WordPress Publisher Blog

The beta version of WordPress for Blackberry, a native application, is now available for download.

Details about the beta and how to get involved in this Open Source project are available on the blackberry.wordpress.org site.

Below is also a quick video overview of the app:
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[ Visit blackberry.wordpress.org ]

IconDock, a new site from n.Design Studio has launched and is powered by WordPress:

Utilizing the WP e-Commerce plugin, this beautifully designed site allows for the downloading of free icons and the purchasing of paid ones as well.

[ Visit IconDock ]

A new feature in WordPress 2.7 and on WordPress.com, is the ability to moderate comments using keyboard shortcuts. A few of the popular shortcuts include:

• Pressing j moves the current selection (light-blue background) down.
• Pressing k moves the current selection (light-blue background) up.
• Pressing a approves the currently selected comment.
• Pressing s marks the current comment as spam.
• Pressing d deletes the current comment.

For any site that regularly receives dozens or even hundreds of comments per post, this new feature can dramatically speed up the comment moderation process.

Mark Jaquith, a lead developer on the WordPress project, put together a screencast to show how this new feature works:
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[ Keyboard Shortcuts on WordPress Codex ]

Along with the various other WordPress mobile options, there is now a WordPress for iPhone app available via the iTunes App Store.

Open Source and compatible with iPhone 3G, iPhone, and iPod Touch, this App works with WordPress.com and self-installed WordPress version 2.5.1 or higher.

Here is a quick video walk-through of the app:
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Keeping your WordPress setup up-to-date is a critical component of your overall security strategy along with strong passwords, and a secure hosting environment.

As Matt points out in a recent post, with each new version of WordPress it has become easier to be notified of updates, new plugins, and in WordPress 2.5 there is even a one-click auto-update feature for plugins.

In addition, one-click updating of the core WordPress software is something that’s being actively tackled for future versions of WordPress.

So what’s the best way to update your WordPress ? Matt has a good summary:

Upgrade your blog to the latest WP. This shouldn’t be hard. There are plugins for it, if you’re techy use Subversion, there is the standard FTP method, and finally Media Temple, Dreamhost, and Bluehost (through SimpleScripts) all have been pretty good about having their one-click upgrade systems ready with new versions within a day or two of a release. If your host is chronically behind, vote with your wallet and switch.

• If you need someone to help you upgrade, consider hiring help on the wp-pro mailing list. (It has close to a thousand subscribers and consultants on it.) Or you could always ply a geeky friend with caffeine, libations, food, or gadgets. Just get them to setup a system lik the above so you can do it yourself next time.

Change your passwords, for yourself and any other users you have on the system. If the attacker grabbed your password when you were on an old version, they can still log in after you’ve upgraded if you don’t change it. There’s a new password strength meter in 2.5 helps you pick a good password.

Search through your posts for any that might have been modified, and comb through the directories on your web server looking for anything out of the ordinary. Your host may be able to help you with the latter.

And big picture, if maintaining and upgrading doesn’t sound like something that your organization wants to tackle and you are hosting your blogs on your own infrastructure, consider hosting with a provider that offers one-click upgrades ( we list a few here ) or hosting on WordPress.com VIP.

[ via Photomatt ]

Many publishers are embedding videos on their blogs from various sources, including YouTube, Brightcove, DailyMotion, Blip.TV, and others.

One consistent piece of feedback we’ve received from publishers, is that it can be difficult and time consuming to remember the exact steps that each video site requires to embed a video — as they all have slightly different methods and formats.

To make this video embedding process easier a company by the name of Vodpod introduced a “Post to WordPress” browser tool that works with hundreds of video sites and makes it easy to grab a video and publish it to your WordPress blog.

With support for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Camino – the Vodpod tool works within your browser and is compatible with both WordPress.com and self-installed WordPress.

From the Vodpod help page:

When you see a video you want to post to your blog, just click the WordPress logo button. It should automatically grab the embed code (this works for sites like YouTube and 100s of other video sharing sites).

You can grab the free Vodpod browser tool here, and read the help documentation here.

We launched a new theme today for WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress called Prologue.

Prologue is a way for “each of us to share short messages about what we’re doing or working on internally, or private messages between groups of folks.”

As you can see from the screenshot below and by clicking through to the Prologue demo it’s all about helping teams of people communicate and collaborate in an efficient manner — similar to Twitter but with a focus on groups.

For publishers looking to deploy this kind of tool, Prologue is very easy to use.  Like other themes for WordPress, you can install this on WordPress.com with a single click in your “Presentation” tab, or quickly add it to your themes directory for self-installed WordPress.

And since Prologue is a theme,  it leverage the power of WordPress to provide user management, privacy settings, RSS feeds, Gravatar, and more.

We’ve received a few inquiries lately asking if a blogging tool exists that a) lives as as an application on your desktop and b) supports creating content and editing while you are offline.

The answer is yes, and Microsoft Live Writer (free to download) is one such tool. It supports blogs hosted on WordPress.com as well as self-hosted WordPress.org blogs. Lots more info here, and you can download it here.

On the Mac OS X platform, Marsedit ($29.95 with a free 30 day trial ) is another great option with lots of capabilities.

So how do these tools communicate with WordPress? They use XML-RPC, a cool technology that allows things that aren’t WordPress to talk to your blog. When Flickr or Youtube posts to your blog, or you use a desktop blogging client they use XML-RPC.

Developers looking to learn more about XML-RPC can read about it on the WordPress.org Codex site and by joining the mailing list.