There is some good news for all of the Windows Phone 7 / WordPress users out there, Windows Phone 7 now has a WordPress application available. In the first version of the application, you can edit posts and pages, upload photos, check stats, and last but not least, moderate comments. At some point in the future, the ability to upload videos will be added to the application. The new website WindowsPhone.wordpress.org is where you’ll find all the latest news on development along with user forums for support. The front page of the website also has a slider on the right hand side that provides a visual indication of what it’s like to use the app. Based on the slider presentation, everything regarding the app appears to be about simplicity, like the phone platform itself. The application is open-source meaning you can contribute to the code to help improve the product. […]

The second beta of WordPress 3.1 has been released for your testing enjoyment. As before, you should probably avoid using this on a live site, and make sure to backup your files and database before upgrading. There are still a few known issues, but if you find any more, please feel free to discuss them with the wp-testers mailing list. If you’re a plugin or theme developer, please test them for compatibility, as the final release of 3.1 is not too far away. Have you tried the WordPress 3.1 Beta yet? What do you think so far?

While WeblogToolsCollection.com focuses on all things WordPress, it’s healthy to get out of the house every once in awhile to see what else is going on in the world. In this instance, the world is Open-Source Content Management Systems. Water and Stone which is a digital agency has released their annual open source CMS market share survey for 2010. This survey was comprised of 5,000 participants with more than 2,800 completing the full questionnaire. The report contains a look at various metrics and trends for 20 different content management systems. While the results of the survey are not definitive, there are some interesting trends specifically with WordPress that I wanted to share. Water and Stone used Amazon.com to determine who has the largest number of books in print, which systems have been the subject of publishing activity in the last 12 months, and which systems are currently the subject of […]

New plugins Bloggers Circle is similar to a traditional writers circle, but with a work-flow optimized for bloggers. Bloggers can earn points by reviewing other bloggers’ drafts, and spend those points asking other bloggers to review theirs. Floating Widgets makes it easy to add a widgetized area right above or beside your main content regardless of which theme you are using. You can have full control of where and how your widgets are displayed without having to edit your theme at all. Updated plugins Exploit Scanner searches the files on your website, and the posts and comments tables of your database for anything suspicious. It also examines your list of active plugins for unusual filenames. Movies allows you to use simple functions in your theme to display videos you have attached to Posts/Pages/Custom Post Types in your Media Library. The video player uses the MediaElement (by default, or VideoJS – […]

Paul Maloney of WPZine.com has a pretty good question: Is there a point anymore to using the WordPress ping lists? Paul’s experience mirrors my own in that I’ve not been able to calculate a decrease or increase in site traffic thanks to using sites such as Ping-O-Matic. At one point, I removed all of the sites I used to Ping because I was told that if you ping a website too much, it would ban the domain. At the time, I was also told that each time you update a post after it’s been published, a new ping is sent to the ping list. Without knowing it, I could have been sending way too many pings than what was needed but after I removed the ping list, I didn’t notice any decline in traffic. There was a time when pinging specific websites after new content had been published would allow […]

So, you’ve just moved your WordPress blog following the official instructions, but what about all of your internal links and images? Even though you may have changed your main URL during the move process, your internal links and images will remain unchanged, leaving images broken and internal links pointing toward the old domain or directory. Sure, you could manually edit every single post or page, but there are other ways. The easy way is to use a plugin called Velvet Blues Update URLs. It’s a very simply plugin. You just enter your old URL, then enter your new URL, and this plugin take cares of the rest. I know, it almost seems too easy, but in this case it really is just that easy. Of course, if you want to make it a little bit more difficult, we sure can. What if Velvet Blues Update URLs disappears and you’re left […]

jQuery Mobile is perfect for those who want to make a good looking and easy to read version of their blog and guarantees an optimal ease of reading on mobile devices such as the iPhone, Blackberries or Android. (designed for use with a plugin like WP Mobile Detector) OpenBook is a “magazine” theme with nice features such as column display, news slider and drop-down menu. Red Christmas is a holiday, minimalistic two-column, fixed-width, widget-ready, and seo optimized red theme. Snippet is a Thematic child theme. It is simple, clean, and perfect for developers who want to show some code.

It seems like just last month when we were celebrating Andrew Nacin’s first full year of WordPress contributions.  Like any good athlete with a solid year under his belt, Andrew Nacin has just been acquired, by Matt Mullenweg himself. Nacin now has his dream job. He will be working alongside Otto Wood as a Tech Ninja at Mullenweg’s Audrey Capital. His job? To continue his work as a WordPress core developer on a full-time basis and also contribute to the WordPress.org site, bbPress, BuddyPress, and GlotPress. Nacin has certainly made an impact during his rise through the WordPress community, and we wish him the best in his new adventure.  The future of WordPress certainly feels more secure than ever before.