adds a Codex Search button to the admin bar which is pretty convenient! He covers the function add_menu() and it’s various parameters as well. In the comments of that post however, Latz brings up an interesting point. Oh great, now every plugin will put a menu in the admin bar, Next stop: a plugin preventing others from cluttering the admin bar. While it’s pretty funny to think about the admin bar containing menus for all sorts of different plugins, it’s a potential problem that users may have to deal with in the future. Hopefully, plugin authors are diligent with not adding a menu to their options page as part of the default package of a plugin. For certain plugins, […]

With theme malware on the rise, many users are left wondering where the safest place to find free WordPress themes is, or how to protect themselves from potentially dangerous themes. Without a doubt, the best place to find free WordPress themes is the official WordPress Theme Directory. Themes can be submitted to the directory by almost any author, but the themes are thoroughly checked for quality and safety by a team of dedicated volunteers. With over 1,200 free themes and a handy tag filter interface, you’d have a hard time not finding the perfect theme for your blog. There are certainly other places to find free themes, like Theme Lab, but how can you be sure that the theme you downloaded is safe? If you plan to download themes from anywhere but the official WordPress Theme Directory, you should install both the Exploit Scanner and Theme-Check plugins. Run the Exploit […]